Day 1095.

Day 1.

I speak only Czech. In Canada, I am mute. In Canada, the words I have spoken for the last twelve years have no meaning. English takes up space on the radio while the water boils for tea. In the elevator while the old woman trains her eyes on the numbers and mumbles quietly to herself. On the bus to ESL school where girls my age spill secrets behind cupped hands into each other’s ears. I do not understand. I feel erased.

Day 24.

The bus driver refuses to let me pass. He shakes his head and points his index finger at the clear plastic box that ate my coins. “Not enough!” he says and I see in his eyes that to him, I am all the immigrants gone before and those yet to come.

A black woman reaches around me and drops more coins into the box. “How about now?” she says, meeting his eyes. I don’t understand her words, only the firm hands that wrap around my shoulders and lead me to an empty seat next to the window.

A yellow and orange headwrap winds around her head and I think, Bird of Paradise. It matches the folds of her dress that spill from beneath the hem of her tweed coat. I have never seen a black person before. Her teeth are large and glow white in her onyx face. She smiles and squeezes my hand. I fight the urge to rest my head on her lap.

Day 35.

In Hamilton, women don’t lean on windowsills deadheading fat geranium heads in their flower boxes. They don’t wait for their husbands to come home, a song on their lips from a night at the pub. I don’t hear mothers summoning their children from the playground: Jano! Honzo! Štěpánko! I don’t see girls walking hand in hand from school, knees bouncing above white knee-socks. My feet can’t find the cobblestone streets; gone are the pubs with their smell of beer and smoke and the sound of lively chatter over clinking of beer mugs.

Here, women don’t walk to the store in the early morning to fetch fresh rolls and an eighth of butter for the breakfast table. I don’t see grandfathers in fedoras and worn leather shoes shuffling down the sidewalk, a cane in one hand and a cloth shopping bag filled with carrots and potatoes and maybe, if the truck had come that morning, a fresh cut of veal for the day’s lunch.

Day 48.

In Hamilton, my eyes can’t find a place to rest. I see symmetrical lawns, attached garages, fenced rectangles of back yards. Here, air expands inside my lungs as if even the oxygen molecules found freedom in this gigantic spread of land.

Here, we buy frozen bread and instant pudding, cream of wheat and coffee, a carton of Benson & Hedges. We add a dozen eggs, chocolate chip cookies, pickles, spaghetti, ketchup, milk in plastic bags, mustard, European wieners, honey, jam, cinnamon, marjoram, oregano. There is a whole chicken, plucked with a plastic baggie of innards tucked inside its cavity, cans of Spam, gypsy salami, yellow cheese, margarine, chocolate ice-cream, grapes in February, watermelon, pineapple, peaches and nectarines, potatoes in five-pound bags. There are no lines for food. I can’t believe our luck. My waistband digs into my expanding waist.

Day 64.

I wake with a dull ache that pulls me down. I lie in bed and breathe in the free molecules of air and grow still like a stone in a riverbed. I watch the water flow over me, above me, around me. I am distorted by the rushing water. I am no longer home. Home has been replaced by Canada. She reminds me of an overeager foster parent I am weary of, do not yet trust to take care of me.

I am learning to live alongside the ache.

Day 98.

“We’re all in this together,” Mom says when she catches a hint of melancholy in my eyes. “You can’t expect it to feel like home in such a short time,” she says. “Give it a few months,” she says. She shoos me outside for fresh air, a change of perspective, and I cross Mohawk Road, the congested parking lot and wander through the mall with its bright lights and plentiful merchandise and avoid the stern woman behind the EATON’S jewelry counter who doesn’t take her eyes off my hands that come back, day after day to caress the fake-pearl earrings that cost $9.99—a fortune.

Day 107.

Every day, I recite the words I learned at ESL school. My teacher told me Judy is an English translation of my Czech name, Jitka. In Canada, people don’t know to give my Czech name a soft beginning, like yellow or yawn or yam; a beginning their tongue can slide around like a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. Instead, they attack it, make it sound hard. "Gitka," they call me and I correct them, spell it out with a Y the way my teacher taught me.

“My name is Judy,” I whisper under the covers. I taste the Judy in my mouth; let it fill my belly like a fleshy fruit, foreign and exotic. Judy is easy for Canadians to say; an old-fashioned name that brings with it images of name tags pinned to uniforms of busty waitresses and old folks who like to repeat it three times: Judy. Judy. Judy. I don’t want to go through life having my name stabbed. I whisper under the blanket, “Judy. Judy. Judy.”

Day 123.

English words churn on the page like fish inside a net. I hunger to make sense of them. I practice aloud into a tape recorder. I sound wrong, the sensation obscene when I force the tip of my tongue between my teeth and say, "the". I listen to my attempts at sounding Canadian: “Throw, thin, thimble, thick, throne, teeth, thrash.” I watch my face in the mirror. Tape after tape I record and erase, listen and repeat until at last, satisfied, I turn the page of the dictionary and begin again. “Ridiculous, ravenous, reptilian, ruffle, reproduction.” Life has become one enormous vocabulary lesson.

Day 135.

Outside my private monologues, people’s eyes widen when they hear me speak, when they guess at my immigrant status. Their voices rise and their hands gesticulate as if the meaning of words could magically shoot from their fingers and imprint upon my brain. I fear I will never master this language, a real meaty fear that wakes each time I can’t answer a question, when the speaker, repeating himself, takes on a less patient appearance.

Day 138.

Immigration pays Dad to go to ESL school while Mom goes to work—scrambles up eggs, makes pots of goulash, beef soup, and grilled-cheese sandwiches— all for minimum wage. He hates it, would rather be making honest money because that’s why he came to Canada.

English makes him shrink. He smiles and nods, avoids speaking at all costs. On the occasions he is forced to speak, his accent is as thick as a week-old stew, instantly giving him away.

Mom is the one gifted with languages and late at night, when the rest of us sleep, she sits at the kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold and studies Dad’s textbook, prints neat columns of vocabulary— English on the left, Czech on the right— and mouths the English words for pot and spoon and butter knife, whispers them like a lover into the quiet of Canadian night.

Day 147.

Mom drops off my little sister at the neighborhood daycare. In the afternoons, my sister returns home with an arsenal of English words. She rattles them off during dinner, one for each slice of hot dog she stabs onto her fork. “I talk good,” she says. I wish I were more like my sister.

*****

Day 952.

I weave my way through realms of knowing. I dream in English.

*****

Day 1095.

The judge asks us to repeat after him. “I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.” He tells me I am now a Canadian. My citizenship card says so. It has my picture on it. It has my Canadian name. I repeat after him and hear my voice echo back to me.