How about Cantonese, she’d asked, and he shook his head.
Only a little Mandarin. And not very good Mandarin at that.
And then: We could learn it together. The two of us.
He specialized in etymology: the meanings of things. As a boy he’d played Scrabble and done crosswords with his father; his mother had coached him for the spelling bee. For his birthdays and Christmas, he’d always asked for books. These days, with libraries and stores shuttering, he had nothing to read but the row of dictionaries lined up on the windowsill. The first morning, after they woke, she rose from his bed and crossed the room to look at them. Fat yellow ones for different languages: French, German, Spanish, Arabic, some she didn’t even recognize. Dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit. A sprawling English one the size of a phone book, pages thin as Bible leaves. Slowly she’d traced her fingers along the spines and then turned back to him—both of them still undressed from the night before, their skin burnished to gold in the midmorning sun—in wonder. As if she suddenly recognized him as someone she already knew.
For Ethan, words carried secrets, the stories of how they came to be, all their past selves. He would find the mysterious ways they connected, tracing their family tree back to pinpoint the unlikeliest cousins. It was proof that despite the chaos around them, there was logic and order to the world; there was a system, and that system could be deciphered. She loved this about him, this unshakable belief that the world was a knowable place. That by studying its branches and byways, the tracks it had rutted in the dust, you could understand it. For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling. How they could make the ineffable effable, how they could hover a shape before you for an eyeblink, before it dissolved into the air. And this, in turn, was what he loved about her—her insatiable curiosity about the world, how for her it could never be fully unraveled, it held infinite mysteries and wonders and sometimes all you could do was stand agape, rubbing your eyes, trying to see properly.
Holed up in the apartment, they read, pulling one dictionary or another from the shelf and poring over it, stretched across the futon, one’s head pillowed on the other’s thigh. Reading passages aloud, dissecting meanings, each of them digging: she mining words like precious gems, arranging them around the outlines of the world; he excavating the layers fossilized within. All the traces of people trying to explain the world to themselves, trying to explain themselves to each other. Testify had its roots in the word for three: two sides and a third person, standing by, witnessing. Author originally meant one who grows: someone who nurtured an idea to fruition, harvesting poems, stories, books. Poet, if you traced back far enough, came from the word for to pile up—the earliest, most basic, form of making.
Margaret had laughed at this. That’s me, she said, a piler-up of words.
Krei, she read, meant to separate. To judge. Like a sieve, Ethan said, separating the good from the bad. And thus, krisis: the moment at which a decision is made, for better or for worse.
With one finger she’d traced the delicate line of his sternum, circled the soft hollow at the base of his throat.
So a moment, she said, in which we decide who we are.
Outside there were sirens and shouting, and sometimes gunshots—or were they firecrackers? Waves of unrest rippled state to state like a wildfire, the whole country tinder-dry and eager to burn. In Atlanta, unemployed protesters had set the mayor’s office ablaze; they’d called in the National Guard. Bombs kept going off at statehouses, in subway stations, on the lawns of governors’ mansions. There were emergency meetings and votes and marches and rallies and nothing seemed to change. It can’t go on, people kept saying, in the few spaces where they still dared meet: in the aisle of the grocery store, picking what they could from sparse shelves; in apartment building hallways as neighbors passed and over fences as people raked fallen leaves—any attempt to maintain order and neatness and normalcy in an era that was anything but. It can’t go on, everyone said, but it kept going on.
Inside: Margaret and Ethan drank tea and ate crackers from the cupboard. After her shower, she put on one of his old shirts, washed her dress in the bathtub, hung it over the rod to dry. They closed the windows, then the curtains. They read. They made soup. They made love.
The way he handled her, like butter to be licked off a finger. In bed afterward, her cheek pressed to his back, she had never felt so calm. It felt good: a stretch after weeks spent coiled. One morning, she simply stayed.