Delia's Crossing (Delia 1)

He gave me a cart to push and fill up. I had never seen a supermarket as big as this one. There were so many choices of every food imaginable. I was like a child turned loose in a candy store. How did anyone know what to choose? Pictures on boxes told me what many things were, but many were difficult to understand.

Señor Baker followed along and explained things, translating them for me and telling me something about everything. I had to admit it was very educational. He actually paused to tell someone I was his student.

“Nothing like hands-on, day-to-day life to help someone learn a language fast,” he explained to a woman who seemed to know him. “Right, Delia?” he asked me. He repeated what he had said in Spanish quickly, and I nodded. It did sound right.

Maybe what he was doing would be good, I thought hopefully. Maybe he wasn’t as terrible a man as I imagined he might be. He was a teacher, and when I thought of a teacher, I thought of Señora Cuevas. Like her, surely, he had to have some pride in his students and his accomplishments. If I learned English well and quickly, he would be successful, and I had no doubt that mi tía Isabela was paying him well and might even give him some sort of bonus.

I felt myself relax and became more and more interested in the choices of cereals, rices, beans, and breads. The sight of the meat and fish counters was overwhelming. There was so much. This was truly what I was told to expect in America.

“Are you a good cook?” he asked me.

I explained how I had learned many dishes from mi abuela Anabela. When I described some, he made sure we had everything we needed to prepare them. Every item I chose he identified in English and had me repeat. As we moved about the supermarket, he would nod at people and things, saying the English words. “That woman is wearing a blue hat,” he would say, or “That man is here with his son.” Whatever he said, he had me repeat and then explained and had me repeat again.

“You see,” he said, holding out his arms, “this way, the world is our classroom. Now, do you understand why I wanted to take you out of your aunt’s home and away from all of that distracting housework?”

I had to admit I did understand, although I still felt very nervous and uncomfortable about it.

Before we reached the cashier to get ourselves checked out, he made me go through the entire cart of food, calling each item by its English name, correcting my pronunciation.

When the food we bought was checked out, he reviewed the numbers on the bill, and when we rolled the cart out of the supermarket, he stopped, turned to me, and asked in English, “Where do you want to go now?”

“Where?” The question seemed so obvious I thought I was misunderstanding him. “Dónde?”

“No, no, only in English. Where?” he asked again.

I shrugged.

To the car, I thought. Where else?

I said so, and he smiled. “That’s it. Think in English. Say to the car,” he commanded, and I did.

In fact, everything we did, every move we made, he described in English and had me repeat.

“We are loading the groceries into the car’s trunk. This is a trunk. I am opening the car door for you. This is where the passenger sits. The passenger. Repeat it all,” he told me, and I did. I was beginning to feel like a big parrot. He corrected my pronunciation and made me repeat the words until he was satisfied.

Even after he started the car and drove out of the parking lot, he continued identifying and describing as much as possible along the way, each time having me repeat the words, and then, if we saw another similar thing, he would point to it and ask me to identify it in English. From the way he was reacting, I thought I was doing very well.

At one point, he began to review what he called idioms, expressions that were common.

“Every morning when you wake up, you say?”

“Good morning.”

“And?”

“How are you today?”

“What kind of a day is it?”

“It’s a sunny day.”

On and on we went, driving and talking. He would recite, and I would repeat. Then he surprised me by asking me to tell him what I was thinking, using as many English words as I could. I didn’t know what to say, but I managed, “The car is long.”

“You don’t mean the car. You mean the ride in the car,” he corrected. “It’s not that long,” he added. “Well, maybe because of all these lights and the traffic. Too many cars,” he said, pointing to the automobiles in front of us.

Finally, we turned down a side road and passed some smaller houses, and then we turned onto another road and stopped in front of a tan stucco house not much bigger than mi casa back in Mexico. This had a thin light blue gate around it, and there was a nice lawn, but there wasn’t much land. A rim of low mountains loomed behind it. It reminded me of places in Mexico. It was truly as if I had closed my eyes for a while, opened them, and found myself back home. The terrain was that similar. It gave me pangs of sadness and homesickness. How I missed Abuela Anabela.

Señor Baker had to get out to open the gate to the short, narrow driveway. There was no garage, just a carport. He identified it in English and again narrated every little thing we did and what we saw and touched. There was a side entrance to the house from the carport. He took out the keys and opened it, reciting the words for key, door, open, unlock. As with everything else, he made me repeat and corrected my pronunciation.