Drawing with Crayons

Eva's Creative Nonfiction Essay

“So,” I ask Sergiy as we sit down at a table in the basement of the Truro library, “what are your kids up to today?”  

Sergiy cocks his head to one side. He has pale, close-cropped hair and blue eyes the color of a summer sky. “Up to?” Wrinkles form on his brow. “What do you mean, up to?”

“Like, what are they doing, what are they up to.” I wave my hands vaguely, trying to think if there is a better way to explain it. 

Sergiy is Ukrainian, and he recently moved to the U.S. from Moscow. He is currently vacationing on Cape Cod with his family, and I was hired to tutor him in English while he’s here, a task for which I'm grossly unprepared. “Just talk to him. He wants to practice conversation,” the tutoring company advised me when I said I’d never taught ESL before. That sounded easy enough, but he signed up for three hours a day. Certainly I need to give him more formal lessons of some kind.  

Sergiy nods and says, “Today my kids are up to going swimming.” 

“Actually, we would just say they're going swimming.”

“Ah.” 

I've confused him again. He's a good sport about the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's our third session, so I ask if he has any suggestions: anything he thinks would be helpful, anything we should do differently. “No, no,” he says. “I sink is very good. You do good job. You are... how do you say... eh, I do not know zee word.” He pulls out his smart phone and swipes his finger across it. He types something into the translator app and squints at the screen. “No, I do not sink you have zee word in English.”

So Sergiy has a way of describing me, but there’s no word for it in my own language. Hmm. 

---

How would I describe myself right now? Impulsive? Optimistic? Naïve? Self-involved? I recently turned down a promotion and quit my full-time job as a high school teacher in order to live off my savings and focus on fiction writing. I stored all my possessions in my mother’s basement and moved up here to the Cape, where my friend Nikki says I can live with her and her husband for a year as their “writer-in-residence.” It wouldn’t be so weird except that I’m thirty-one years old. This is the age when people are starting to settle down and act responsibly. And I’m doing the opposite.

I hope I’ll be able to write something good this year and prove that I’m not a complete waste of space. So far I haven’t written much, but at least I’m doing a lot of reading. And it’s nice to spend time with Nikki.    

Nikki is currently reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and we've been discussing it frequently. I read it a couple years ago and don't remember much except I thought it was profound and extremely confusing. So Nikki will say something like, “isn't it crazy, the theory of special relativity?” And I'll say, in my best teacher voice, “why don't you explain what you think it means,” as if I'd like to hear her take on the subject before I give her mine. 

A few days ago, Nikki and I were stretched out on the floor of her living room, doing yoga and puzzling over light and time. “What he seems to be saying,” Nikki said, draping herself over her giant exercise ball, “is that all light is the same age because it travels so quickly it never has time to age. Like, it travels beyond the speed of time.” 

“How can that be?” I put my hands on the floor and pushed into downward-facing dog. “Unless time isn't what we think it is.”

“Well it's not. It's relative. That's what Einstein realized. Time changes depending on where you are.” 

“I don't understand that.” I went into cobra pose, stretching the crown of my head towards the ceiling and trying to comprehend how time could be different depending on where I’m standing. 

Nikki’s husband, who was sitting silently nearby, stood up from the couch. “I think it's way more complex than what you guys are saying, and we just don't have the words to describe what's actually happening.”

“Oh.” I felt deflated. My mind had been stretching, trying to reach some sort of understanding, but maybe, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never grasp it.

---

It’s now the second hour of our daily lesson, and Sergiy and I are practicing idioms at the library. I'm realizing how many there are, and how difficult this must be for him. We go through the seemingly endless list of business idioms I found online: to plug a product, to pull the plug on an idea. Sergiy is the CEO of a company that just expanded to the U.S., so I figure these will be useful. 

“Generating buzz,” I tell him. “That's getting people excited about your product – getting them talking. Like bees.” Again I'm swinging my hands around, as if acting out a swarm of bees will make everything clear. When Sergiy looks confused, I start making buzzing noises. The guy at the table next to us gives me a strange look. 

“Bees talking?” Sergiy asks. “What does it mean – buzz?” 

Bees must not buzz in Russia. Yesterday Sergiy and I discussed animal noises – at my request. I learned that in Russian, dogs say “guv guv,” frogs say “qua,” and pigs say “hru hru.” But I didn't ask about bees. 

I give Sergiy the task of writing sentences to practice his newly-learned idioms while I flip madly through the ESL books I scrounged up, looking for activities. How am I supposed to teach English? Sergiy wants clear-cut rules, and all I know is what sounds right. 

The problem, Sergiy says, is that he thinks of what he wants to say in Russian first, and there's no direct translation. 

“You need to immerse yourself in the language for a while,” I tell him, as if I actually know what I'm talking about. “Then, one day, it'll click. You'll stop trying to translate and just be able to speak.” I tell him this with confidence, even though the phenomenon has never happened to me. My foreign language skills are shameful.

“I don't know,” Sergiy says. “I study – I have study English for many year and still, it doesn't click.” 

“Yeah, I know. It's much easier said than done.” 

---

Speaking of things easier said than done, I thought once I had the time to focus on writing a novel, I would be able to sit down each day and have the chapters come flowing out of me. But that’s not the way it’s been going. I’m out of practice, and writing is a struggle. Each day I sit down at the desk Nikki set up for me in their dining room, and I gnash my teeth for a while. The words don’t come out, or they come out wrong. I have stories I want to tell, but suddenly they seem silly and unimportant. Sometimes I end up deleting an entire day’s work.