I ONCE TUTORED students at a private college in New England. (It was my job; I wasn’t volunteering for free.) Of course, private college and New England are code words for white and well-off, or at least comfortable. I’m pretty sure the students all had robes and slippers. But even these kids, whose primary language was English, had trouble transitioning (if I may borrow the term from my brother’s former employer) from speaking English to writing it. I’d have them read their papers aloud to me so we could hear the words in neutral airspace, as if encountering them for the first time. Their voices would drop into a formal octave to pronounce the long, convoluted sentences fortified by the thesaurus and held together by the authority vested in the passive voice. These students tripped and fell over their own words. After a paragraph or two I came to their rescue, stopping them with a gentle tap on the arm so they didn’t have to suffer anymore.

“What I meant was,” they’d say to me, falling back into their normal speaking tone and everyday subject-verb-object constructions. And then they’d explain in a few clear words what they had been trying to say in the awkward, formal language of college essays and official documents.

As a tutor in San Francisco’s public schools, I have read this same impenetrable language on school assignments handed out by teachers. I have sat next to eleven-, fourteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who wanted to know what this written assignment was asking them to do, and I have frequently been unable to answer them. Reading those sheets is like being lost in France: a few words sound familiar, but I have no idea how they are connected to one another, or to me. When I was a student in these classrooms, I often felt this same bewilderment, but I always assumed it was I who was illiterate, and that the language of academia was correct. Now I feel like a social worker advocating for clarity. I keep wanting to ask the teachers, “But what do you mean?” and see if they, like the New England college students I once tutored, can translate their prose into words that make sense.

The students in the city’s public schools, meanwhile, may not be fluent in the convoluted English of official written papers, but they sure know how to fly back and forth among several other languages. One teenage girl, half Mexican and half Filipina, glides between Spanish, Tagalog, and English, creating an idioma of her own. Snapping her gum, she takes a surreptitious peek at her cellphone, glances at the assignment sheet, and says to me, “Chica, what I’m supposed to do here?”

TO GET TO the volunteer center, you must pass through a storefront that has been turned into a gift shop to help fund the tutoring program. It resembles a museum gift shop, except it’s dark and overstuffed, almost as if it were designed to confuse people who come in off the street, blinking their eyes to adjust to the dim light and wondering where they’ve landed. For some reason the gift shop has a pirate theme, and so, along with books and T-shirts, it also sells eye patches, skull-and-crossbones flags, treasure maps, and other “pirate supplies.” And, on the floor at the far end of the counter, perhaps most confounding of all, is a large barrel of lard.

Apparently lard is some kind of pirate thing. And apparently pirate, in a language I don’t understand, is some kind of writer thing, or maybe a rebel thing, or a grungerati thing. (Like I said, I don’t speak this language.) There is a store log — counterpart, I suppose, to a ship’s log — and people write in it about the lard: reminiscences; appreciations; facts about lard, or at least beliefs they feel strongly to be true. The lard barrel is a source of many nervous laughs and quizzical looks, and also knowing smirks from a certain demographic that finds profound irony in that tub. The lard is not actually sold, but you can barter for it. I’m not sure what the store takes in trade for a lump, a lick, a pound of the stuff. How do you measure out lard from a barrel? By the scoop? The handful? The bootful? And what do you keep it in once you get it home? These are the kinds of questions the lard inspires, and perhaps this is its reason for being in a wooden keg in the shop that fronts the room where tutors and students work together on writing sentences and stories: it’s there to ignite surprise, to arouse curiosity, to explore the slippery terrain between confusion and understanding.

I think the lard serves another purpose as well: it acts as a litmus test for distinguishing the people who “get” the lard — or act as if they do — from the people who don’t. For the Spanish-speaking moms and kids who live in the neighborhood and walk past the keg to get to their tutoring sessions, lard is not an ironic joke; it’s food. They use it to make refritos, to fry their rellenas, to get their calories to fuel their bodies. But in the pirate store, it sits in an open-mouthed wooden keg, collecting grime like a New York City snowbank. Splotches of lard spill out of the keg and smear themselves on nearby shelves, books, cards, and other items. A middle-aged man walks by in a button-up shirt and nice, creased slacks. His pleats flirt with a tuft of lard sticking out of the keg like frosting. Somehow he strolls by without noticing how close he came to getting greased.

My gut feeling is that lard stains do not come out of clothes easily, if at all, though I do not know this to be a fact. I only feel it strongly to be true, the way my four-year-old niece knows that Saturn is the biggest planet on Earth. My gut feeling is that the neighborhood moms who launder and iron the clothes of their sons and daughters do not get the joke of the lard and would prefer their children not stick their hands into the tub and then, as children will do, touch those lard-dipped hands to their shirts, dresses, jackets, hair, and faces.

Perhaps it is because I come from this neighborhood, or perhaps it is because I moved away, but I tend to worry about these children, about all children. How will they ever learn enough to be successful, and how will they ever unlearn enough to be happy? Yet they proceed undaunted, or perhaps unaware of the sheer amount of information — both facts and opinions, often conflicting — that lies in wait, ready to ambush them.

“Hey,” says my niece with the unsilent e, “the word eye is pronounced the same as the word I, but they don’t have any of the same letters.” She is delighted with her cleverness at having made this discovery, and with the cleverness of the English language, the way it doesn’t make sense but still seems to make sense anyway. We are sitting at the kitchen table doing homework out of a purple folder. And though she is actually on her knees in the chair — her legs folded underneath her, the soles of her bare feet facing up, her bottom resting on her calves — she is sitting fully into her seat. Next to her, perched on the edge of my own chair, I try to figure out if my time has passed, if I have both absorbed and lost too much to ever get my body to unfurl like that again, or if I still might have a chance to settle into my own place in this world.

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