I Told You It Was a Small Town

So it was Christmas Eve and I invited Yabby over, being as how Ryan and Kelly and I had all this shisha and rum balls and salmon pate and there was no one to share it with. Charles came as well and we listened to our music too loud which the neighbors really hate (the alley beside our apartment is an acoustical anomaly, in that the noise from inside bounces against the walls and actually sounds louder outside. Sucks for the people trying to tuck their kids in for Papa Noel, I'd imagine). So we were eating and drinking and dancing and telling dirty jokes when Yabby asked if he could invite his friends J and G over, to which I responded of course, it's Christmas, and then ten minutes later he introduced me to his friend G and I said, "Yes, we've met," and G squinched up his pug face till it wrinkled all the way into his bald head and said, "We have?"

I had promised myself that I would not let his assholery go unchecked. I had promised that he was going to know my wrath. But damn, it was Christmas. What could I do. So I just smiled and said, "Yes, we met one time at Shamrock," and G shook his head like I was the crazy one, and then Yabby whispered could he offer his friends a drink. Of course he could, I said, and I went into the kitchen with him to crack open my bottle of vodka and pour some out for the rudest man alive.

In the kitchen Yabby put his arm around me. "Hey," he whispered. "Are you uncomfortable with J being here? He's really embarrassed."

"Why?" I asked.

"He said the last time he came to your house he went on an anti-American rant and you got angry at him."

"Did he?"

"You don't remember?"

It suddenly occurred to me that I was feigning a blackout that didn't even happen, to protect the feelings of a near-stranger who had come into my house and started railing against my country, unprovoked. WHICH IRONICALLY IS JUST THE SORT OF ENTITLED BEHAVIOR PEOPLE CLAIM TO HATE IN AMERICANS, BUT WHY BRING THAT UP. "Yeah," I conceded. "I remember."

"He feels really bad about it," said Yabby.

"I know," I said. "No big deal."

"You're not still mad?"

"To be honest," I said, "Your other friend was way nastier to me."

"G?"

"Yes."

"Look," he said. "If it's weird for you, and you don't want to come to Christmas dinner, I understand."

"Oh, are they going to be there?"

"Yes."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

This dampened my mood. My options were unenticing: Christmas dinner with my two mortal enemies, or sitting alone in my apartment all day. So I sucked it up. "It's fine," I said. "Come on, let's mix the drinks." I poured them extra strong to prove that there were no hard feelings, and I tiptoed back into the mine field of the living room, marveling at how someone so supposedly non-confrontational had managed to amass such an opposition in two short months in Palma. If only Boogie had been there, I thought, the circle would have been completed.

The next morning I got up early to greet the Christmas sun, showered and did my hair twice (the first attempt was a failure), and then packed up my biscuits and some fancy wine to bring to Yabby's. Yabby's whole yacht crew lived together and his captain was a brilliant cook, who stretched eight delectable courses out over four hours. The captain was also something of a wine expert, and brought out five bottles over the course of the meal for us to taste, explaining the subtle differences and the reasons therefore, based on the grapes and the cask and the cork and what-have-you. There was also a fair amount of fancy bubbly poured among the guests, over which we chatted before dinner and got to know one another. I introduced myself to a woman named Lou, who replied, "Yes, we've met," and I am never quick enough on my feet in these instances to go, "Oh of course, I remember! How have you been?" So instead I said, "Where?" and she said "Agua Bar," and I did not know how, in such a swanky situation, to explain that I do not remember anything that happens at Agua Bar or anybody I meet there, or that the doorway to that place serves as a magnet to wipe clean my knowledge of a shared history with anyone inside, the sole exception to this rule being Matthew, for whom my heart still burns despite his steadfast refusal to confirm that he possesses any sort of personality. Rather than getting into all this, since I had only entered the door about five minutes prior, and Yabby had already made it clear to me the night before that he was afraid I might be too much of a boozehound to handle myself around his adult coworkers, I simply apologized to Lou, who turned out to be perfectly lovely and to have excellent taste in music.

Speaking of boozehounds unable to handle themselves, they sat me next to the single angriest blackout drunk in Palma, who passed me plates of potatoes and clinked glasses with me at the toast and continued his life blissfully unaware that he's a total monster. J, for his part, sat at the other end of the table and did all he could to pretend I didn't exist, either because he thinks he's the first person to ever trash America or because he pure-straight-hates-me from the bottom of his soul, I didn't ask. I personally handled myself with aplomb, which was particularly impressive considering the fact that I'd consumed my weight in Dom Perignon before the dinner even started. I left with the impression that nobody hated Yabby for letting me crash their party and that even G probably felt that I was a nice enough person, but that's only because he's got no idea how much shit I talk on the internet.

Christmas Eve

Tomorrow is Christmas and I don't have any plans. I bought cheese spread and salmon pate and chocolate biscuits and vodka just in case I end up going to dinner at Yabby's or Mikaele's tomorrow. I texted Yabby to ask if dinner was still on but he hasn't written back yet, and I'm afraid to text Mikaele because we don't really communicate electronically. We just bump into each other on the street sometimes. Ryan has to work on the boat and Kelly has a mandatory Christmas party at her captain's house (who makes a Christmas party mandatory? People with low self-esteem, that's who). Dennis has a German Christmas party to go to and Rob is in Malaga and Felix is in England. So it's entirely possible that I'll spend Christmas dipping chocolate biscuits in Smirnoff and doing laundry. We'll see.

This afternoon Kelly's coming over and we're going to drink wine and smoke shisha and exchange presents. Today I went shopping out in the rain for groceries and phone credit and Christmas gifts, only two this year which is the good part about holidays away from home. I got Kelly a blanket because it's cold on her boat and Ryan a candle because he always thinks our apartment smells. I don't think the apartment smells but I have had a cold for the past twelve thousand years. I talk like Marge Simpson and I blow my nose every three minutes. The only thing I can smell is Brazilian Nut, because I bought myself a Christmas gift of Brazilian Nut lotion. I smell so amazing now that I keep continually sniffing my forearms, which is sexy. I got to hold it down for all my paramours.

I'm updating this in real time because I don't care to edit. Kelly is in the kitchen now making rum balls, and Ryan is playing deejay (although he just skipped over a Rihanna/Ne-Yo compilation which basically destroyed me) and Yabby did call and give me directions to his place. I asked what I should bring and he said just bring wine, or whatever you like to drink, and I said oh I like to drink everything and he said "Yes, I noticed that." To which I was like, whoops. Kelly came bearing gifts of four kinds of nuts and two kinds of red wine and one time I told Kelly that I yearn for an overstocked spice rack and she bought me a spice rack, at which I got so excited that I can no longer deny the fact that I am an old lady. But a spice rack means that you are home. And now I know I'm home.

On Faces in the Crowd

When I finally walked home it was 6am; I know because I kept checking my phone thinking, "No way is it almost 6am" but the clock was not backing down. Felix was chattering in British to the girls we'd amassed along the way and Jamie was sleeping into his hand. Ryan had gone home hours before and Curtis had stomped off in the rain after a couple violent outbursts. The outbursts surprised me, and on our walk to the second bar I asked him if he was all right, to which he outbursted more, angrily spitting that I didn't know who he was or what he was like, and then he stepped out of my peripheral vision as if to part ways. I held my coat over my head (the coat I left in the Scottish boys' flat two nights back, the coat that Curtis came with me to hunt for, yelling up at balconies, "Hello! Strangers! Have any Americans left articles of clothing in your homes this week?" until one of the Scots let us up) and I was walking through the downpour in search of the second bar, the other boys blocks and blocks ahead of me, probably wrists-deep in their second pints by now. I stumbled in the vague direction of the main road, turning when it felt like I should turn, and when I went left instead of right I'd hear a shout, "Hey!" and I'd turn my head and a Curtis-shaped silhouette would point across the street. In this way I eventually ended up in Shamrock instead of, say, Ibiza, but Curtis was still angry and he gave me a very begrudging hug goodbye.

Yabby was at Shamrock and he bought me a beer and listened to me blather about Curtis. "It's weird," I said, "He's never like this," and Yabby asked how long I had known him and I thought about it, "Two weeks, I guess." The point was raised that two weeks was not a fair amount of time to claim understanding of another person, but I felt sad because Curtis was my best friend in Palma. Every day for the past two weeks, when the evening reached a certain point and it became clear that no more productivity was to be squeezed from my day, I would go to his dark apartment to drink screwdrivers and watch stand-up comedy. I really liked Curtis and now it turned out that he was some sort of bar-fight dude. Yabby patted my back and said that these things happen, and would I like to come to Christmas dinner, and I said I certainly would. I had Christmas dinner plans, technically, with a guy from Brooklyn who I'd met on the street two nights prior, who I'd only spoken to because he'd heard my accent and then it turned out we're neighbors in both America and Spain and within ten minutes we'd exchanged life stories and phone numbers and he'd invited me to Christmas. His name was Mikaele. I had accepted the invitation, but aside from our curbside bonding experience Mikaele and I had never spent any time together so I was a little unsure of how solid my Christmas plans were. I saw Mikaele out that night, incidentally, our paths crossing in the rain as our groups swam between bars, and I stepped on his foot and gave him a hug, but that didn't necessarily guarantee a place to hang my Santa hat. Yabby assured me that I was welcome at his own Christmas dinner, and for New Years as well, and any old Saturday really, just another Palma yachtie falling out of the sky and opening a door to me, a phenomenon that is so friendly and wonderful and altogether commonplace that I've almost gotten used to it.

Truth be told I was feeling phenomenally popular, playing Never-Have-I-Ever with the boys at Havanna's and engaging in happy, disposable pub chatter with strings of strangers. People I'd never seen before were teasing me for forgetting their names (one ginger man in the bathroom line asked, rather provocatively, "So you found your red coat, then?" before ducking back into the dark) and strange men were leaning in close and nodding at my beer-soaked proclamations. One such leaner-inner was a bald, pug-faced gentleman who spoke of yachting like they all spoke of yachting, and the canine features of his face were not something that I'd ever have mentioned aloud were it not for the events that transpired. I care little for yachting talk but my friends all suffer through ESL classroom stories so it's only fair that I listen and nod and pretend I know port from starboard. The pug-faced man and I talked for a bit, I don't remember what about, and he stood rather within my circle of personal space so that I was backed up against the bar and nodding at whatever he had to say, and all I know is that at some point he told me that he'd visited every continent except for Australia. I didn't care about this fact any more than I cared about anything else he'd said, but I was game and I said, "Well then you should take a weekend trip, shouldn't you? Just fly to Australia for Christmas so you can say you've been to every continent." And he answered, "You know, maybe this is why you don't have any friends here," and walked away. It was such a cold line, and so randomly abusive, that I just stood at the bar sort of gulping for air and trying to piece together what had occurred, and once it had registered I still had no concept of where it had come from or how to respond, beyond smacking Felix on the arm to say, "Dude, guess what just happened."

There was one night at Agua Bar when I'd had a bit too much Cava and I met this boy named Matthew, a Brit with long eyelashes and dark curls who was just shamefully handsome, and rather quiet and sullen, and we had a quick chat wherein he revealed that he was a musician and he was here for open mic night. I was so smitten with Matthew that I lost all ability to function in polite society, and for the rest of the evening I threw myself at him, asking him over and over again when he was going to "get up there" and perform on stage, and bumming his rolled cigarettes. He never quite got around to obtaining a restraining order, which I took to mean that he was equally as fluttery over me, nevermind the fact that anyone who asks for more than two cigarettes in a row is a blatant, raspy-voiced asshole. On the off chance that he had misunderstood my intentions, I put my hand on his shoulder as I was leaving and assured him that I thought he was "lovely." I woke up the next morning with a terrible cough, wincing at my own creepiness. My only consolation was the promise I made to myself that I would never have to see Matthew again. That was Monday. On Tuesday we went to Trivia Night at Chupito's and there was a team in the back of the bar that got nine points out of ten on every round. During the halftime break I got to talking to one member of the winning team, and then he introduced me to his trivia partner, a curly-haired Brit smoking a rolled cigarette, and I had to sort of swallow my embarrassment and say that yes, we'd met before, hello Matthew.

I share this story not to highlight my own flirtatious ineptitude, nor to provide a platform for the announcement that I have really, truly, for serious this time, quit smoking. I am not even trying to examine the fact that Matthew is British, a musician, and a trivia god, and therefore my soul mate, and I have irreparably stuffed up our courtship. My point in all this is, Palma is a small town. You simply cannot be a shithead to anyone in this city and hope to hide from them for any length of time. So it is with great pleasure that I anticipate my next meeting with the oddly hateful pug-faced man. Because, pug-faced man, we are going to bump into one another and you are going to be drunk and you are, don't deny it, going to hit on me again. And I am going to call you on your asshattery and your male-pattern baldness, and you are going to walk away with a much clearer picture of why I don't have any friends. And then someone else is going to buy me a drink, just to prove you wrong.

Boogie Nights

We went from sleeping seven people in a 3-bedroom apartment to just me and Ryan occupying opposite ends of the house. Kelly and Christian moved onto their boats. Leila got a job at a chalet in the French Alps. And George responded well to the suggestion that he get off our couch and find a hostel. The only one who posed a problem, really, was Boogie.

Boogie was a friend of Kelly's, a Hungarian girl who'd lived in Mallorca for the past three years when suddenly she developed a problem with her landlord. Kelly, ever the Samaritan, offered our home to Boogie, who assured us she only needed a place to crash for a few days. Boogie's arrival in our apartment reeked of the fact that she would be staying longer than that. She showed up two days late, wordlessly stacking suitcases in our dining room and hanging her robe beside the shower. She made me uncomfortable because she was vaguely slimy and her name was Boogie, but I didn't say anything. I'd been in dire straits myself, relying on the kindness of strangers, so I shut my mouth and made space in my bed.

It became quickly apparent that there was something amiss with Boogie. One thing I found frustrating was the fact that she never actually got out of my bed. I'd come home from work and there she'd be, sprawled out and clicking at her laptop, in the same position I'd left her in that morning. With George taking up residence on the sofa and the other bedrooms full to bursting, this left very little space for me in the apartment. I was annoyed, but I swallowed it.

At first Boogie didn't seem to have a job. After three or four days without leaving the apartment, I watched her get ready one night for her job at a "hospital." She was vague about what her job entailed, playing up the language barrier when we asked her about it. But her shifts were always at night, and she dressed for work in knee-high boots and booty skirts, locked herself in the bathroom to tend to her hair and makeup. Boogie took longer to get ready than anyone I'd ever met. She meandered back and forth between rooms, zipping bags and jiggling door handles. Water would run and heels would click and she would walk out the door looking exactly the same as she had that afternoon in bed. At 6 a.m. I'd wake to a tug on my comforter as she crawled into bed beside me to sleep through the morning.

"I think Boogie's a stripper," I told Kelly.

"She's not," said Kelly. "She works at a hospital. And I think sometimes she dances."

"Yeah, on a pole," I said. "Have you seen what she wears to the hospital?"

But Kelly hadn't, because she'd been on watch at her boat, spending the night onboard to make sure nothing sank before dawn. Leila moved out and I took her spot in Kelly's room, making Boogie the only member of the household with her own bed, in addition to being the only person who didn't pay rent.

"So when exactly is she moving out?" Ryan asked. "It's been two weeks."

"I don't know," said Kelly. "She won't give me a straight answer. She's not very good at communicating."

She wasn't. She stayed in her bed in the hallway, breezing past us like a bleached Hungarian ghost. She dropped dishes in the sink or laundry in the wash when she thought no one was looking, sometimes offered a tight-lipped smile if she accidentally made eye contact. She spoke only to answer a direct question, or to ask for something. My discomfort with her was evolving into loathing.

One Friday night we had a party. "Boogie," said Ryan. "Come into the living room and hang out with us."

"No," said Boogie. "I have to stay in here. I'm getting ready to go out."

"When are you moving out?" he asked her.

"I think tomorrow night," she said. "I think my new room will be ready by then."

"When are you going to pay us the two weeks' rent?"

"I will talk to Kelly about that."

The next morning Boogie wasn't there. Her clothes and luggage were still piled in the dining room, her laptop was under her bed. But she was gone. She didn't come back that night or the next. We were perplexed. Why would she leave in the middle of the night without taking any of her things? Why wouldn't she call to say she wasn't coming back? If she was in such a terrible financial position, why didn't she at least try to woo us with a sob story?

Five days later she showed up with a sheepish smile as though nothing had happened. It was six o'clock in the morning. I never miss an opportunity to back down from a fight, but in this situation I was precaffeinated and anxious about the security of my home. "I need your keys," I told her, and she handed them to me. A few minutes later she came into the living room with her computer, to casually surf the net while the two of us watched the sun come up.

"Boogie," I said. "You can't stay here."

"But where will I go?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, "But it's not fair for you to just disappear for five days and then act like you live here."

"I didn't want to disturb anyone."

"If that's the case," I said, "then you went about things the wrong way. Look, you've got to go."

She rose and returned to the dining room, and I heard the slow-motion zipping and unzipping of bags, the subtle click of heels on tile, the rustling of clothes being folded and rearranged. This went on for about an hour before she slipped out as I showered. I counted the laptops and cameras, even looked under the beds in case she was hiding there. I had no idea what Boogie's angle was but I was far beyond the desire to figure it out.

That night she showed up one last time, to collect her bags. We watched her haul them down the stairs into her boyfriend's car, listened to her argue on the phone with her new landlord. Without a goodbye, she closed the door behind her. Suddenly it was just me and Ryan in the whole apartment, with no opponents. We shrugged at each other and retreated to our opposite ends.

On Career

I woke up at 6am on my sofa. I was still dressed and the lights were all on and there was half a conversation on my laptop screen. I stumbled into bed and slept another hour and half, till the alarm clock started making concerned, persistent little chirps to protest my love affair with the snooze button. So I bleared through the shower and the two cups of coffee and the bus ride and got to work, where I found myself in the distinctly awkward position of standing in a spinning room surrounded by a herd of chattering second-graders. This was not the plan. There was no plan, actually. The head teacher was out and nobody could remember what I was supposed to do, so they gave me a little smile and a shrug and tossed me into the classroom.

I had some Christmas vocabulary cards with pictures on them, so I knew I could wring a good five minutes out of teaching the items on one of the cards (drum, bow, heart, star, ornament -- I tried to teach the word "angel" but when I drew one on the board the kids all yelled out, "Monstro!"). I reached into the supply closet and pulled out the first thing I could find, some green paper, and announced with authority that today we were going to cut out Christmas trees. The kids set to work drawing lopsided little pines and I grabbed some red paper and folded it in half. We'd made Christmas cards the week prior, but these were desperate times, and we hadn't used red paper before. As the children came up to me one by one to show me their Christmas tree cut-outs, I handed them a red paper and a glue stick, inventing elaborate instructions as I went along.

I let the directions draw out for as long as possible; I needed the extra time it took for each kid to walk back up to my desk and wait in line behind twelve others scrambling for my attention. They pawed at me and waved papers in my face and the whole thing became very zen after a while, like being surrounded by a swarm of bees and nodding off to the drone of their humming. "Beautiful! Do you want gold stars or silver stars? Very nice! Would you like red circles as well? Great! Now write 'Merry Christmas.'" So on and so forth, the sea of children around me never ebbing, the cries of "Cat-a-lee! Cat-a-lee!" punctuating my name with upside-down exclamation points, the wretched little trees cut jagged and glued to the wrong side of the paper, the Christmas cards sparkling from the liberal application of gold star stickers.

The ones who finished early got assigned increasingly bullshit projects. Draw a picture from the words on the board. Good now color it. Good now write the word. Good now cut it out. Good now glue it to a piece of paper. Jesus, are you done already? Fine, draw another picture. Anything. One little boy got hip to my tricks and rolled his eyes, "No quiero dibujar mas!" I shrugged my shoulders, there were only five minutes left of class anyway. Then he changed his mind and took a piece of paper; as the bell rang he handed me what appeared to be a gray turtle with a club foot, wearing a brown cape-sash. He told me it was a present for me.

Eventually, days later, the bell rang. The kids went outside to eat their lunches and I exhaled. Their teacher, who'd been grading papers at the back of the room, was impressed. "You are a very good teacher," she said. "I will buy you a coffee." What I really wanted was a glass of water but I thanked her and slurped down my vending machine cappuccino. When we parted ways I locked myself in the bathroom to drink from the questionably-potable sink until my throat reopened and the pounding in my head stilled. I closed my eyes and slumped against the wall, readying myself for my next class.

Cultural Differences

So I've embarked on a new career path, what with the teaching-English thing, and I guess I like it. It's a little early to tell if want to make a lifetime commitment of molding young minds, but it's certainly more stimulating than secretarying, so for now I'll take it. I've got about sixty students between two schools, and as I only see most of them once a week, the getting-to-know-you phase has been rather drawn out. But we're starting to get used to each other. The kids have started coming to me to tattle on one another, or to ask to use the bathroom, or to show me their loose teeth. Little by little I am learning names and pairing them with personalities. My favorite student is a little blonde boy with three-inch eyelashes who does absolutely nothing in class. This child's ability to do nothing just gobsmacks me; he'll literally cease all productivity until I hover over his desk and ask to see his paper. Then he'll move his pencil in very slow circles, reposition his fingers a couple times, and barely touch it to the worksheet in the hopes that if he drags out his fake-preparation long enough I will grow bored and leave him alone. Then he bats the eyelashes that he does not yet know he has, and I melt into a puddle of English grammar and ooze across the floor.

My least favorite student is a lanky sixth grader who deigns to bring so much as a pen into class with him, who ignores my practice worksheets to talk to the girl next to him, and who, when I ask him why he hasn't started, shrugs his shoulders and says, "I don't speak English." The bass-ackwards logic of this statement makes my eyelid twitch as I explain to him the answer to question number one and then move on with my life, at which point he returns to talking to the girl next to him. He's now used the "I don't speak English" excuse on me three times, and probably even if he asked to TA for the rest of the year I'd still never forgive him.

The no-ingles boy is a member of one of my more difficult classes, which is the first half of sixth grade. I teach half the sixth grade on Tuesdays and half of them on Wednesdays, and somehow the classes ended up lopsided. The Wednesday sixth-graders are excited to learn and love to participate; the Tuesday sixth-graders mope through the morning and roll their eyes when I ask them questions. I've had to resort to the dramatic arm gestures and frantic jumping-jacks of every Spanish teacher I've ever had, because teaching a language class in the students' third language requires a fully-rehearsed hour of pantomime. I'm supposed to use strictly English in the classroom, a rule to which I say fuck it; I drive myself crazy listening to my own English explanations over and over again, and I understand every word I'm saying. Sometimes dropping in a Spanish word or two is enough to make a student sigh with relief or grin with sudden understanding, and to me that is worth it. So I cheat by using English. I also cheat by pretending not to notice the fact that four kids skipped my class this morning. They don't pay me enough to patrol the halls. In fact they don't even pay me enough to bother showing up, but I do because if I didn't they would pay me even less.

This morning, after sixth grade, I had two periods of art with the little kids. Art classes can be taught in a foreign language because the gist of the class can be totally missed with very little detriment to the student's academic development, which is not a statement that applies to, say, math. So I teach a lot of Spanish art classes, which differ from American art classes in all ways. In Spain the children are taught exactly how to produce the desired outcome, and chastised heartily for failing to follow all steps in order, so that the finished product will hang in a chain of twenty-eight identical green Christmas trees, or gold stars, or whatever, along the walls. If a child takes the liberty of, say, drawing red balls on her Christmas tree, the teacher will reprimand her, "No! Very bad!" in front of everyone in class, and she will live with the shame of being the only person who dared decorate her paper Christmas tree. The logic behind this school of thought is beyond me, especially coming from Spain, the country that produced both Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, both pioneers in the field of Making Shit Look Weird. Surely they both failed elementary-school art.

So I had my last art class of the day with a teacher who showed up ten minutes late and then asked, "What should we do today?" It was then discovered that the required audiovisual equipment was missing, so we were about twenty good minutes into a class free-for-all when it was suggested that I teach the children a song. I taught them Jingle Bells, which is what they would have learned anyway, if the DVD player worked, which is an odd choice by virtue of the fact that its lyrics make very little sense to me as a native speaker and are frankly useless to a group of hyperactive six year olds. (Google the lyrics to Jingle Bells and read the second verse, then please come back and explain to me who became upsot and why.)

After Jingle Bells it was decided that the children would make twenty identical Christmas cards by cutting out a gold star and a silver star and gluing them onto a piece of white cardboard. I had been helping a girl named Ana and her seatmate Paula, because Ana couldn't glue and Paula couldn't cut. After affixing Ana's stars to her card, I instructed her to return to her desk and press them very tightly till the glue dried. I turned my attention to Paula and the warped little curls she had hacked into her silver paper, and I was showing her how to hold the scissors when suddenly the other teacher launched into an othertongue tirade in a bellow loud and threatening enough to elicit utter silence from every child in the room. "Ana!" she screamed. "Ven aqui!" Then she launched into a string of abuses, using a tone that suggested she'd just caught Ana setting fire to her desk and rubbing someone else's face in it. Ana's crime, it was soon revealed, was that the idiot child had deigned to write her name on her card, thereby ruining Christmas not just for the recipient but apparently for everyone else in the room as well. "Don't cry! Don't cry!" she shrieked in Spanish, as Ana snuffled into her sleeve, crumpling the bastardized card behind her back. After five minutes of this demonic reprimand, the teacher directed the children to continue their own Christmas cards and they all got back to work, whispering and tiptoeing between the desks.

Paula had been burrowing into my shoulder as this lecture was delivered, and I stayed a couple minutes past my scheduled time, not wanting the poor girl to have to reveal to the furious teacher that she did not know how to cut. I felt awful leaving any of them in her clutches, but ultimately there was nothing I could do. There was another teacher in the classroom as well, and as she did nothing to intervene, but rather crossed her arms and nodded her head at Ana's disgraceful behavior, I had to chalk it up to a cultural conflict. In Spain, I guessed, these sorts of lectures were warranted. I said goodbye to the other teacher, and our language barrier left her with nothing to do but shrug and smile in a way that said, "I can't believe I'm stuck with these disgusting children for the rest of the day while you get to leave," and I responded with a smile that said, "I just witnessed you drown a bag of kittens with your bare hands," and then I stomped outside to catch a bus home and write lesson plans for tomorrow's sixth-graders.

Pizza Night

It's Friday night and we're dance-partying around the livingroom, garnering glares from passing Spaniards at the volume of our merrymaking. The Spaniards would be much angrier if they could understand our dirty Mickey Avalon lyrics. Christian has come home from work toting three bottles of champagne, one of which he emptied directly into Kelly's hair. Christian is strong and silent as Norwegian wood but he will cut a bitch who deigns to change the music to anything but deep house. I've danced so hard I've had to shower again to get ready. I'm meeting a woman at 9:30 in the plaza because she wants me to come have pizza and meet her cousins.

I hate to leave the group on a Friday night but I've promised to come for dinner. She's an English teacher and very outgoing; she waves at me from across the plaza and leads me to her car. I don't want to show up empty-handed so I've tucked a bottle of 2-euro wine into my purse. Emilia, my host, embarrasses me by gushing at the gift and insisting that it's fancy and decadent. Her cousins show up, one by one, six of them out of a total of twenty, she tells me. "We're like the Mafia. You hurt one of us and all of us will hurt you." She sets out a table of Spanish appetizers, some sort of pork and some sort of sausage, little toothpicks strung with spicy pickles, red peppers and pearl onions. There are dishes of green olives and a big bowl of potato chips. Everything is salty and I wash it down with cheap red wine, my head aching after so much champagne.

The cousins speak to me in English and in Spanish. They all apologize for their English but I understand every word. Emilia apologizes for the size of her apartment, the crowding of the table, the behavior of the cousins. She does so with a grin and a flurry of her hands, and it takes me a while to understand that it's a cultural thing when I'm so used to bragging. I make jokes in Spanish and garner some laughs. I make mistakes in Spanish and receive gentle corrections, which I intend to file away in the language part of my brain and then immediately forget.

"Ah, New York!" say the cousins. They tell me about an uncle in New York, a writer receiving an award from Columbia University. I find myself name-dropping countries, a behavior I abhor, in an attempt to keep up with the worldliness of Europeans. They tell me of an airline promotion for one-euro flights around the continent, a promotion that ended only an hour ago. They speak to me in Spanish and try to teach me some Catalan, and the words fall out of my head and bounce across the floor like a green olive from the tabletop. The pizza is ordered at midnight and I find space for it in my stomach between pork products.

After dinner I'm stuffed and sleepy. Suddenly Spanish is as unreachable as Japanese and I make everyone repeat themselves. I'm terrified I'll fall asleep on the couch so when Emilia offers me a cappuccino at 2am, I thank her. She spoons hazelnut ice cream on top and I slurp it down like Christmas. The cousins begin to yawn and we hug and kiss goodbye. One drives me home and my key gets stuck only once in the lock when I stumble in. The apartment is empty; my roommates will be out until dawn so I could ride the caffeine rush and go find them, but sometimes there is magic in solitude. I unlock the window and slip out on the terrace for a cigarette. Those things will kill you unless something else does. I wheeze through the last drag and put out the lights, crawl into someone else's t-shirt and fall face-first into bed, dreaming in smoke and salt and Spanish.