I sit outside the room in the warm, muggy hallway, looking at my watch. Someone was supposed to be out here, dammit, but I’m waiting by myself. There’s a window in the door, so I know I’m outside the right room, and the instructions were clear: wait outside until someone comes out to get you.

The door opens. Professor X steps out. I know Professor X. He brightens as he sees me. “It’ll be another few minutes until they’re ready for you,” he says. “I’m just going to the bathroom.”

I shrug. “Maalesh,” I say. Never mind. What else am I going to do? Demand to be seen right this moment?

I twiddle my thumbs.

In the next room, there’s a group of Indian children playing in brightly colored shawal kameez and korta pajama. They run and laugh and scream and giggle. Their parents shuffle between two or three rooms, huddled in conversation: the men with the men, the women with the women. I wonder why that is.

Professor X comes back. “It won’t be long,” he says. “Thanks so much for doing this, especially on a Saturday.”

“My pleasure.”

He enters the room. It’s back to just me and the consterned Indians.

Professor Y comes out. I wonder if Professor Y has come to get me … oh, god, what if Professor Y turns out to be my interviewer? Of all the people on the faculty, I think Professor Y might be the only one left who was actually one of my professors. Surely there’s a rule against that … ?

But, no, it turns out that Professor Y is having full bladder issues, too. He brightens as he sees me and says hello.

Professor X comes out again. “OK, we’re ready. This is the usual sort of OPI format,” he says to me. Like everything else he’s said to me this morning, he says it in Arabic. I am uncomfortably aware of how out of practice I am speaking — this is probably not a good thing right before an Oral Proficiency Interview.

“You’ve done this before,” he says, and I finally correct him. No, I’ve never done this before. This is the first time. Too late to back out now. “You’ll be interviewed by Professor Z,” he says.

I try to remember as I enter the room and see twenty pairs of eyes staring back at me, that it is Professor Z who is actually being tested, not me. The problem is that I know a good ten of those sets of eyes personally, including Professor Z. The man who is actually In Charge seems a little disturbed that Professor Z knows me. “Huwa talmeezahu?” he asks. Even though it’s Shami dialect, I know what he’s asking: He is his student? As I sit down, I wonder why it is that I know the word talmeez, since it’s pure dialect, and one I don’t speak at that.

Fortunately, they have it set up so that my back is to everyone in the room except Professor Z.

We begin.

“My name is Mohammad,” he says in Arabic. “What’s your name?”
“My name is Chris,” I respond.
“Ahlan wa sahlan.”
“Ahlan bik.”
“Where do you live, Chris?”
“I live here, in Austin?”
“What neighborhood?”
“In Round Rock, in the suburbs.”
“Do you live by yourself?”
“No, I live with gozi,” I respond, realizing that I’m both using the Egyptian word for “spouse,” and have it in the masculine form–and that most people who don’t know me are going to think I’ve just used the wrong gender. Fortunately, Mohammad gives me an opening.
“Are you married, then?”
“No, I’m not married,” I respond. “I live in Texas, not in Massachusetts.” It takes a second, but the chuckles go around the room as the deeper significance of what I’ve just said kicks in.

I relax. The conversation progresses to what I do for a living — which I have a hard time explaining in English, let alone in Arabic, and then to whether or not I have been to the Middle East. The lengthiest part of the conversation revolves around me attempting to defend the Turkish Prime Minister’s attempt to revise the constitution to allow women who wear headscarves to attend state funded universities. I am hoping this is a good sign.

The time flies by faster than I realize. By the time I finish blubbering my way through the idea of what I think secular government means (and I know they’re going to mark Mohammad down because at one point he unintentionally gives me the word I can’t remember: ‘aalmani–secular–for which I am very, very grateful), we have been talking for twenty five minutes.

There is perfunctory applause, and Professor X shakes my hand as I leave. I don’t look at the others in the room as I leave, and then I’m in the hallway, and all I want to do is leave the building as quickly as possible before the laughter starts. I feel as if I have been flattened by a steamroller.

I return to my office to retrieve my gozi, who is playing his Playstation Portable at my desk, and we head out to lunch. As we leave, I see a coworker, the one who roped me into this in the first place. “That was brutal,” I say.

She nods. “Everyone’s been saying that,” she says, and tells me about another coworker who was asked to delineate the main points of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I shudder in horror.

I leave her walking the other way on the mall. It’s off to lunch and a quiet afternoon in which I will reprocess the interview several dozen times, recognizing countless grammatical errors and wondering how I did, and wondering why I subjected myself to this in the first place.