Spanish Dance
It was like a perfectly coordinated dance: the bobbing and weaving of carts and shoppers, the friendly greetings, and the words, each flowing and spinning and dancing around her. Yes, it was like a dance; a dance that she could never learn.
Sighing hopelessly, Lynnie returned to her attention to the books perched on her knees. An English-Spanish dictionary partially covered a messy loose-leaf paper, and a dulled pencil balanced on the well-worn cover. Gently separating the pages, she browsed for the next vocabulary word her father had instructed her to look up this morning.
“Church,” she muttered, shifting the loose-leaf to a writing position. Her spidery handwriting echoed her words. “Church is an organization that takes pleasure in sending missionaries and their families to foreign places with weird languages, and gross foods, and…” Lynnie’s pencil traced squiggles through the words. Darker and darker the line became until her conscience was at ease that her father wouldn’t be able to read the original. How often had she reminded herself of her dad’s obligation to the church, of her own sacrifice for God’s sake? And how often had she sat in self-pity as she watched the whole country of Spain swirl around her, so fast, so perfect, so oblivious to the exotic American wallflower?
Abandoning the dictionary into her bag, Lynnie pulled her knees up Indian style and allowed her head to rest on her palms. Her fingers pulled her course, blonde hair away from her eyes, allowing a total view of the hustle and bustle of Spanish market street. A plump old woman haggled with a bread vendor.
“No, no, presumible Martes y Miercoles,” the vendor repeated, strengthening the woman’s exasperation. She rolled her dark eyes and flounced away.
Across the street, two men were talking intensely. Words flew speedily, as if competing with each other to see who could finish first.
To Lynnie’s left, three girls, roughly her own age, stood in a lop-sided circle. A tall, dark haired girl was emphasizing words with smooth movements of her arms and wiggles of slender fingers. Peals of laughter perforated the spill of Spanish words.
Lynnie forced her attention to a blade of grass growing between two bricks on the street. She prayed that her eyes hadn’t sparkled enough to show her pitiful longing. She hoped that her rosy cheeks hadn’t mirrored her absent-minded thoughts of her own friends. Gently tugging the green shoot, she hazarded another look at the girls. To her horror, the tall girl was walking towards her, a grin brightening her intelligent face.
“Hola!” she called, waving her hand in a friendly greeting.
Rising to her feet and ignoring the embarrassment clouding her thoughts, Lynnie remembered the response her dad had taught her on the flight leaving Illinois.
“Yo soy Marisol,” the girl announced upon reaching Lynnie.
“No hablo espanol,” Lynnie countered apologetically, her gaze resting on the girl’s sandals. To her surprise the sandals didn’t retreat.
“Oooh,” the girl laughed, a language that they both understood, “No, no, Marisol.” She directed both thumbs towards herself and spoke slowly, watching Lynnie for any recognition.
“Oooh, You mean your name is Marisol?” Her cheeks flushed red as Marisol’s blank gaze displayed her mistake, “Me llamo Lynnie.”
Marisol smiled again, revealing two rows of bright teeth. She emitted a stream of more words, met by a perplexed stare on Lynnie’s pale face. Pausing, she reached into her brightly colored purse, and rose again with a pen. Signaling for Lynnie to put her hand out, she etched a message along her arm, and spiraling to end in her palm.
“Adios, Lynnie,” she said finally, and turned back to the pulsing world just beyond an American’s grasp.
Examining her arm with curiosity, Lynnie extricated the dictionary from her bag. With each scribble she decoded, excitement rose in her chest. Finally, her spidery letters had translated the message on to the more stable medium of loose-leaf.
“Meet me here tomorrow around noon. –Marisol”
A grin emerged on Lynnie’s face, the first in many weeks. Gathering her books together, she hurried to follow the steeple’s shadow towards the church. Her eagerness to retell the afternoon’s events to her dad fueled her run down the street. She bobbed and weaved through booths and vendors, and called apologies to bumped shoppers. Her world seemed to spin with excitement, to flow with purpose, and to almost dance in synchronization with Spain.
