Neither English nor Spanish

NEITHER ENGLISH NOR SPANISH / Gerald Stern for Heidi Kalafski It was when I went out to get an angry soul a little cool and a little windy. Some bird was clacking his beak or maybe rubbing his gums together either for singing or for crushing a watery insect. I was driving with one sister to find another and the car we drove in was huge and fast and dangerous. I thought the darkness we drove in was something like daylight although the lights on the body seemed more like lamps, just lighting the ten or twelve feet in front of us. It is the madness of northern New Jersey Tm describing, a sulphur day and night, a cloud of gas always hanging above us. We drifted down to Newark, there were clusters of people in front of every bar and drug store, they were mostly very young, as if the population over twenty had disappeared and the care of life and the care of the culture were in the hands of babies, all our wisdom, our history, were in their hands. I stopped over and over to ask directions, the language they spoke was neither English nor Spanish, they either pointed in some odd direction or stood there staring. I bounced up over the curb into a radiant gasoline island; there was a psycho-pomp in a clean white suit who calmed me down and told me where the phone booth and the park was I wanted. His English was perfect. I was shocked to see him in a job like that, reaching over and wiping the mist away, holding his hand on the pump, staring at nothing. He should have been a lawyer or engineer, but he was black, although he could have been a student. I gave him a tip and turned around. This time I found the park 34 · The Missouri Review in half a minute but there was nothing in sight, not even a police car with its fat dog yowling or some stray bleak berserker on the burnt grass. I locked the car, the other sister sat there trembling. I tried to smile. I found a dime, and then a quarter, for my phone call. I stood there on the sidewalk holding the black receiver and listening to noisy insects. The sweet life outside is different than the life of the car. I suddenly wanted to walk. I wanted to touch the trees, or sit on the ground. There was a ringing but no-one answered, as I recall. I shouldn't have made a mystique of that but I was shouting "bad connection" to myself and "vile connection" and "fake connection", all that we hold dear in twentieth century evil communication. That was where I could have lifted my fist and played for the dirty trees, but I was tired and struggling with the stupid lock, a Ford Galaxy Superba. Anyhow, I got bored with the park and its shadows, I did a faint-hearted dance, a mild frenzy on the sidewalk, and sang me a primitive note, a long moaning note, as I put my car into "drive", the lever hanging somewhere in oblivion, the meshes ruined, no right connection between the orange letters and the mushy gears. This was my futile descent into Newark. We returned empty-handed, empty-hearted. I smoked a single cigarette in the blackness and ranted against New Jersey, as if there was a difference between one land and another. That dear girl we looked for would be sitting in the kitchen, surrounded by her family, thin and exhausted, full of terror, her mind erasing one horror after another; and I would hold her and kiss her along with the others. We would be some tragic group somewhere, someone would boil water, and we would talk all night, even end up laughing a little before the streaks of light and the morning noises brought us to our senses. I turned Gerald Stern The Missouri Review · 35 right where I had to turn right and found the buried driveway as always. I was right, the kitchen lights were burning and there were cars and trucks parked wildly in the...