She sat on a plastic chair outside a windowless office, flipping to the last chapter of Taylor’s book: “Review and Expansion.” The dialogues were more complex. If I had known you were coming, I would have baked a cake. Conditionals. Regrets. The past affecting the future. That was the level she needed.
Walking out into the gray Chicago wind, Marina looked at her binder. She wanted to throw it into the nearest recycling bin. But instead, she hugged it to her chest.
But Chicago was not Grant Taylor’s world. Chicago was a place where the barista said, “Hey, what’ll it be, hon?” and Marina’s mind would freeze. Hon? That wasn’t in Chapter 12 (“Family and Friends”). The correct response, according to page 87, was, “I would like a cup of coffee, please.” But the line behind her groaned, and she’d squeak out, “Coffee. Small.” Failure.
Her mind raced. The PDF had a chapter on food, but it was all about hamburgers, apple pie, and “pass the salt.” It didn’t have a script for this.
She opened the binder to the last page. At the very bottom, below the final exercise, she penciled in a new sentence: Today, I became a citizen. The world is not a textbook. But I am learning.
She took a breath. “In my country, we eat a lot of potatoes and soup,” she said slowly. “Here… the pizza is very good. But it is… different.”
Grant Taylor hadn’t taught her how to order coffee or what a casserole was. But he had given her the bones. He had given her the simple past, the prepositions, the difference between “a” and “the.”
Easy. Chapter 4 (“Homes and Cities”).
The officer was a tired-looking man named Mr. DiNolfo. He asked her the usual questions: the color of the flag, the name of the Vice President, the year the Constitution was written. She answered, her voice tight but clear. Grant Taylor’s ghost nodded approvingly from her binder.
Then came the writing test. On a white tablet, he dictated: The President lives in the White House.
Then he looked at her file and smiled. “You’ve been here six months. How do you like the food?”
She had downloaded it from a forgotten corner of the internet six months ago, on the night she landed in Chicago from Minsk. Her cousin had said, “You need to sound less… textbook.” But the textbook was all she had.
Tonight, however, was different. Tonight was the final exam of the real world. Her naturalization interview.
She blinked. Casserole. The word wasn’t in the glossary. But she understood the shape of it. A baked dish. A mess of good things.
She smiled. Not a practiced, textbook smile. A real one. “Yes,” she said. “A delicious casserole.”
