Survival English

Sarah D. Warburton

“We’re the city mouse and the country mouse,” Kate told Adam on their first date, and after their wedding, the country won out. Adam accepted a partnership in a pediatric practice in Ashland and put a down payment on their first house.

The neighborhood was newly hewn from undeveloped land at the outskirts of town, the houses all variants of the same master plan. Walking the empty sidewalks, they might have been the only people on Earth. The saplings strapped to wooden props looked sad and stunted, centuries away from growing into an arching canopy of green. Sawdust clogged the gutters and the lawn was a patchwork of imported sod. “It’ll be a great place to start a family,” their realtor, Celia, had said, and Adam had nodded and smiled.

One morning when Kate slid her newspaper out of its plastic wrapping, a dead garter snake came out with it. The pale green body could have been a child’s toy, but it rolled off the kitchen table and hit the floor with an unmistakable sound, a live thing gone dead. She yelped involuntarily and backed away, her heart racing. Could it have crawled into the bag and suffocated? The only snakes she’d seen were in the glass boxes at the zoo, and she wished she wasn’t alone in this silent house.

She called Adam at work, but he was with a patient. “No, no message,” she told the receptionist, whose brisk efficiency she found intimidating. She’d tell the story over dinner, and he’d listen, and make a joke about her paranoia, and everything would seem all right again. She wished she had a job to go to, a reason to leave the house and neighborhood and the dead snake behind. “You don’t have to work if you don’t want to,” Adam had said. “We can afford for you to stay home with the kids.”

“And if I don’t want kids?”

He’d laughed, of course, she wanted kids; they’d already discussed it. He was the youngest of four, and she was an only child. “No one who’s been an only child would ever have an only child,” she’d told him on an early date. They wanted lots of children, a flock, a herd, a brood of children. “You won’t get tired of them?” she asked him.

“If I didn’t love children, I wouldn’t have gone into pediatrics.”

But today he was at work and she had nowhere to go and the snake lay there on its back, the pale curve a soft question against the hardwood floor. She went to the closet for a dustpan, her body a clenched fist, and scooped it up. She carried it out the back door, to the edge of the yard and dumped it over the back fence into the undeveloped land behind.

She couldn’t muster an interest in home design or flower arranging. Adam met a surgeon from the hospital, and she got together with his wife for tennis and again for lunch, but she couldn’t shake the feeling this tanned, groomed woman twice her age had been told to be nice to her. “You know,” she’d told Kate as she dipped the tines of her fork into her vinaigrette, “Once you have children, there are some mommy clubs you can join. I used to take my son to Gymboree. Now he’s at Episcopal.”

And then the realtor, Celia, had called again, ostensibly to offer advice on challenging the tax assessment of their property, and the conversation went on for an hour. Celia revealed herself as the ex-wife of an orthodontist who’d run off to Mexico with his receptionist. “It’s not so much the indignity,” she told Kate, “it’s the unoriginality of it all. At least I got out before we had kids.”

“We have snakes,” Kate told her, “one rolled out of the morning paper.”

“Oh honey,” Celia breathed rough against the hands-free phone. “I still call my Daddy when I see a snake. They scare the bejesus outta me. One of my clients used to hear snakes all over her house. Her husband told her it was the sprinklers going off in the morning or the air conditioning or the leaves of the tree outside their bedroom. He thought she was going crazy. Every single night she’d wake up absolutely petrified. Then they got someone in to blow out their vents and a whole nest of baby black snakes, maybe twenty of them, fell out. They got divorced the next year.”

One day after the next, Kate searched for ways to mark off the empty hours. After the boxes were unpacked and everything organized, she went to the nearest nursery to buy plants for the bare backyard. That project took the better part of August, not the best time for planting, as the man told her, but he gave her a discount on daylilies and knockout roses. She set a trellis at the base of the back porch and planted a butterscotch rose to climb it. She tuned the radio to the college alternative station, cranked the volume to fill up the mute walls, and cleaned the house, washing dishes by hand to make the job last a little longer. “I hear some people are into scrapbooking,” Celia told her, “or maybe you should look into volunteering. I mean, if you don’t want a real job.”

Kate began to help with an adult ESL program that met one night a week in a classroom at Patrick Henry High. The coordinator, Tom also taught English Literature at the High School. Week after week he led a larger group of ESL students through a workbook of “survival English,” while other volunteers, like Kate, worked one on one with more advanced students.

In her sessions, Kate tutored students from all over the world, like a man who came over from Vietnam on a boat and now worked night shifts at the paper factory. He preferred to read the newspaper in detail with a patient high school girl and a well-thumbed dictionary. Kate also worked with two sisters from El Salvador who quizzed each other from a GRE study guide, while a skinny high school student dozed next to them.

Today Markus from Romania sat waiting for her across from an empty desk. His hair was long, shaggy, like a singer from the eighties, his eyes heavy-lidded with dark circles underneath. She slid into the seat facing him, and he passed her a dense block of paper, the core manual for an exterminator’s exam.

When she started working with him, he had already moved through the third chapter, “Principles of Pest Control,” but they had been stuck on “Special Environmental Concerns” for the whole of September. Some days, he showed no interest, he drifted off, answered incorrectly over and over, watched her mouth. “Do you like to dance?” he asked her. “I want to dance with you.”

“I’m married,” she told him.

 She directed Markus to read aloud from the vocabulary section. Slowly, as if the words were saturated with meaning, he read, “Leaching is the movement of pesticide in water or another liquid downward through the soil.” His mouth twisted in amusement, and she waited to see if he had a question.

Because Kate spoke no Romanian at all, no other language except some near-forgotten high school French, they relied on Markus’s mastery of English for conversation. Little gestures, the way one eyebrow flicked upward at the edge, a slight pulse in the hollow of his cheek, these things were as important as the words on the page, more, when the words meant only a task.

He finished reading the vocabulary section and passed the book over to her. She looked down at the questions, “What is a habitat? What is an endangered species?” She asked him, “Why do you want to be an exterminator?”

This time one corner of his mouth curled like a crooked finger. “That is in the book?”

She shook her head, looking down again.

He ran a hand through his hair, and she could smell his cologne. “I paint houses for my brother.”

“With your brother.” She corrected him automatically.

He jerked his head, “No, for my brother. He is the boss and I am on the ladder. To be an exterminator, I pass the exam and I am the boss.”

She looked down at the book, and asked, “How can you tell if you must take special action to protect the environment?”

While Markus answered, she looked at the paint on his hands, Caribbean blue. What houses could he be painting that color here? All the houses she saw were Colonial colors, creams and burgundy and slate gray.

In her new home, the unbroken pallor of the walls was as sterile as a hospital ward, so she went to a paint store and chose a pale green for the kitchen. She didn’t use a primer, so the first coat soaked into the wall, leaving it patchy and rough. After it dried, she rolled on a second coat, relishing the smooth motion of the roller, the repetitive rise and fall of her arm. She stood on a ladder to tape and paint close to the ceiling, trying not to listen to the echoing silence of the house. When Adam got home that night he said, “I thought you told me you wouldn’t use the ladder unless I was home.”

“I had my phone in my pocket.”

“If you hit your head, it wouldn’t do you any good.”

She didn’t answer, picturing herself lying peacefully on the floor in the noiseless house, the cell phone inches from her outstretched hand.

“I like the color.” He opened the fridge, looked inside. “Maybe you could start on the nursery next.”

“Pink or blue?” she asked.

She didn’t paint the nursery; instead, she bought The Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking and How to Cook Everything. She practiced cracking an egg one-handed, dropped one after another down the garbage disposal.

In the evenings, she sat next to Adam on the sofa, twining her hand with his. She wasn’t taking birth control, but even if she forgot in the heat and rush while they made love, in the first moments after a deep resistance flooded her, and she knew she wasn’t pregnant.

After all, she thought, she’d chosen this. Together they’d pored over the floor plans for this soundless house, talking about the merits of a two-story, an open floor plan, a great room, and a game room, a “playroom” he’d corrected. Now that they were locked into a thirty-year mortgage, she couldn’t let a fear of snakes, a lack of direction throw them off course.

Some nights at ESL there were three students to every volunteer, but more often it seemed the volunteers outnumbered the students.

“I don’t know why they come,” Tom told her one night. “Some people have a strong goal like becoming a nurse or applying for citizenship. Most just seem like they’ve got nothing better to do.”

“How do they get by if they can’t speak English?” Kate couldn’t imagine making your home in a foreign country, where even the cans in the grocery store, the fliers in your mailbox were ciphers.

“Many of them have children who go to public school. They take care of translating. And people tend to sort themselves out into little communities, so they have clusters of people who speak their language.” Tom glanced at the table where a high school girl sat facing the two sisters from El Salvador. From their posture, they might have been interviewing her. “It doesn’t seem to matter. Sooner or later, they all disappear, and others turn up.”

“Just like your high school students,” she offered, but it took him a moment to smile.

The first half hour of class was devoted to a concept, like pronouns, or a task, like getting a driver’s license. The next hour was spent in tutoring. After the break, each student shared something with the class, and then the pairs switched to conversation, operating on the theory that speaking the language was the best way to learn it.

“I want to be a nurse,” one of the El Salvadoran sisters said, and the other whispered something to her in Spanish.

“My son makes pictures,” the man from Vietnam told them. “His teacher sent a note, stop making pictures on the work for school, but I like his pictures.”

“My mother has come here,” Markus told the class, “and now she calls me, my phone goes all the time.” He raised his cell phone, a small steel-colored block. “On the phone, we say more than when I am at home.”

The class laughed.

“My wife, too,” the man from Vietnam said, “all the time.”

“Can you turn it off?” Tom asked.

Markus shrugged. “This is how mothers are. If I turn off the phone, she calls my brother.”

After an early February thaw, the heavens opened and it rained for days filling the house with sound. Once the sun came back out, so did the snakes. “I don’t know what it is about a wet spring,” the mailman told her, “but it’s always good for snakes.”

One climbed the trellis and pressed its pale underbelly to the window of the upstairs bathroom. She shut the blinds. A black snake sunned on the driveway, and she parked on the street so as not to run it over.

“We have a snake problem,” she told Adam.

“It’s not a problem if they’re not in the house,” he answered.

“Why does wet weather bring out the snakes?” she asked Markus, as they read Pesticide Handling Decisions. He could define “residue” and “heat stress” and “drift” just as the manual did, but she couldn’t tell if he knew what they meant.

He shrugged. “In Romania, we have the snake, sarpe de casa, very important snake for eating mice and bugs. Good for the house. To be exterminator in Dobrogea, I just need this snake. He will do the work and I will get paid.”

“People aren’t afraid of snakes?”

He snorted. “People are afraid all the time.”

For Adam’s birthday, she made a cake from scratch while he sat at the kitchen table, listening to his mother on the phone. Every so often he would say, “yes,” or “of course,” and he watched Kate move from the pantry to the counter to the cabinets.

“I love you, too,” he told the phone and set it down on the table. “Mom wants us to drive down this weekend. Expect some wannabe grandparent pressure.”

“We haven’t been married a year,” she told him, a little more sharply than she’d intended, and then, “and your brother has kids.”

“Granny greed,” he told her, “she’s got a baby problem.”

She picked up an egg from the carton, her hand shaking a little, and brought it against the side of the bowl too hard, crushing shell into the flour. She scooped up the mess in her hand, flung it into the sink at the disposal, and turned, her hand still dripping. “What if I can’t do this?”

“Don’t worry,” Adam stood and came behind her. “I’ll love you anyway, even if you can’t cook.”

The rain came down in sheets day after day, and when she came into class the damp coil of her hair trailed water down her neck. Markus sat in his desk, bent over the book, but he looked up as she slid into her seat.

“More water for your snakes.” He glanced at the window where raindrops slid down in long reflected ribbons of light.

“I haven’t seen any this week.” Against the blackboard, Tom had taped a poster of symbols with everything from a school crossing sign to a medical caduceus.

Markus pointed at the caduceus. “I saw the snakes at the hospital this week. My mother—”

“Your mother …” she prodded, wondering if it was a lack of words or something else that stopped him.

He shook his head and looked down at the book.

“What are we studying tonight?” She took the book from him, accidentally brushing his hand. In the heat of the classroom, he smelled of wet wool and earth, strong, but not unpleasant.

“Proper storage and disposal of pesticides.” The words sounded foreign in his mouth as if somebody else were speaking through him.

“Which means?”

He ran an impatient hand through his hair. “Don’t throw the poison in the river, no?”

She laughed. “I think you’re ready for the test.”

Markus took the book from her and flipped the pages. “I have more chapters. The problem is not the test, but the words. Maybe tonight I ask you the questions and you say the answers. I will be the teacher, no?”

She sat back from the desk, crossed her arms. “What’s your first question?”

She half expected him to ask her about Adam, or her hair, or where she’d grown up, but he flipped to the back of the chapter and asked her, “How should one dispose of a pesticide container?”

Startled, she answered, “I haven’t read that section yet.” He usually read the chapter aloud before she asked him the questions.

He half-closed the book, using a finger to hold his place. “Think. How would you do it?”

“I’d read the label.”

He took his finger out of the book and spread his hands wide. “So. Is the right answer. When are you taking the exam?”

“Really?” She took the book back, flipping through the pages to find the answer.

“Really.” He smiled, but his eyes looked tired. “You should be taking the exterminator exam. You and I have studied the same.”

“But I don’t want to be an exterminator.”

He took the book gently from her hands. “Who knows what you will need to do?”

Markus usually spent the break outside the school, smoking. But today as he left the classroom, she saw him raise his cell phone to his ear. He didn’t come back. She took the handbook with her.

Next week, Markus didn’t appear. Kate worked with a woman from Sudan, whose small daughter sat swinging her legs on a chair in the corner of the classroom. After every few words, the woman raised her head and barked a command to the child. After class, Kate helped Tom straighten the chairs and set the classroom in order. She wanted to ask if he thought Markus would be back, but she didn’t know how.

Instead, she said, “I almost stepped on a snake on the way to my car.”

He gathered up the child’s unused paper and slipped it into his leather briefcase. “You didn’t grow up with snakes?”

She shook her head. “I grew up in the city. All the snakes were in the zoo.”

“Live here long enough and you’ll get a snake story, too. Everyone has one.”

“What’s yours?”

“I don’t remember the first part very well, but my sister tells it all the time. I was about five years old and I was working with my father in the yard. He and Melanie were raking the yard and I was weeding this ivy border he’d planted at the edge of the woods. She says I came up to them and said, ‘There’s a snake in the ivy, Dad, but I just weeded around it.’ He went over and looked, and it was a copperhead. The part I remember is watching from the back porch while he chopped it with a hoe. I’ve never seen him do anything like that before or after.”

“He must have been really scared.” She imagined the child, pressed to the screen of the porch while the hoe rose and fell, the father, his heart racing with what he might have lost.

“A copperhead could kill a child.” He took the poster off the blackboard, rolled it up and snapped a rubber band around it.

The next afternoon she was outside deadheading the daylilies. As she pinched off the withered blossoms, she could see into the naked backyard of the house next door. How long would it be empty, echoing? Kate reached down for the last blossom and felt a prick on her hand. Surprised, she looked down for the thorn and saw the snake, the color of a dried daylily stalk, slipping away.

She spent three days in the hospital, waiting for the swelling in her arm to go back down. She thought a hospital would be quiet, but every time the door opened or closed, she heard a rising hum of voices. Sometimes one word or a phrase would jump out, “he said what?” or “ice” or “next Tuesday,” but most of the time it sounded like the murmur of a foreign language.

In the late afternoon of her second day, she fell asleep under the pale, constant illumination of the fluorescent lights. She dreamed that she slid wordlessly through the deep grass, the scent of damp growth in her nostrils until tremors shook the ground beneath her and something cast a shadow that thrilled her with panicked fear. When she woke, her mouth wide open, Adam sat in the chair next to her, reading a magazine.

He set it down, “That one looked like a doozy.”

Now that she was awake, she could feel the awkwardness of her injured arm. “I dreamed I was a snake.”

“It was only a matter of time.” He scooted his chair closer to the bed. “How did it feel, being a snake?”

“Scary.” She remembered the grass as tall as trees, the sense of something large looming over her.

“Poor little snake.” Adam put his hand on her good hand.

“Poor me.” She turned her hand over so they were holding hands on the thin hospital blanket. “Maybe the snake was afraid, but I got bit. At least a rattlesnake can tell you where it is. This one couldn’t say anything.”

They sat together, listening to the rush and hiss of the hospital around them.

On the third day, Adam let himself into the room. “One of my patients gave me something for you,” he said, “but I’m not sure you’ll want it.”

Kate used the button to make the bed go up. She knew she would be discharged today, she was already dressed, but she wished she could stay longer in this pale, hushed room. “What is it?”

He took his hand out of his pants pocket and held up a plastic bag. “You don’t have to touch it, but she said it would help a snakebite.”

Fascinated, she reached out and took the baggie. Through the cellophane, she could see a crumpled mass with the opacity of fingernails and the fragility of tissue. A frisson of revulsion ran down her spine. “Is this a snakeskin?”

Adam sat in the chair beside her bed. “She says to tie it around your wrist one night, and when you take it off the next morning, snakes will leave you alone.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s some old Eastern European superstition. She’s one of the mothers at the free clinic, and she was there when I got the call about your bite.”

She poked at the skin, imagining it in a knot of crepe around her wrist.

“I don’t expect you to do it.” He leaned forward and reached for the bag. “I just thought you’d find it interesting.”

Her fingers tightened and she drew it towards her. “I’ll keep it.” Maybe the venom would linger in her system; maybe other snakes would always know that she’d been bitten. Maybe she’d always remember the way it felt in her dream to be wordless and helpless and afraid. Maybe she would take the exterminator’s exam, after all.

A nurse knocked on the door, discharge papers in her hand, and Kate slipped the snakeskin into her pocket. She didn’t think she would wear it around her wrist, but she would keep it with her for a while until she found the perfect place to let it go.