Page 25 of True North
JT had clearly told her they were almost exclusively using their phones to communicate. “Okay, we’ll try.”
“That’s good.” She opened the notebook. “Let’s begin with getting a general sense of your current knowledge. Can you tell me the name of every object in this kitchen that you know?”
“Oh, um. Television,” Misha said, which was similar in Russian and therefore easy to remember. Sveta gave him a look as if to say she knew exactly what he was doing. He grinned without shame and said, “Uh, table?”
They went through the whole room in that way, Sveta scribbling busily in her notebook as Misha plumbed the depths of his memory. He knew more than he had thought but less than he would have liked. Why couldn’t JT learn Russian? Then there would be no need for Misha to learn English, which was a stupid language anyway.
At last, Misha fumbled to a stop when he couldn’t remember the word for ‘sink.’ Everything else in the room was some obscure object he would probably never reference in daily conversation, like the ceiling fan. Surely Sveta wouldn’t expect him to learnthat.
“That’s all?” Sveta asked with a raised eyebrow, and Misha had to nod, flooded with shame. He hadn’t thought he didthatpoorly. But then Sveta immediately soothed him by saying, “You know quite a lot. More than JT led me to believe. That’s a good start for our work together.”
“Oh,” Misha said. “Well. Good.”
Sveta turned a page in her notebook and continued writing. “We’ll start by working on your vocabulary. You can communicate more than you’d think with a handful of basic nouns and verbs. It’s key that you work on your own between our lessons, and spend as much time as you can talking with JT. You’ll learn simply by interacting with him. I like to focus on speaking and listening first, but in a few weeks we’ll begin working on reading and writing as well.”
Misha nodded. He had no opinions about language acquisition. Sveta’s plan sounded as good to him as anything else.
She tore the sheet out of her notebook and pushed it across the table to Misha. She had written a list of ten or fifteen words in tidy Cyrillic cursive. “Here are some words for you to learn before our next lesson. Have JT help you. It’s not too many. Now.” She began writing on a fresh sheet of paper. “Let’s discuss some simple verbs.”
Twelve
“Refrig-rator,” Misha said, and then frowned. “Refri— refri-ger-ator.”
JT grinned. “Yeah. You got it.”
Misha shot him a sweet, bashful smile and bent his head over his list again. He said a long word or short phrase in Russian and then, “Microwave.”
“Yeah. Is that all of them? That’s the whole list?”
Misha turned the paper to face JT and pointed to the final word on the list. “Microwave.”
“Nice. All ready for your lesson today.” JT smiled encouragingly at Misha and was privately delighted by the faint pink flush that tinged Misha’s cheeks. He was so cute and working so hard. JT was proud of him.
“Lesson today,” Misha repeated carefully. “With Sveta. Yeah, ready.”
JT felt his smile widen. Misha wasn’t only repeating JT’s words—he understood them. He knew what JT was talking about and had responded appropriately. In the three days since Misha’s first lesson with Sveta, JT had made a concerted effort to stop relying on his phone as a quick and dirty way to communicate, and it seemed to be paying off. Misha’s English was improving in leaps and bounds, far more quickly than JT had expected. Sveta had told him that Misha would to a great extent be remembering rather than learning, but JT still thought it was uncanny how quickly Misha was picking things up, as if language acquisition were some kind of bonus shifter ability.
After a couple of weeks of Misha’s quiet shuffling presence in JT’s house, it was so good to see him blossoming like this. He had gained a little weight and no longer seemed quite so scrawny and fragile. He had lost some of the hunched watchfulness that made JT think of a dog waiting to be kicked. He was still shy with JT at times, but also increasingly cheeky, slyly filching a tomato slice from the cutting board and grinning at JT as he chewed it with his mouth obnoxiously open, or yawning theatrically in bed in the morning and rolling himself in the blankets with a smirk when JT got up to make breakfast for them both. He was annoying, and annoyingly charming. JT liked to see his personality emerging. The bear was fading, and the man was taking center stage.
“You want some more cantaloupe?” JT pushed the plate of sliced melon across the table toward Misha, wordlessly encouraging him to polish off the last of it. “It’s good.”
“Cantaloupe,” Misha said. “Yeah, thank you.” He stabbed his fork into one of the melon slices and ate the whole thing in two huge bites. His table manners still left something to be desired, although JT kind of had the feeling that Misha was being gross on purpose to annoy him.
JT left for a workout in town a few minutes before Sveta was scheduled to come over for Misha’s lesson. The timing was deliberate; he thought Misha might have an easier time concentrating without the threat of JT unexpectedly coming into the kitchen for a glass of water or whatever. He had a good, hard skate with Alex that left his legs and lungs burning in tandem, and by the time he got home, Sveta was gone, although Misha was still at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee.
The pot was still hot. JT poured himself a half cup and stood behind Misha’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the notebook open on the table. “How did your lesson with Sveta go? Was it good?” He had learned that more specificity was better; just saying,How did it go?would be more likely to confuse Misha.
“Good,” Misha said. He showed JT the sheet of ripped-out notebook paper he was poring over: another list of words for him to learn, this one longer than the first had been, filling up the entire page. “Lots.”
“Oh yeah, you’ll be busy.” JT’s fingers twitched with the sudden urge to run a fond hand over Misha’s head. He wiped his palm against his basketball shorts and brutally crushed the impulse.
Without explanation, Misha stood up and went over to open the fridge. After a few seconds of rummaging around, he turned toward JT with a stick of butter in his hand. “What’s word?”
“Butter,” JT said, happily surrendering the rest of his afternoon to producing nouns on demand. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.
The words on Misha’s list were all food words. JT appreciated that Sveta was starting simply with common, everyday objects. She had told JT that Misha would learn more quickly if JT could reinforce the lessons, and that was easy to do when they could just hang out in the kitchen and name things. JT threw together a quick lunch and taught Misha the words forolive oilandgreen pepper, which weren’t on the list, but adding a few extra nouns couldn’t hurt. As they ate, JT quizzed Misha on the words from his first lesson, and Misha nailed all of them. He was learning.
After they cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher, JT stretched his arms above his head and said, “I’m going to swim in the lake. Would you like to come?”