She keeps giving the same answer, “Here.”
I pull a couple of yellow legal pads out of my messenger bag and a pack of pens. I write my name and address, my cell number, and my email address on the first one.
“Hey Sherri, if she wants to get in touch with me, could you help her?”
I’m not sure what Sherri will say. Sherri shrugs, “I guess.”
Malni looks at the writing. She taps it. “Ros,” she says. Then the number. “Your phone.”
“Yes,” I say. “My phone.” It’s my work phone because I never give clients my home phone. Not even my clients who read Old English.
I think about Malni walking through those boys. I’m meeting with one of my clients. Agnes is Latina. She’s sixty-four and had a stroke that’s left her nearly blind and partially deaf. She’s diabetic and has high blood pressure. She has a tenth grade education and before her stroke, she and her daughter cleaned houses.
With a hearing aid, Agnes can make out some sounds but she can’t make out speech. Her daughter, Brittany, communicates with her by drawing letters on her hand and slowly spelling things out. I’ve brought a tablet so that Agnes can write the letters she thinks Brittany is writing. It’s an attempt at reinforcing feedback. Adult deaf blindness is a difficult condition. Agnes is unusual because she doesn’t have any cognitive issues from her stroke, so there are lots of possibilities. I’m having Agnes write one letter at a time on the tablet, big enough that she herself might be able to see it.
Agnes has a big laugh when she’s in a good mood. Sometimes she cries for hours but today she’s good. She has crooked teeth. Her English is accented but she’s lived here since she was thirteen—Brittany was born here and speaks Spanish as her first language but grew up speaking English, too. “Mom!” she says, even though her mother can’t hear her. “Quit goofing around!” She smacks her mother lightly on the arm. Agnes’s eyes roam aimlessly behind her thick and mostly useless glasses.
Brittany, who is in her thirties, raises an eyebrow at me. Both women are short and overweight, classic risk profiles for diabetes and hypertension, like me. Unlike them, I have really good health care.
Agnes prefers drawing on the tablet to writing and after twenty minutes of trying to figure out what Brittany has been asking her, “?yr name?hot or cold?what 4 dinner” Agnes has given up and drawn an amorphous blob which is apparently supposed to be a chicken. “Fried chicken,” she announces, too loud because she can’t hear herself well enough to regulate her volume.
“She can’t have fried chicken for dinner,” Brittany says. “She has to stick to her diet.”
Agnes says, “El Pollo Loco! Right? Macaroni and cheese and cole slaw. Cole slaw is a vegetable.”
Brittany looks at me helplessly. Agnes cackles.
My phone rings. “Is this Ros, the speech lady? This is Sherri, Malni’s roommate.”
“Sherri?” I remember the woman with the nails painted to look like the laces on athletic shoes. “Hi, is everything all right?”
“Yeah. Well, sort of. Nothing’s really wrong. I just got a bunch of papers here for you from Malni.”
“Where’s Malni?” I ask.
“She took off to find her friends,” Sherri said.
“What friends?”
“Her friends from wherever the hell she’s from,” Sherri says. “You gonna pick up these papers or what?”
I wanted Malni to write her story down. She filled almost three legal pads. I didn’t expect her to disappear, though.
“This guy showed up,” Sherri says. In honor of Agnes I’ve brought El Pollo Loco. Sherri doesn’t really like El Pollo Loco. “I don’t eat that Mexican shit,” she says but she takes it anyway. “He was tall and skinny. He looked like her, you know? That squished nose. Like those Australian dudes.”
It takes me a moment but then I realize what she means; Aboriginals. She’s right, Malni looked a little like an Aboriginal. Not exactly. Or maybe exactly, I’ve never met an Australian Aboriginal. “Oh, cool, I didn’t know they had mac ‘n’ cheese.” Sherri plunks down on the couch and digs in. “Yeah so he started jabbering at her in that way she talks to herself. Was crazy. And he acted just like she did. All foreign and weird. Then they just took off and she didn’t come back.”
“When was that?” I ask. My feet hurt so I sit down on the couch next to her.
“Like, Saturday?”
This is Thursday. Part of me wants to say, you couldn’t be bothered to call until yesterday but there’s no reason for Sherri to have bothered to call me at all, even though Malni apparently asked her to.
“That bitch was super smart,” Sherri says.
I give Sherri twenty dollars, even though she’s a recovering substance abuser and it’s risky to give her pocket money, and take the legal pads and go.
I call the department of history at UCLA and eventually find someone who can put me in touch with someone at the department of Literature who puts me in touch with a woman who is a Beowulf scholar. Why I thought I should start in History I don’t know since Matt is an English teacher and he recognized the language. Anyway, I tell the Beowulf scholar I am looking for someone who can translate Old English and that I will pay.
That is how I get Steve. We meet at a Starbucks near campus. Starbucks is quickly becoming the place where everybody meets for almost every reason.
Steve is Asian-America and very gay. He wears glasses that would have gotten me laughed out of middle school. He is studying Old English and needs money. “I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation,” he says. “I am working on my dissertation, actually. It’s on Persona and Presentation in Anglo Saxon Literature. But there’s that pesky thing about rent.” He eyes the legal pads. I wonder what persona and presentation even means and what his parents think about having a son who is getting a doctorate in English Literature. Which I realize is racist. Just because my dad is an engineer and my mother is a chemist and they are classic immigrant parents who stressed college, college, college, doesn’t mean Steve’s are. For all I know, Steve’s parents are third generation and his dad plays golf and gave him a car on his sixteenth birthday.
“I can pay you $500,” I say.
“That looks like modern handwriting. Is it, like, someone’s notes or something?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” I say.
He eyes me. I am aware of how weird it is to appear with three legal pads of handwritten Old English. Steve may be a starving UCLA student but this is very strange.
“I think it’s like a story,” I say. “I work for Los Angeles County Social Services. A client gave me these.”
“You’re a social worker,” he says, nodding.
“I’m a speech therapist,” I say.
He doesn’t comment on that. “This is going to take a lot of hours. A thousand?” he says.
“Seven hundred and fifty,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
I write him a check for half on the spot. He holds the check, looking resigned. I think I’m getting a pretty good deal.
After that I get emails from him. The first one has ten typed pages of translation attached and a note that says, can we meet?
We meet in the same Starbucks.
“Your client is really good at Anglo-Saxon,” he says. “Like, really good.”
“Yeah?” I say. How can I explain?
“Yeah. She does some really interesting things. It’s a woman, right?”
Malni tells a “story” about a woman from a place on a harbor. The place is vast, full of households and people. There are wondrous things there. Roads crowded with people who can eat every manner of food and wear the richest of dress. It is always summer. It is a place that has need for few warriors. Trees bear bright fruit that no one picks because no one wants it because no one is hungry. The air is noisy with the sounds of birds and children.