Breaking news: I can eavesdrop again! After six months of almost everything I overheard being beautifully, transfixingly, and at-times frustratingly unintelligible, it’s a equal parts stimulating and distracting to be able to overhear again. The other day, at a coffee shop in Seattle:
“wanted to go to Cleveland to go Christmas shopping.
Daddy, it made a noise!
-A bleach rag, yeah. -Lawsuits.
This last exchange occurred right next to me, and I’m certain I didn’t mishear. Eavesdropping’s not always glamorous.
The downside to being back in the land of my first (and still, sadly, only) language is the (reasonable) expectation that I’ll be able to communicate with ease in a variety of everyday situations. Instead, I unlearned so much English that polite banter at coffee shops and grocery stores is proving a challenge. It’s not that I don’t remember the words; rather, I grew accustomed to being regarded as somewhat dim, and came to regard elaborate gestures, sheepish smiles, and poorly-pronounced thank yous in the local language as the only options in my small-talk arsenal. Now I can say anything I like! And it’s not always pretty. This weekend, at Trader Joe’s, the cashier thanked me for bagging my own groceries. Appropriate responses include, “No problem,” “You’re welcome,” or even, the slightly self-satisfied, “Sure,” with a shrug. Instead, after a pause, I exclaimed, “It’s a DELIGHT!” and threw my arms out to emphasize just how fantastic I found the experience. This was met with a bigger pause, and the slack-jawed, weirded-out stares of my partner, the cashier, and the people in line behind the grocery-bagging-loving apparent new-arrival to planet Earth.
No matter what length the trip, returning home makes me feel like I’ve been away forever but also not at all. The drugstore is the same save the discounted-Easter-candy display. A favorite restaurant has expanded and grown crowded, and the host, who took three years of Sundays to remember my name, has forgotten me completely. People are actually reading on, rather than about, iPads in coffee shops. It’s a comfort to sit down to a meal with good friends and slip back in to conversations started months ago, to talk over one another, to tell new stories and retell old favorites and laugh until our faces hurt.
Last night, I went with friends to dinner at a crowded pizza place, and we waited for our table in an unfortunate little semi-circle of chairs that positioned us as an audience for a couple that appeared to be on a very early date (my dinner companions and I disagreed on whether it was a first, and possibly blind, or second, date). The couple sat facing us on high stools and we were in standard chairs, exaggerating the sense that we were there not only to observe, but also perhaps to assess the date and raise scores on little placards rating their flirtation, table manners, menu choices. At one point, it grew to be too much, and someone in our semi-circle cracked the silence, trying but failing to address the bizarre arrangement softly enough so that the couple wouldn’t overhear. Soon we were in loud fits of laughter, behaving like those Americans abroad who believe English to be “some mysterious tribal dialect,” and the couple was sharing tentative secret grins, and laughing, too, but no one broke the imaginary fourth wall between us; we just continued to talk about and laugh at and overhear each other, all of us pretending we couldn’t understand one another perfectly.