Photo credit: Rapha Wilde | Unsplash
The girl’s mother’s landlady, Mrs. Hawthorn, reminds the girl of the gelding her dad sold after the divorce—the lips and teeth are the same, as are the coarse, peppered-white hair and calming energy. The old widow’s always ready with juice and cookies in the starving three-hour gap between the end of school and when the girl’s mother gets home. Mrs. Hawthorn seems to delight in watching the girl’s restless flame of a body flit amongst her shelves and end tables of Precious Moments figurines, framed photographs, and Bible verse needlepoints. Unlike most of the so-called God-fearing people in this town, Mrs. Hawthorn actually practices Christian kindness; unlike the girl’s mother, she seems unconcerned that the girl will make a mess or break something. And because she’s unconcerned, the girl never does.
One afternoon, the girl walks the two blocks from her mother’s house to Mrs. Hawthorn’s to find a silver car parked in the driveway. The car’s so pretty the girl almost can’t keep from touching it, but so sleek and reptilian she instinctively fears it might bite. It’s got a hood ornament shaped like a hollowed-out pie chart. The idea of pie makes the already hungry girl hungrier.
“This is my son, Tim,” says Mrs. Hawthorn in the kitchen. “He’ll be visiting for a few weeks. From Washington.”
“I was born in Spokane,” the girl says.
“I’m coming from the other Washington,” Tim says, laughing, “where the president lives.” He mimes a west-to-east motion, his mass of brownish arm hair waving like a caterpillar’s nest on a branch.
“I also played George Washington’s wife in my school play last year,” the girl says. “Martha Washington.”
“How marvelous,” says Tim.
Between the bugged-out eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses, and the horsey teeth that seem to be a Hawthorn family trait (on both sides, going by the living room photos of Mrs. Hawthorn’s dead husband), Tim’s got a Far Side vibe so silly it almost erases the menace of the snaky silver car in the driveway. He also laughs like it’s punctuation, which the girl appreciates, because she does that, too. And yet, there’s a sharpness about Tim’s perfectly unwrinkled polo shirt and khakis, the way his tongue portions out words with deli slicer precision.
Then Tim tells the girl he’s a linguist. For all she can remember of her eleven years, the girl’s been obsessed with words. Even before she could read or write, she was drawing picture books, dictating the stories to her mother to transcribe beneath the pictures. In excited clumsiness, mental hunger superseding to one in her stomach, the girl tries to explain this to Tim. He joggles his head approvingly.
“I’m fluent in Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Italian, and French,” Tim says, “and my Russian and Arabic are coming along nicely.”
“Holy cow! But how did you learn all those?”
Tim licks his lips, grins the I’m glad you asked grin of a salesman. “I never leave home without my portable language lab. State-of-the-art. As a matter of fact, it’s set up right downstairs in the basement. Would you like to see?”
“Oh, yes!” the girl says. Mrs. Hawthorn’s basement is the one part of the house she’s never been shown, and locked doors have always enticed her curiosity. She’s pictured it as an underground haven of sumptuous rugs and wall hangings, gilded light fixtures, exotic birds in cages. Now she envisions all this upstaged by Tim’s language lab—surely an apparatus of railway crossing-sized lights, pulsing switchboards as big as king mattresses. The girl’s mother says she’s got a “wild” imagination, like it was an animal not fit to live in the house. Not as if the girl wants to live in her mother’s house, anyway. She’d much rather live in her mind, where things are more interesting.
The girl follows Tim Hawthorn down an unfinished staircase into the darkness, wood splinters nipping at her shoes, damp and rooty air whisking up the arms and legs of her shorts and T-shirt. Tim pulls a string, and a bare ceiling bulb comes on; he flips a switch to brighten another. There’s nothing fancy about the basement, after all. In the center, the light hits a mysterious, sculptural clutter of equipment atop an L-shaped desk.
“Won’t you sit down,” Tim says. The girl takes one of two metal folding chairs, face to face with the speaker-shaped eyes of a black console sleek as an alien spaceship, with at least a dozen symbol-marked buttons. She recognizes some, like the symbols for play and rewind, but many are unbearably unknown to her. She wants to ask Tim what the button with a black circle on a light background does, the one that looks like a talking mouth, or the one with two arrows crossing. She also wants to impress Tim with how clever and well-behaved she can be. So to keep quiet, she bounces her legs on the metal seat that pricks her warm skin with coolness.
“I have here,” Tim says, pointing to some boxes beneath the desk, “everything necessary to achieve intermediate to advanced proficiency in the world’s top twenty most-spoken languages. All those I mentioned before, and thirteen others. Which would you like to try?”
The girl reads the names of the languages, neatly written in black Sharpie on the white box fronts: ARABIC, BENGALI, FRENCH, GERMAN, HAUSA, INDONESIAN, ITALIAN, JAPANESE, MANDARIN, MARATHI, PORTUGUESE, PUNJABI . . .
“You got any Sinhalese down there?”
“Ah, yes, the principal tongue of Sri Lanka!” Tim says. “Sadly not among those on which I’ve focused my studies, though I’d love to learn it one day.”
“I like the way Sinhalese looks,” the girl says. “The letters, I mean. Whenever I stay with my mom or dad in a hotel, I look in the back of the Gideon Bible where they have those translations of John 3:16 into all the different languages, you know? I think Sinhalese is the prettiest one. The letters look like curled-up leaves or butterflies.”
“How marvelous,” says Tim. His buggy eyes, pupils expanded, are black as night ponds, all the way through. The girl can’t remember what color they were upstairs.
“My apologies that I’m unable to offer your first choice,” he says. “Might I interest you in something else?”
She scans the black-Sharpied boxes down by her feet.
“Hmm. How about . . . Mandarin?”
“Excellent choice,” says Tim. The girl tells herself to remember this exchange for when she describes the whole event to her dad next weekend. It was like he was a waiter in a classy restaurant or something! she’ll say, hamming it up until she gets a laugh out of him. But there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to tell her dad about Tim. Or anyone at all. She doesn’t want to puzzle over why now, though, because she needs to pay attention.
Tim sits in the other metal chair. Their chairs are just inches apart. The girl considers scooching hers away a bit, but fears it’ll make a loud noise. Tim’s arm bristles in the light as he reaches across and in front of her to push a button. A cassette holder opens. Tim uncases a tape, and loads it. Each surface he touches responds with a clack, tap, or click. The girl’s skin tingles.
“You speak into this,” he says, sliding a skinny black pinecone thing—apparently a microphone—toward her. “Here’s the button you push to replay a phrase. Once you get more confident, you also can record yourself with the tape in this deck over here,” he says, pointing, “And play it back to see how it compares to the native speaker. Are you ready?”
The girl accidentally shakes her head no, then nods yes. It’s unnerving to sit here, spotlighted by the bulb above her head, so close to this weirdly magnetic man whose sharp diction seems at odds with his goofy, wet-smiling lips. The girl suppresses an impulse to look behind her, up the stairs, to see if the door to the kitchen’s still open. “I’m ready,” she says. She wills herself to believe it; to believe she’s about to knock Tim Hawthorn’s socks off.
Tim presses the “play” button. First, there’s the hiss of polyester film finding purchase on the spools. Then a crisp female voice, which reminds the girl of the British comedy shows she sometimes gets to watch, though only at other people’s houses, since neither of her parents have TV—one of the few things they always agreed on. The female voice welcomes the girl to volume one, lesson one of so-and-so’s Mandarin for beginners.
Syllables are the phonetic building blocks of Mandarin Chinese, says the voice. Each syllable has a different meaning depending on which of the four basic tones is applied . . .
The girl’s brain lingers on the enticingly unfamiliar word “phonetic,” causing her to miss part of the instructions. She’s relieved when Tim prompts her.
“Time to repeat,” he says.
The female voice pronounces a series of syllables; the girl repeats them. She feels good about what she hears. She’s always been able to mimic people—grandparents, uncles, teachers. It’s the most reliable way of un-dividing her parents’ attention. It’s even gotten a few begrudging kudos from classmates who mostly do nothing but harass her. Ever since her math teacher temporarily sent her to the “special” class for failing multiplication tables, she’s hardly gone a day without kids calling her stupid. All members of some church or another. Yet somehow she’s the only one ever turning the other cheek, waiting for Jesus or God or somebody up there to notice.
When the girl glances at Tim, his eyes and lips are glistening, a smile hooked in place behind his long-lobed ears. He pauses the tape.
“Very good. A bit less air through the nose,” he says, “up from the diaphragm, out through the front of the mouth—like so.” He gestures beneath her chin with one hand, his other arm brushing her arm as he points at her stomach—not with his skin, but with those wormy arm hairs—and the tip of his tongue curls behind his teeth as he demonstrates a high, tight vowel. The girl shivers.
“OK,” she says, trying not to shrink from Tim’s correction, ignore the tremor of discomfort in her body, and focus on the “very good” part of what he said.
“Let’s resume then.”
The girl listens as hard as she can, and repeats. She thinks she sounds almost exactly like the woman on the tape.
Tim stops the tape. “Well done. You pronounce each of the tones distinctly, the most challenging part for native English speakers. You say you’ve never learned another language before?”
“Not unless you count the way my grandma talks. She’s from the Bronx.”
“Ha! One might well make a case for New York English as a language in its own right. Very well done, indeed. Astonishing, really.”
Tim’s smile slackens, and his black eyes lose focus. What does it mean that his nearness unnerves her so, though his words tell her she’s never been safer, or more understood, because he has a mind like hers: a mind ceaselessly scanning for puns and rhymes and verbal curiosities as if they were four-leaf clovers, sparkly rocks, and sidewalk coins. The girl wants to look back up at the basement door again, to reassure herself that Mrs. Hawthorn can hear what’s going on below. She also wouldn’t mind staying with Tim for hours, sampling a cassette from every box in his collection, talking about things she thought nobody else in the world was interested in. She feels, or doesn’t feel, something cold against her knee. Could it be part of the desk? One of the underpinning bars? She decides to ignore it, because the words “flawless” and “astonishing” are kicking up bright balls of dopamine inside her brain. She feels warm and glimmery, like a ball of light herself.
Tim’s smile re-broadens. “Learning to pronounce words in a new language is just the first part, you know. Then you must learn to understand the full meaning of each word, and not all words translate readily into English. You mentioned the Bible before, but did you know that some of the most important ancient Hebrew words in the Bible—like heaven, or even God—have no exact translation in modern English?”
“I . . . didn’t know that,” the girl says.
“Then you have what we call ‘relay translations,’” says Tim, “which are two or more times removed from the original text. The first translations of Russian literature into Korean, for instance, were based on previous translations from Russian to Japanese. A translation of a translation—can you imagine?”
The girl finds she can’t say anything this time, can’t feel her body much at all now. She couldn’t say if she’s still sitting, or floating, because there’s no more sensation of chair metal pricking her legs, or pressing her back. It’s wonderful, this warm numbness.
“I believe you have a natural aptitude for languages,” Tim says. “I hope you’ll consider exploring it. We need all the gifted youngsters we can get in linguistics-related fields. This may surprise you, but more than forty percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on this planet are actually endangered . . .”
The girl hears little of what Tim says after this, because those last words of praise—“aptitude” and “gifted”—have ballooned her up into a vision of her future self: a sophisticated woman, switching between languages as effortlessly as her dad shifts gears in the fussy old Datsun her mother could never drive. She’s dressed in long coats and heels, wearing gloves as she drinks her tea. When she says something witty, in any language, everyone laughs, and they’re laughing with her, not at her.
Back upstairs a while later, the three of them—the girl, Mrs. Hawthorn, and Tim—have Sunny Delight and Danish butter cookies at the Formica kitchen table. They look at some albums from when Tim was young, and his father was alive, and they all lived in this same house, and ate their meals at this same table. Then the girl goes home, and says nothing about the afternoon to either of her parents, her one so-called school friend, or anyone else.
The girl never sees Tim Hawthorn again. Or if she does, she can’t remember it. Sort of like the first meeting broke the plastic safety tabs off her memory’s cassette tape, and with those tabs gone, there was no recording over the initial impression.
The first person the girl tells about Tim is a significantly older man she sleeps with in grad school. They meet at a faculty party, and go back to his basement apartment. Perhaps something about the subterranean space brings the story out of her. Or it might be the desperate sense of giving herself to someone who doesn’t particularly care who she is as a person, driving her to reveal deeper and more intimate things in an effort to push past his indifference.
“You’re lucky that guy didn’t molest you,” the man says.
“Maybe he did and I just don’t remember it.”
The man doesn’t find her joke funny. He also doesn’t seem to appreciate Tim’s contribution to her escape from an insular, hypocrite-filled town where nobody spoke any language but “American.”
“Round two?” the man asks.
The girl assents, but disassociates during the act. She considers whether Tim Hawthorn might’ve touched her. Could she have selectively erased that part, preserving only the part that helped her? She wonders if memory’s ever anything but a translation of what we experienced, double-filtered through what we felt, and what we wanted to believe. Ten years on, Tim’s words stand out clear in her mind as Sharpied letters on a white box. Around the words—where her body and Tim’s shared the same dark, secret space—is static.
Editor’s Note
The 11-year-old girl in Francesca Leader’s “The Linguist” craves the acquisition of knowledge. She is drawn to Tim’s language-learning machine and to the power it unlocks for her. But the girl’s deeper fascination seems to be with Tim himself–a grown adult who gives her attention, lavishes praise on her, opens her mind to possibilities beyond the constraints of her insular young life. At the end of the story, we see the deep impact this enlightening experience had on the girl. A reminder of how a single day can alter one’s entire life trajectory.
Josh Boldt, Editor
Story Track
The girl in Francesca Leader’s “The Linguist” has an awakening of sorts when she meets a fascinating adult who opens her eyes to a world of possibilities. Like the narrator of “Dream in Blue” by The Stray Birds, the girl sees new colors. Colors that can never again be unseen. Although the nature of the relationships are different, the outcome is the same. In both the story and the song, the women “[leave] home on account of” what they learn in their respective encounters.
Josh Boldt, Editor