by Norie Suzuki
You see, when I was in grade school, my mother uttered only verbs. Succinct. Her words flew straight, like bullets piercing the red center of a shooting target. Wake up/Get changed/Eat/Hurry up/Pack/Go/Study/Shower/Sleep. All the while, like a thousand-armed goddess, she poured tea, made riceballs, removed curlers from her hair, put her laptop in her leather tote bag, washed dishes, and penciled her eyebrows in an S-shape, which made her look grumpy although I’d never heard her complain. No surprise. Complaining requires more than a verb. But you know what? She’d switched to an only-noun mode when I started high school. Kudos to her. She still maintained her economy of words. Good-for-nothing. Chauvinist. Asshole. All fired at my father.
I rarely heard my father’s voice. Instead of words, he used telepathy to express his wants. Newspapers appeared on his table, his stoneware teacup got refilled, his pajamas and clean underwear waited for him in the bathroom like a loyal Shiba dog wagging its tail. But by the time my mother left for good, his telepathic power had dissipated.
Do you get it? It was inevitable that I became bilingual. So when I fell in love at first sight with my ex at a party, I followed him with my eyes, beamed beta and alpha waves at him. But he did not speak my father’s tongue. Or it might have been the mirror ball interfering with my telepathy. So, as bilinguals naturally do, I switched to my mother’s tongue and said, “Marry me.”
We did. He called me Sugar, Honey, Sweetie, and sucked me up until I withered, until my heart split like desert cracks. It hurt, but my glare did not stop him from cheating on me. Shouting Fuck you/Dammit/Liar led me nowhere. Maybe I needed to learn a third language. Maybe that was what my mother wanted to tell me when, like a bolt out of the blue, she spoke to me in a full sentence before leaving: You find someone you can talk to. Noun-verb-object. A complete sentence structure. As in, I love you. As in, I hate you.
Norie Suzuki (she/her) was born and educated bilingually in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes and works as a simultaneous interpreter. She received an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Her work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Cutleaf Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She received the third prize in the T Paulo Urcanse Prize For Literary Excellence 2024.
Emerge Literary Journal 