Counting Change
Ena Selimović
Excerpt from the essay collection Real American Girl (RAG), or Prava Amerikanka
Illustration: Ena Selimović
“As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility—a mirror image of myself.”
Unwelcome change welcomes numbers. Four schools by the age of ten. Migrations? Nine. Of those how many international? Three. Languages learned? Four. Here’s your alien number—keep it confidential. How many years before you can apply for citizenship? Five. How many questions to drill for the test? 128. Here’s your residency card number. You need a landline—dial 011 for international calls. Ten immunizations the first months. You already had ten? Back where? Sit. Date of birth? What grade are you in? Passport number? How many amendments does the Constitution have? Twenty-seven. Here are social security numbers for each member in your family—know them. All thirty-six numbers? All thirty-six. Checking account number? Nine more digits. How many years is the President elected for? Depends on which President. How many bullets were on the immigration sponsor’s refugee intake form that outlined the path to assimilation? Twelve:
1. Pay all your utility bills every month.
2. Keep your front, back yards, and hallways (common area) clean from trash.
3. Keep your living quarters sanitary at all times.
4. Put all food away after cooking and eating.
5. Keep carpet and floors free from grease, dirt, and water.
6. Do not draw or put holes in the walls, windows, or doors.
7. Do not put anything in the drains except wastewater. Always turn off water after use.
8. Contact your landlord for any repairs needed.
9. Do not let your children play near traffic or talk to strangers. Do not allow children to peel or eat the paint, plaster from walls, windows, banisters, unknown bottles, cans, etc. It could be poisonous.
10. Always turn off gas stove after use.
11. Know how to escape if there is a fire in your building.
12. Know how to use the phone to call for help. Dial 911 only if there is a life-threatening emergency.
Know, know, know. 011 international, 911 life-threatening. An interpreter had enunciated each point slowly (she was paid hourly). A Bosnian-speaking couple approached your parents afterwards, the man saying, “I’d complain—they think we’ve never seen a washing machine! But I did shrink a load the other day.” Laughter. “Does that make me a barbarian, or a man?” His wife: “That makes you an idiot.”
How many siblings? One. How many branches in the federal government? Three. Voting members in the House of Representatives? 435. How many aluminum-can caps are you submitting? 435. Even though Sara had said that if you collected a million maybe your family could finally stop living with her family and she wouldn’t have to share her bed.
It was night when we landed in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, the words written in caps on all the intake flyers and brochures and forms that quickly accumulated. Maybe they were to shield us from the cold. It was snowing, or so I remember it—a romantic touch perhaps. The McDonald’s sign across the street from the apartment we would be sharing with Sara and her family was radiating. I carried a UNHCR bag containing one T-shirt from our institutional sponsor, one mug, and one American flag: were they pieces of the same survival kit containing all those flyers and brochures? Each was met with my first utterances of gratitude on American soil: Tenk ju, tenk ju so mač. In Bosnian, mač means sword, and so I quickly learn that gratitude is a double-edged sword.
The people in the waiting area at the airport must have been real Americans. Everyone seemed to be wearing the same thing: shorts, flip-flops, and a heavy hoody—a potpourri of seasons. No telling what kind of weather awaited us outside. When I briefly sported the same style in my early teens, my late father confirmed my early theory, saying, “Sad si prava Amerikanka.” Now you’re a real American girl.
The second week after landing in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, I started second grade with not a grain of English—bez zrna engleskog. But you see, I misspeak: language isn’t weighed in grains. The force of a single goal propelled me nonetheless: whatever happened, I had to collect as many aluminum-can caps as possible.
How many friends did you make at school today? Zero. How many times was your lunch stolen this week? Five.
In Sakarya, Turkey, you left behind your best friend. How many letters did she send before she stopped? Four. Canım arkadaşım, she wrote. Nasılsın iyimisin inşallah iyisindir. Beni soracak olursan ben çok iyiyim. Tek uzuntum seni özlemek sen buradayken çok güzel günlerimi özlüyorum. Okuldaki arkadaşlarım seni özlüyorlar. Hep seni soruyorlar. Bende bilmiyorum bende özledim haber alamıyorum diyorum. Arkadaşım Ena sen öğretmenimize mektup yazsışın. Çok sevindik. Öğretmenimiz bize okulda. Hepimiz çok sevindik. Bizde sana mektup yazmaya karar verdik. Sende bizim gibi sevin diye bu mektubu gönderiyorum. Mektubunu bekliyorum.
By the time you were ready to write back, you had forgotten Turkish.
In 1998, five months after your family lands in St. Louis, Missouri, and is welcomed with twelve bullets of advice on how to assimilate, a Bosnian girl is murdered. She is eleven. She lived in an apartment building two miles from yours. She had been born in the same region where you had been born, three years after her. Her family had fled the same war that your family had fled. Her name had two of the same letters that your name had.
This is how I saw it then, as a child. I remember Selma.
The dream of America quickly accelerated into a nightmarish reality of systemic violence, but a different account would come to haunt the hallways of my school(s).
Where are you from? Russia? Yugoslavia. Well, not anymore—. You an alien or something? You from Russia? Across from Italy. Why are you here? I don’t know. Your people just kill each other, huh? I don’t know. So you a Muslim or something? I don’t know. You a vampire? I don’t know. How long have you been here? Why are you here?
How many hours do you work? How many pounds of cranberry tuna did that one customer order at the Prepared Foods counter when you worked the closing shift at Whole Foods in college? .84 pounds. How many toilets did your mother clean at the church down the street that hired her full-time? Sixty-eight. And at the church next to it where she worked part-time? Fifty-two. And at the office building next to that? Fifteen. “Custodian,” she was called. The custodian of toilets. Mom, you had a proper monopoly over that shit!
Her first job was in a trophy-making factory. Softball tournaments, golf, world’s best boss. For a long time I dreamed of those trophies; they looked like citizenship to me. I wasn’t much of a winner, although in some American schools participation itself is rewarded: maybe it was clear you’d have no future, so they bedazzled you with all those ribbons and bows. Metal I don’t recall seeing as often, but then a memory flashes: I am buffing the floors of one of the churches where my mom works and there is a preschool graduation on and all the little kids are given trophies. For completing preschool. I am shining the floor, and they’ll be shining their trophies.
Maybe my mom made them. #make
She came in her work uniform for a conference with my principal and teacher (and an interpreter). The uniform was dark blue, oversized, her sort-of name written on the right pocket. All of our names had an equal opportunity for interpretation. Even Sara’s cat, whose name was “Macan” (mah-tsan). The name was a form of the word “kitty” in Bosnian, but the vet would pronounce it “macon”—like “bacon” with an “m.” So when Macan went to the doctor, and the doctor gave him his utmost attention—“How we doin’ today, Macon?”—the cat offered nothing. But the doctor didn’t think much of it, because it’s normal for cats to be assholes.
How did my mom feel standing there, in that school, when she herself was once a teacher?
Unwelcome change welcomes languages, and all of the languages I come to know to some degree—come even to forget—share numbers. The numerical representation of the word “one” is 1 in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian; it is 1 in Turkish; it is 1 in English; it is 1 in French; it can be 1 in Japanese. My aunt says, “You have just 1 life. Live it. Treasure it.” But cats have nine. There are nine digits in a social security number. There are nine letters in the word “custodian.” Remove a letter and you get paradise, which is pronounced paradajz, which means “tomato” in Bosnian, my edible replacement for the countless ghostly American dreams that flit past.
