They’re boys, only a few years older than the ones I teach. But they seem to occupy a different universe.
A few months ago, a peremptory letter from my insurance company said I must strip my roof of its two layers of composite tile, and two more of wood, and replace them. My ex-husband, a construction supervisor, recommended a local company, and their bid was reasonable, so I set the job up for the first week of summer vacation.
When the first young man — with his neat crewcut and striped dress shirt over a T-shirt — showed up, I shook his hand and introduced myself, and told him about the attic room I didn’t want destroyed. They would use shorter nails, he assured me in broken but passable English.
That would be the last English I heard until the job was finished.
The workers were slender, young (some so young, I confused their voices with my 12-year-old son’s), and dark, and seemed to be having a pretty good time, keeping up a lively chatter. When I listened and watched, I caught something about a caballo, and a telefono, and something about someone who was linda, and a carro, but my Reality Spanish for Teachers class didn’t help me communicate with these energetic young men. I tried not to mind that they trampled irises and yarrow as they leaped the low fence around my front yard. Gardening wasn’t their job.
In my first year out of college, I worked on hydraulic fracturing crews in southeastern New Mexico. My coworkers spoke Spanish almost exclusively, and I learned words my students nowadays are surprised I know, as well as basic commands and names for tools. That was necessity. At first it felt like the guys were isolating me, the only woman, using their language as a tool; soon, I realized that was simply the way they communicated.
If I wanted to be a part of things, I’d have to learn their language, too.
I was separated from the young men on my roof this morning by age, gender and occupation, but language made us occupants of two separate worlds. They had no need to speak to me; in my forays out of the living room, I smiled at them mutely and nodded, the way you do in a foreign country when gesticulating with a shopkeeper, the way you would on another planet. We needed nothing from each other.
Four hours after they arrived, the men were finished. They swept the sidewalk with a leaf blower and a magnet, and most stood, quiet and tired, against their crew cabs, while they waited for the one who sealed the chimney opening. Finally, the crew chief, now a little sweaty, came over to see if I had any questions. I didn’t. He said the company would bill me for its services, and they left.
My roof looks perfect.
It probably shouldn’t bother me that the men who swarmed over my house, while I did nothing, seemed so different from me that we hardly seemed members of the same species. I got a service I needed; they’ll get paid. Even if the young men spoke English, there’s little likelihood that we would have enough in common for even friendly conversation. Am I silly, then, to expect less of a wall between us?
In the cold snap of last winter, my pipes, like those of many others in Colorado, froze solid. I called the fellows who ream out my sewer line every couple of years. We stood around in air so cold it made us cough, and I learned a little about their lives. Is it self-indulgence on my part that wants to be able to talk to the people who perform life’s necessary services for me?
Or should I, if I want to talk to them so much, just learn their language myself?
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@msn. com) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher. She blogs at .
