Things in Translation

A mask, apparently, requires at least one person to be aware of its existence.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Pavement was why my father didn’t get a perfect SAT score. The way he tells the story, you’d think his British education had left him functionally illiterate. Once you fly across the Atlantic, the ground your feet step off onto is called the sidewalk. If you walked on the pavement, you might get hit by an American Car—one of those gas-guzzling rusted pickups driven by a tanned man clad in denim or something like that. This is why we were sent to The American School, so that we knew to walk on the sidewalk. 

As I barrel across my front steps, it is not semantics that captivates my mind. I am entirely preoccupied with my toes. They are nestled deep in patent red Mary Janes, the sort that reach out of the catalog with greedy little hands and lilting voices. Each foot is tucked in a sock, one old and one new, because only one foot was up for the challenge of never-been-washed-before-cotton that morning. At all times, my toes must remain at least 2.54 centimeters away from the nearest sidewalk/pavement crack. Not for my mother’s back or my father’s spine, though (the others sometimes played perplexing games). The pavement/sidewalk is not divided into even segments whatsoever. But the slabs of concrete must have been manufactured in a standardized manner. I have a world of questions to ask the man that assembled this particular stretch. What sort of person does something like this? The task at hand, given the suboptimal conditions, demands utmost focus. I glue my gaze to the ground, and for extra measure, I hike my knees up. My steps are horizontally timid and vertically fervent. A mother, watching from the window, sees her little girl stomping in slow motion, each exaggerated step convulsing her little purple-with-blue-polka-dots skirt, and purses her lips. 

In the classroom, I don’t see that my pigtails dance alone in a sea of docile long locks, or my shiny shoes, interlocked at the ankle, harmonizing with the wall clock’s exact tick as they tap the linoleum floor. People lie when they say that we don’t have eyes at the back of our heads. We do. The way we see behind us—and ourselves from behind—is through our ears. But this mode of seeing is forever limited by the perceptivity of others. And so I was blind for years, because I was too busy watching them to notice that they never saw me. 

I observe that Lisa is wearing pink socks that are a different pink from her top, but she doesn’t seem to mind that one is wrong, so I set out to not mind either. I also notice the shoes—all colors of lace-up sneakers in canvas, mesh, suede, and one pair of dull black rubber rain boots—under the row of desks in front of me. They lounge in varying asymmetric positions—pushed far out, wrapped around chair legs, hovering, resting flat—but all are relatively stationary.

There is one other set of feet tapping the floor, though. I can’t see them, but I can hear them. I don’t know who he is yet. But apparently, he is allowed to poke the rest of us with the sharp end of his pencil. I don’t quite understand how he manages to do anything at all, let alone torment us with tiny stabbings, given that he seems to have his own personal classroom aid hovering over him at all times. And if you say anything to the teacher, you get into trouble, Sydney tells me over lunch. She alternates between eating singular carrots dipped in ranch and educating me, paying no mind to him being well within earshot. No one else pays him any mind either. I’ve never seen carrots that look quite like hers before, smooth bite-sized oblongs, a small pile nestled next to a tiny container of sour-smelling dressing. How much carrot must be discarded, I wonder, to make those perfect little logs? I don’t tell her this, or much of anything, yet.

By the second period, I would know his name, and I would soon come to hate hearing his name, always inexplicably following mine when our teacher—the shared one—would announce pairs. This is when I make my first and only mistake. Turn and talk to your neighbor, the teacher writes on the board. A thought hurtles through me and wrenches my right arm straight into the air. 

“I think you spelled neighbour wrong.” The class goes silent, and all I can hear echoing in my ears is the tapping of my shoes and the ticking of the clock. Then he begins to laugh, laughing so hard that tears stream down his face and he’s kicking his feet and banging the table. Despite all my efforts to step carefully, I’ve stumbled onto the pavement and he’s pushed me and I know he didn’t mean to. Yet, as slender tears well in my eyes and drip down to mar my leather shoes, I discover hate unlike anything I have ever felt before. Rather than flooding outwards, it turns on itself and drills deeper into me. If I had sat with that shocking emotion for longer, perhaps I would have seen for the first time.

Instead, determined to give my classmates nothing to watch, I still my shoes against the classroom floor and sit up straight. In just a few days, Justice will be my deepest desire. That and Claire, who manages to pierce everyone’s ears somehow. I learn that my shoes matter much more than the sidewalk cracks, and I vow to never be anything like him.