The Interpreter

1 Marta Nowak had interpreted for her mother at the bank, at the pharmacy and on the telephone with the gas company, where she once spent forty exhausting minutes persuading a recorded voice that her mother was, in fact, her mother. Compared with that ordeal, a parent-teacher conference for her eight-year-old brother should have been uncomplicated. Mr. Pruitt's third-grade classroom smelled of glue sticks and pencil shavings, and the chairs were so low that her mother sat with her knees nearly at her chin, her good leather handbag balanced on top of them like a shield.

2 "Tomek is a delight," Mr. Pruitt began, and Marta translated that with genuine pleasure. Then he opened a folder and, in the gentle, practiced voice of someone delivering unwelcome news, explained that Tomek had turned in only two of the last nine reading logs. Tomek talked constantly during lessons, and not in whispers: he swiveled around in his seat to entertain the row behind him, and twice he had been sent into the hallway to settle down. Marta heard herself summarize all of this for her mother, in Polish: Tomek was an energetic boy who occasionally forgot his homework. It was not exactly a lie; it was more like a photograph with the mess cropped out.

3 Her mother nodded politely and smoothed the strap of her handbag, and Mr. Pruitt, apparently encouraged, continued. "There's something else, though. In February we welcomed a new student from Poland, Kacper, who doesn't speak any English yet." He smiled a little ruefully, as if he were about to confess something himself. "Tomek has appointed himself Kacper's interpreter. Every time I give directions, he turns around and repeats them in Polish, so half the talking I write up is really that. Honestly, I can't decide whether to scold him or thank him." Marta sat very still, taking it in: her little brother was doing her job, at eight years old, surrounded by tiny chairs and alphabet posters, and nobody had asked him to.

4 With her face suddenly warm, she turned back to her mother and started over from the beginning. She translated the two reading logs out of nine, the jokes, the hallway, every unflattering detail, and then she described what Tomek had been doing for Kacper. Her mother listened without interrupting, the way she listened to the evening news on the Polish radio station, her expression giving nothing away. When Marta finished, her mother leaned forward and tapped the chart in the open folder, where a long row of empty boxes marched across the page.

5 "I can read a chart, Marta," she remarked in Polish. Then she turned to Mr. Pruitt and said in careful, deliberate English, "Thank you. He will do the logs, and he will help Kacper after the lesson, not during." Mr. Pruitt laughed, the first real laugh of the evening, and wrote her promise down in the margin of his notes. Out in the parking lot, her mother buttoned her coat against the wind and said, without looking at Marta, "Next time, all of it. I am his mother, not the gas company."