Writing Life

Eddie comes home from the oil field one night last January and goes, “Guess what, we’re moving to Saudi Arabia.” Just like that. No “What do you think?” Or “Is that all right with you?” He’d seen this ad in the union newsletter that said Exxon had several assistant driller positions available in its Saudi Arabian oil fields. Apparently, the terrain in Saudi Arabia is similar to certain parts of Utah. So the company was sending a representative out here to recruit drillers for its Middle Eastern operation. Eddie had been a derrickman for seven years and was eager to become a driller. Now his chance had finally come. “All I need is a couple years’ work as an assistant driller over in Saudi Arabia,” he said, “then I can come back to America and get hired on as a driller anyplace I want.” Derrickmen make only about $3000 a month. A top driller can earn up to $8000. So naturally Eddie is all hyped up to leave behind the only house we’ve lived in for the whole eight years of our married life and take off for the middle of some godforsaken desert. Never mind what I might think about having to spend the next two years wearing a veil over my face and pouring sand out of my shoes. Talk about inconsiderate!

Of course, this wasn’t the first time Eddie had gotten some screwy notion into his head. You know the song Tom Jones sings that goes, “I know you’re tired of following my elusive dreams and schemes”? Well, that could be my theme song with Eddie. He’s always chasing after some pot of gold and finding nothing at the end of the rainbow but more rain. One time he was going to build a portable miniature golf course and cart it around in the back of a truck so he could lay it out in people’s backyards when they were having a birthday party or a family gathering. Boy, that was a beaut! We’ve still got the windmill out in the garden behind our house. I planted some tulips around it so it wouldn’t look so out of place. And then there was the time he was going to raise night crawlers in the unfinished part of our basement and sell them to local bait shops. I still see those nasty things slithering around every time I take a load of dirty clothes down to the laundry room. When we were first married I thought Eddie’s schemes were kind of romantic. Eddie was nicer to me then, and sort of handsome, so I was willing to put up with a lot more. But he’s gained thirty pounds since our wedding and he doesn’t talk as nice as he used to either. He just orders me around. That’s why I no longer even pretend to be enthusiastic about any of his wild schemes. Besides, he almost never follows through on any of them. Usually it’s just the Budweiser talking. But when he told me about Saudi Arabia he was as sober as a church elder. Which should have been my tip-off that this dream was going to be a lot harder to wake up from. I kept waiting for him to get over it and he kept telling me to start saving boxes to pack our stuff in.

Then came the day when the man from Exxon’s Saudi Arabia oil fields was conducting interviews out at Eddie’s jobsite. Eddie was one of thirty guys – derrickmen, roughnecks, rig mechanics, motormen, and others – who had applied for an assistant driller position. After the interview, Eddie was selected as one of ten finalists for the five job openings. All he had to do was pass a physical. And, believe me, there’s nobody more physical than Eddie. “I’m practically a shoo-in,” he told me, when he came home that day. Suddenly I started to accept the fact that we might actually be moving to the ends of the earth after all. Not that I was the least bit happy about it, mind you, but I had been living in Mormon country long enough to know that a wife’s duty is always to walk one step behind her husband – even if the damn fool is walking all the way to Saudi Arabia. So I kept my mouth shut and tried to make the best of it.

First I went to the library and checked out all the books I could find on the Arab world. I figured it couldn’t hurt to learn a little about the place, its people and its culture and so forth. I didn’t want to get my head chopped off for ordering the wrong kind of meat at dinner or insulting some grand poobah with a gesture that means “good luck” in America and “a plague upon your entire household” in Saudi Arabia. Then I went to the Banana Republic shop at Sunset Mall to shop for some cool, desert-style clothes. The salesgirl asked me if I was going on vacation. I lied and told her that my husband and I were taking a cruise to Rio de Janeiro. I figured that would sound more romantic than a two-year stretch in an Arabian oil field. The salesgirl seemed very impressed by my story. I walked out of there feeling glamorous and worldly.

With my Banana Republic bags in my hands, I went strolling down the mall like a sophisticated jet-setter, and that’s when I saw this shop called Foreign Tongues in a little storefront tucked between a Jamba Juice and a Footlocker. Painted on the front window of the shop was a large mouth with all sorts of strange words and phrases pouring out of it. Below that was a small banner that said, “Learn Any Language In Just 90 Days – Money-back Guaranty.

Gee, I thought, it would sure make things a lot easier for Eddie and me over in Saudi Arabia if one of us was to learn how to speak the language. And so I went inside, and when I met the man who ran the place I nearly forgot how to speak my own language. He was gorgeous. A tall, blond-haired man, about forty, with pale blue eyes the color of Windex, and a smile that made my legs go all rubbery. So much for my sophisticated jet-setter impersonation. He was almost too handsome to be true. And so refined, like a hero in a Harlequin romance novel. He kept calling me “dear” and “lovely lady” and he told me how pretty I was, which was nice because Eddie always tells me I’m fat even though I work out three days a week to an aerobics video and weigh almost what I did back in high school. He had some kind of an accent too, so he must have been a foreigner, which is probably why he was so interested in foreign languages. Anywho, I told him about me and Eddie moving to Saudi Arabia, and instantly I could see in his eyes that he and I were kindred spirits.

“Oh, beautiful lady,” he said, “how it is sad that you must from your home so far away travel.” (I told you he sounded like a foreigner!) “I too the painful sharpness know of how it feels to be, as you say here in America, a stranger in a land that is strange.” Then he excused himself for a moment and disappeared behind a silky looking curtain. I could hear him rummaging around amongst his inventory in the back of the shop. The front of the shop was empty except for a long wooden counter that was buried under an avalanche of weird-looking magazines. Most of the magazines had the letters ILDDRE on the cover. It must have been some kind of travel magazine, because all the covers had photos of strange-looking places on them. From the back of the shop came the soft whirring of machinery. Then the whirring stopped and the Harlequin man stepped out from behind the curtain. He was carrying a large cardboard box that looked as if it contained an oversized board game – Monopoly, maybe, for the kind of people who read large-print books. On the front of the box was a picture of a camel crossing the desert.

“Here you are, my dear: Arabic Made Easy,” said the Harlequin man.

I reached across the counter and took the box from him. Its sudden weight in my hands made me kind of nervous and I wasn’t so sure any more if this was a good idea.

“Is there really a money-back guaranty?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” the man said. “No questions asked.” Then he smiled kind of funny.

I paid him the $24.99 plus tax and left the shop.

Soon as I got home I peeled off the cellophane wrapper and opened the box. Inside were three workbooks and sixteen ninety-minute lessons on four CDs. The workbooks were labeled: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. I took hold of the first DVD and inserted into my stereo. Here goes nothing, I thought, as I pressed the PLAY button.

For the next few days I listened to the CDs whenever I had a free moment. The voice on the disc would say something like, “Voden yi noop? – May I have a glass of water? – Voden yi noop? Now you try it.” There would be silence on the disc while I said, “Voden yi noop?” And then the voice would come back and say, “That’s very good,” as though it could hear every word I said. Within a few days I had established a routine. Every morning I would listen to the CDs while I cleaned the house (two bedrooms, one bath, so it doesn’t take very long). And every afternoon I sat at the kitchen table and filled in my workbook before starting dinner. I didn’t tell Eddie what I was doing. I wanted to wait until we arrived in Saudi Arabia and then surprise him by hailing a cab or ordering a meal in perfect Arabic. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face.

Unfortunately, I never got that chance. Eddie didn’t get the job. He flunked the physical because of all those extra pounds. He came home that night with a five-alarm fire blazing in his eyes and went stomping through the house in his heavy work boots, cursing at everything in sight. “What the hell does it matter how much a guy weighs?” he shouted, pounding his pudgy fist into the refrigerator, causing my ceramic Bless This Kitchen plaque to fall to the linoleum and shatter into a dozen pieces. “That’s goddamn discrimination, that’s what it is!”

I felt sorry for him. But I have to admit that I was happy we wouldn’t be going to Saudi Arabia. It had taken me a long time to get our house looking just exactly the way I wanted it. I had put in a flower garden, and made curtains for all the windows. Eddie said it was a waste to put so much time and effort into a rental home, but I didn’t care. A house doesn’t know if you are a renter or an owner. It wants to be loved either way. What’s more, if we’d have moved, I would have missed the Dillards, the nice old couple who lived next door. I loved watching them going for their daily walks hand-in-hand, just like young lovers. Eddie, of course, couldn’t understand any of this. He was more concerned about money than about flower gardens and curtains and next-door neighbors. I tried to cheer him up by fixing him a big dinner of meatloaf and tater tots (his favorite), but he still went to bed in an awful mood.

When I first learned that we weren’t going to Saudi Arabia, I planned to drop the language lessons and return the box for a full refund. But the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to do that. After all, I thought, everyone needs some kind of challenge in their life, and this could be mine. I’d be the only housewife on my block who could speak Arabic. So I kept up with my lessons, although I never did tell Eddie about them. After failing his physical, he got upset if he so much as heard the words “Saudi Arabia” on the TV news. Besides, he wouldn’t have had anything nice to say about it. He had never been a real affectionate person, and now, because he felt rejected and humiliated, he dropped deeper and deeper into himself, like a tortoise into its shell. When I tried to talk to him, he’d just tell me to shut up and bring him another beer. So I studied in secret, and eventually I could read long passages in the workbooks without having to look things up in the glossary. And my pronunciations were just about as good as the voice on the CDs’. I managed to keep Eddie completely in the dark about all this until I was on the final CD and had just about completed my advanced workbook. Then Eddie came home from work early one day and caught me reciting my lesson out loud. He was standing in the doorway behind me when he yelled, “What the hell are you doing – speaking in tongues, for chrissakes?” He scared me so bad that I spun around and let out a little shriek. You can just imagine how embarrassed I felt. But now that he had found me out, I told him the whole story, how I had wanted to surprise him when we got to Saudi Arabia but didn’t get the chance, and how I kept on studying anyway because it was more constructive than watching soap operas or Oprah. Eddie just snorted and grabbed hold of the language box. He studied it warily for a minute as though it might be a present from a secret admirer. Then he set it down and picked up one of my workbooks. He flipped through it for a moment and then he threw it down and began laughing like a lunatic. I just stood there and waited for him to tell me what was so darn funny. I didn’t think it was fair of him to make fun of me, when I never laughed at Golf a la Carte or any of his other get-poor-quick schemes. When he finally got control of himself, he said, “Boy are you stupid. You spent all that time studying and this ain’t even Arabian.” I lowered my head and could feel myself beginning to cry. I hate it when Eddie says I’m stupid.

“What do you mean it’s not Arabian?” I said. “It says so right on the box.”

Eddie’s voice got real sarcastic now. “Arabians don’t write with regular letters. They use those squiggly, Arabian letters, the ones that look like wavy Morse code.”

He picked up the workbook and held it near my face.

“That don’t look like no wavy Morse code, does it?”

I shook my head.

“You must’ve learned some other stupid language, one that uses American letters. Probably German or Polish – something dumb like that.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Then why has it got camels on the cover of the box? You ever hear of camels in Poland?”

Eddie shook his head, exasperated, like he was talking to a moron.

“You are one stupid broad, you know that? They must’ve put the wrong books and CDs into this box.” He started laughing again. “Boy, if this don’t take the cake. I’ll bet you’re the only person who ever learned a language and didn’t know what one it was.”

I’ve never sworn at Eddie. He’d probably slap me right across the mouth if I did. But if I’d known how to cuss him out in my new language, whatever it might be, I would have laid into him good just then. He teased me for the rest of the night and I wound up crying myself to sleep. But then, the next morning, I began to feel different about things. After all, I had still learned a foreign language, even if it wasn’t Arabic, and that’s something to be proud of. All I had to do was go back to the mall and ask the man at Foreign Tongues to tell me what language I had learned. Maybe it was even better than Arabic. Maybe it was something romantic, like French or Italian. So after I packed Eddie’s lunch and he left for work, I put all of the workbooks and CDs back into the box with the camel on it and drove down to the mall. But as I made my way down the wide corridor, weaving through a horde of teenage girls who all seemed to be speaking in a language more foreign than the one I was cradling in my arms, I could see right away that something was wrong. There was nothing between the Jamba Juice and the Footlocker but an empty storefront and a sign that said For Lease. So I called the leasing agency on my cell phone and asked if they could tell me where Foreign Tongues had moved to. The lady I spoke to said that she had never heard of such a business and that the space between Jamba Juice and Footlocker had been empty for more than a year. I said thank you, and hung up. Now I was truly stumped. How was I supposed to find out what language I had learned? I couldn’t ask Eddie for advice, because if I told him how Foreign Tongues seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, he’d think I was an even bigger bubblehead than before. Besides, the desert between us was growing bigger and wider every day, and I didn’t feel like talking to him much any more. So I went into the Jamba Juice and ordered a Tropical Cream Supreme, and then I sat down in one of the booths and pondered my situation until I came up with what I thought was a pretty good plan.

The next morning, after Eddie left for work, I dressed up real smart-looking, in black slacks, a white silk blouse, and a blue blazer. Then I drove my little Ford Focus across town to the University. It was a big campus and I had to meander through a bunch of identical-looking buildings before I located the admissions office. The girl at the receptionist’s desk gave me directions to the language department. Luckily, it was right next door. She told me to ask for Professor Nichols.

School was in session as I walked down the hallway of the Language Sciences building. I could hear a different foreign tongue seeping out of each door that I passed. Even the air smelled smart – like books and chalk – and I was feeling horribly out of place. Finally I found a door with Professor Nichols’ name on it. I knocked and a tall, friendly-looking man with a full head of beautiful white hair answered it. He looked like a doctor on TV. “May I help you?” he asked.

“My name’s Margaret Stokowski,” I said. “I’m looking for Professor Nichols.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” he said. “I’m Professor Nichols. Please come in.”

His office was small but very elegant. Fat books lined just about every square inch of wall space. A huge oak desk took up half the room. Professor Nichols scooted around the desk and sat in a chair behind it. He pointed for me to take a seat in one of the two cushy leather chairs in front of the desk. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin, smiled, and said, “So, Ms. Stokowski, what can I do for you?”

I had been lugging the language box all over campus, and now I set it down on the desk, where Professor Nichols eyed it curiously.

“I was hoping you could tell me what language is in that box,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“You see,” I explained, “there are language lessons inside that box. I just need to know what language it is.”

He looked at the box. “It isn’t Arabic by any chance, is it?”

“No. Eddie – that’s my husband – says that Arabic is written with squiggly lines, not letters. So it has to be something else.”

He nodded. “And what is your interest in this language?”

Now for the embarrassing part, I thought. “You see, I’ve been studying whatever language is in the box for a few months now, and I’ve learned to speak it pretty good. And now…” My voice trailed off. I was afraid I’d made a complete fool of myself.

But Professor Nichols just nodded in a friendly way. “And now you’d like to know exactly what language it is that you’ve learned. That seems like a reasonable request. Let’s take a look and see what we’ve got.”

He opened the box and took out my three workbooks. He studied them for a long time, his smile becoming frownier with each passing minute. While he studied I killed time by trying to read the titles of the books on his shelves. He had books in all different languages, but none were in the language I had brought in the box.

Professor Nichols flipped quietly through my notebooks for what seemed like hours to me. Every now and then he’d shake his head or let out a little sigh. Finally he raised his head and said, “I’m afraid you’ve stumped me. I am fluent in seven languages and familiar with the basics of dozens of others, but I’ve never seen this one before in my life. I don’t recognize a single word. But then again, you didn’t expect me to, did you Ms. Stokowski?”

The way he said it, it didn’t sound like a question; more like a police officer asking if you saw the stop sign you just ran. Puzzled, I stammerd, “W-what do you mean?”

“I must hand it to you, Ms. Stokowski, this is a wonderfully elaborate hoax. Did you think it up all by yourself or did your entire sorority work on this gag together?”

“Sorority?” I said, confused. “I don’t belong to a sorority. I’m not even a student here.” I began to squirm in my chair, like a troublemaking kid in the principal’s office.

He chuckled. “You play that ditzy housewife routine to perfection, Ms. Stokowski. I certainly hope you are a drama major. I’d hate to think that I was taken in by an amateur.”

He put the workbooks back into the box with the camel on it and slid the whole thing back across the desk to me.

“Now, young lady, I’m very busy. So please run along and tell the girls at Alpha Phi that the gag worked beautifully. The old fool fell for it hook, line, and syntax.”

I stood up and grabbed the box. I held it tightly against my body, as if it were a small towel and I was standing there naked. “You mean you really don’t recognize the language?”

“I can assure you, Ms., that no one on earth speaks such a language. Other than yourself, of course. Good day.”

When I got home I curled up on the living room sofa, buried my head in a pillow, and began to cry. Someone had played a horrible joke on me. For the first time in years I had taken it upon myself to learn something new, something difficult and challenging, and now it turned out to be a language that didn’t even exist. Even when I try to do something smart, it ends up being dumb. I was still on the sofa when Eddie came home from work. When he saw me curled up on the couch, right away he started yelling at me.

“Where the hell’s my dinner? I gotta double shift today. I gotta be back at work by seven or my ass is grass, goddammit. Now hurry up and get me something to eat.”

I fixed Eddie some chicken in the microwave, just to shut him up. Then I went back into the living room. I took the box with the language lessons in it and threw it into the fireplace. I shoved some wadded up newspapers beneath it, lit them with a match, and then I watched the whole thing burn to ashes and float out the chimney.

When Eddie left at six thirty, I got up to do the dishes, but I was so exhausted I just let everything soak in the sink. Being a failure can be pretty tiring work, I guess. I took a long shower and then crawled under the comforter and into my bed, where I hoped I could at least be smart in my dreams.

The phone rang at one a.m. “Maggie,” said the voice on the other end, “Yee virik poilir. Yee fezil brit wuneel du’crossit Washington Boulevard. Jig clummit frimmer. Jig umbrit. Migg itein Sloont 17th. Vo britchen, priadah. Vink.”

“B’wein,” I said sleepily. “Yee kobot retemalik b’vani.”

I hung up the phone and threw back the bed covers. Eddie needed me. He was stranded downtown. Some kind of malfunction – to his car, I guess. He said he would wait for me at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and 17th Street. My mind was still cobwebby as I sprang out of bed and began dressing myself. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and was tying the laces of my aerobics shoes when it finally hit me. The phone call hadn’t been from Eddie. I felt sort of dizzy then. I sat down on the side of the bed. Of course, it wasn’t Eddie. He can barely speak English, let alone a second language. Besides, the man on the phone had said “vo” (please) and “vink” (thank you), two words Eddie had never said to me in any language. Not only that, but he had called me “priadah” (dear), and had even used the more affectionate pronunciation, with the accent on the second syllable instead of the first.

Confused and frightened, I stood up and began pacing the room, trying to clear my head of the sleep that clouded it. I rubbed my temples with my fingers, struggling desperately to place the voice I had heard on the phone. Suddenly it came to me: the Harlequin man at Foreign Tongues, the man with the Windex eyes and the beautiful smile. But why would he call me, of all people? It didn’t make any sense. I sat back down on the bed and thought about going to meet him. I imagined what it would be like to stare up into those sapphire eyes while listening to that velvety voice call me “dear” and “lovely lady” and, best of all, “priadah” with the accent on the second syllable. But what would Eddie do if he came home and I wasn’t there? He’d be majorly ticked off, that’s for sure. But then I realized that I didn’t care what Eddie thought. I was going to meet the Harlequin man, and that was that. And if I was lucky, I might not ever come back.

I threw some of my things into an overnight bag and carried it out to my car. Once I make up my mind, I can be pretty stubborn. I backed out of the driveway and headed downtown. I was halfway there before it dawned on me what a dumb and dangerous thing I was doing. After all, how did I know that the man who was waiting for me wasn’t some notorious rapist or serial killer? This whole thing was just crazy. I was a fool to have even gotten this far. I slowed down, put on my blinker, and prepared to make a U-turn at the next stoplight. Eddie may be a jerk, I told myself, but at least he’s not some psycho serial killer. But then it occurred to me how stupid those words were. If that was the best I could say about Eddie, I would have to be insane to stay with him.

I switched off my blinker and continued heading downtown. What the heck, I thought, I’ll take my chances with the Harlequin man.

I needed someone to talk to.