That night, as we spooned pegao into our mouths, mom laid out The Vision. Abuela listened, nodding as if the gentle gesture might lull an ailing barrio into good dreams. By the time we made it back to West Philly, mom’s adrenaline was spent, if not the pilot light glowing inside her. Our cheek kisses and goodnights were formalities, and we traipsed off to separate dead zones, bone-tired.
That’s how Casa Comadre was born, mom’s bricks-and-mortar community center for a phone-less demographic. It was an old row home smack-dab on North 7th, tidied up on the cheap, whose warmth outshone its spartan décor. Almost immediately, curious women poked their heads in. Then hung around for a cafecito on the sofa. Then attended the workshops where mom presented female anatomy charts so body-chat could proceed with shameless specificity. The comadres opened up about their lives. Their needs—nutritious food, dental work, safe harbor from violent partners—were urgent and painful to behold, and yet their laughter, educational history, working-class and dirt-poor concerns, and even their eye contact felt like home. Mom designated and trained Block Ambassadors to go speak with women who were reticent to be seen entering the building. Now mom could reach forty-somethings who’d never had a Pap smear, explaining gynecological procedures while chauffeuring them and holding their hands during checkups. One such visit caught the cervical cancer early, and when word spread, more women came. Now mom could sit face-to-face with undocumented women and convince them a hospital delivery would be legally sound. Mom assembled a bilingual team of legal and medical professionals who swore to answer her call any hour, ready to head to the hospital and advocate like hell.
I was inching toward preadolescence, murky still on the nuances of booty, but comically well versed on AIDS and STDs. The herpes pamphlets littering our backseat made for better reading than English class. And as I became schooled in the Latina body, I grappled with the notion that I might have one. If mine was, as mom insisted, Boricua through and through, did I not carry sterilization abuse in my cellular memory? Yes, mom said. Health and sickness were shared by the collective, not siphoned individually.
But my skin tone more closely resembled those of mom’s white supervisors at the hotline. She frequently took potshots at her managers’ la-dee-dah pedigree, branding them elitist and out of touch. She had been hired through an exclusive network after all, Daughters of the American Revolution, the kind of feminist club sure to deny her entry. For the entire seven years mom worked at CHOICE, she could never reconcile herself with management’s whiteness. Gloria Steinem’s visit was the cherry on top. When the famous feminist chose CHOICE and its affiliate programs as a stop on her Philly tour, the office was over the moon. “This is big, man!” mom hollered in thick morning traffic, drumming the steering wheel. “I’m going to put the Latina health movement on Gloria’s radar! Today, Boricuas are going to get a national audience!” But that evening’s drive home was stifling, and we bypassed Abuela’s for drive-thru and straight-to-bed. “Same old tired shit.” It turned out that Gloria’s reception was management-only. Mom watched the all-white crowd through a window whose reflection revealed she was not alone. Behind mom stood her lone African American coworker and single Latina colleague. All three witnessed the superstar feminist through a sheet of glass.
Which part of that divide did I fall on? Would I have been invited to the courtyard or forced to view it soundlessly from a distance?
That was the management dynamic when Casa Comadre came up for budget renewal. It was criticized as a divergence from CHOICE’s central mission, an unfocused and even rogue programmatic sidestep, the work of a cultural zealot whose passion superseded protocol. With an outsize focus on the need-filled Hispanic community, mom’s flagship program was a major resource sap for the cash-strapped organization. Eighteen months after its founding, Casa Comadre was defunded. Mom had shed pounds in the wake of her separation, then dropped another pants size during a below-the-belt custody battle. After Casa Comadre was denied, her cheekbones hollowed inward, as though readying to grow tusks. Drive after drive, I saw her soft shoulders yield to bone. Her knuckles gripping the steering wheel became spindly. She was hollowing out, wasting away because there were Latinas in crisis and those who would see them suffer. In this way, mom and I shared something new. She could smell it on me and I could smell it on her: the loss, the bafflement, our common perfume. When I boarded the R5 train, I was a Latina in crisis, too. The ride out to dad’s was simply a variation on her theme. That damn stretch of train tracks from 30th Street to Overbrook: rubble, graffiti, dereliction. And boom, the Main Line arrives as the American oasis: lawns, gilt wood shop signs, mailboxes etched in historic detail. If I had once questioned mom’s tales of coerced sterilization, I now believed and was pained by her suffering.
Latino leaders citywide formed a committee dedicated to Casa Comadre’s survival, and the Inquirer printed a feature lauding the center’s successes in an under-resourced neighborhood. In the article’s accompanying photo, mom looked focused and ferocious. It was an action shot taken during a conversation, and her mouth is open delivering unheard words that seem equal parts authority and love.
In the end, no committee or article could save it, and the center shuttered. Mom left the job where she’d spent seven of her best years, her twenties now complete. Our house’s sadness became saturated and we could barely stand being home. In those days we avoided West Philly. It became a site of sleeping and laundry only, every corner a reminder of loves once felt, fathers once favored, advocacy once activated. So instead of hanging out there, mom, a born workaholic, threw herself into maniac hours in a new social justice position (with a new white boss who would become a second mother to her). And me, I became a North Philly expat, with Abuela’s house as the capital of my new dual citizenship.
Spanglish Cousins on the Jersey Turnpike
If you won a shopping spree and loaded your cart full of cousins, that was Abuela’s house. They streamed in and out, staying for five minutes or two months or eighteen years. They were from Lehigh Ave, South Jersey, Florida, and PR. There was always a new one I’d never met plus the daily rotation of usual suspects. Cousinhood in my big-ass family was a swim-with-the-sharks wonderland.
I was the hump cousin. Younger by years than my own generation. Older, by more, than their emerging crop of babies. Wedged awkwardly in a no-man’s-land where I had to make friends with ’em all or be alone. Always hovering, always listening, ears perked up like Abuela, though I held the perimeter while she was central as the sun. Sometimes a burst of cousin laughter would crack my shell and I’d emerge, poking my beak into their sunlight, waddling up to their joy, wings wet and yearning to fly.
At two years my elder, Tiny was the closest in age. Already in her early teens by the time we moved back to Philly, she was just four feet tall and compensated with bangs teased to heaven, aqua-netted to diamond firmness. With underwire bras and C-cups, her boobs accounted for half her body. Despite her frequent stays in North Philly, she couldn’t fully conceal her suburban South Jersey airs. Her parents had fled the 215 dysfunction, Ricans with their noses in the air, like an aboveground pool was some ethical distinction. But they still relied on barrio childcare at Abuela’s.
Tiny was perpetually ill, a Victorian recluse in the wrong time and place, and spent sick days at Tía Moncha’s right next door to Abuela’s. Her menstrual flow required Hoover Dam intervention. Girl had her period three out of four weeks, plus cramps, nausea, and migraines, making her swallow pink horse pills at twice the prescribed dose. When Tiny wasn’t fetal or hunched over the toilet, the two of us would play War with an incomplete deck or watch shirtless boys bike up and down American Street from Tía Moncha’s porch. “He’s mine,” she’d point out. “I call him,” I’d say. We’d sit in some sexy manner as the boys rode up to us and asked what bands we liked. “Menudo,” Tiny called out. “Guns N’ Roses,” I shouted. “Corny bitches!” they yelled back, popping wheelies in their wake. To b
and-aid the disappointment, we bought penny chicle from the bodega and Tiny taught me to snap it like a firecracker.
Cousins JJ and Danito were old enough I could play with them, young enough I could babysit them. They were originally Flor’s sons but Titi Ginny had adopted them in grade school. When I swung by Ginny’s house, they thundered down the uneven stairs and pulled me to the G.I. Joe bin. If we excavated Ginny’s yard today, we’d find the remains of a hundred action figures. They loved whupping me at Nintendo—Ginny had a knack for finding “new” cartridges at church sales. JJ and Danito named the sticker price on Madden Football or NBA Jam, then bragged how Mami Ginny had paid cents on the dollar. Balling on a budget. JJ inserted the cartridge and after a moment of silence or static withdrew it, jiggled it like spun gold, breathed holy in the slot. Occasionally, the game loaded. “Press A,” they shouted. “I am!” I shouted back. After mopping the floor with me for an hour, they grew bored and fled to Norris Square. Real football was happening at the corner of Hancock and Susquehanna. I’d stay in Ginny’s kitchen listening to my walkman until her husband, Tío George, called the boys home for dinner, showing off the loudest whistle in North Philly. I knew mom would be swinging by soon to scoop me up and take me home, but I hoped it might be one of those after-work hangs when, insisting she had only five minutes to spare, mom pulled up a chair and we crashed the family meal.
Candi, JJ and Danito’s biological sister, was also adopted away from Flor, but by Abuela. She was shy and studious, with a smile that tended to pout. Mostly I recall her in Abuela’s living room, wearing Catholic school plaids and leaning over her homework. She would show me how to dot the i in her name with a heart, then run out for hopscotch or house with the block’s young’uns. Out the window, she joined the circular foot traffic of freeze tag. I, in turn, crowned headphones over my ears and pressed play on my walkman, watching the kids from the kitchen. A few piano notes later Whitney Houston assured me the children were our future, as Candi tabbed open a grape soda and traded sips with a knob-kneed block kid. By the song’s symphonic swell, Whitney crunching those high notes—if I fail, if I succeed—the kids were throwing soda at each other, staining T-shirts, then communally crushing the can with Payless Mary Janes. Mere inches from the gorgeous idiocy of childhood, I waxed poetical, just outside the action.
* * *
—
When Cuca invited me to Six Flags with the big cousins, I was Cinderella being invited to the ball. These weren’t the rug rats of the family, my usual crew. Five to ten years my elder, my big cousins were gods on Mount Olympus, meriting study, mythology, even fear. Cuca, redheaded Joe, Mary Lou, Flor, and Nuchi. Saying their names filled me with awe. They had babies and tats. I had blackheads and wedgies. They had curves and moves. I had puberty boobs called nipple-itis. They moved in unison, a complex organism, dancing, laughing, cursing, and gossiping. They were electrons and protons, some positive, some negative, circling and orbiting in a dynamic flow. They spoke Spanglish like Greg Louganis dove—twisting, flipping, explosive—and laughed with the magnitude of a mushroom cloud.
That my cousins moved as a universe unto themselves made them a microcosm of their North Philly home, but exceptionally homogenous when compared with the larger city. Elsewhere in Philadelphia, I noticed that opposites found each other. Litter stagnated alongside new skyscrapers. Homeless folks made cardboard cities a block away from the Liberty Bell. Every path crossed the Italian Market, reeking of fish, crates of squid stacked curbside, storefronts ripe with the stench of pig slaughter and peach rot. Hard hats lined up at Pat’s next to suits from downtown. Chinatown flip-flops and Rittenhouse Square loafers tramped atop flower petals and fruit rinds. The Italian Market sidewalks were slick with mess, though an occasional bucket of water washed the grime downhill. Middlemen gesticulated and bluffed by open-air produce vendors; taxis collected mink-clad blue-hairs. The cheesemonger would cut a free slice if you braved the stench. Tourists and the homeless braved it.
In the Italian Market’s old cookware store my aunt Alice, from dad’s side, manned the coffee counter. She had eloped and fled suburban Long Island for the anarchic hubbub of Philly’s white working class. It suited her well. She wasn’t the only émigré. Seemed to me if you threw a stone in any direction at the Italian Market, you might hit a down-and-out expat who’d left the trust fund, running.
By sixth grade I was taking the trolley and bus alone, exploring any pocket of Brotherly Love I pleased. Rittenhouse Square, Old City, Chinatown, University City…so many Philadelphias in my restless foot traffic. Bakery cases and heat lamps boasted regional specialties; old men played international games on park tables; the tuning of AM/FM dials revealed nostalgias rooted in different hemispheres. The one commonality was porousness, how insiders and outsiders traversed blocks together, riding upstream for a bit in shared waters. Within all the mismatch and chaos, I could be both interloper and core constituent—a tug and pull I knew well, being of two cultures.
North Philly was different. What scarlet letter el barrio wore on its corners I couldn’t tell, but its motions and commerce were strictly internal. A colony on Mars couldn’t be more sealed off. My big cousins moved by some internal logic to a music all their own, impervious to and unseen by the rest of Philly. Being with them was a VIP pass to the most delicious, if segregated, social club. It was a separate world, like my mother’s circle garden had once been, and I recognized in this separation not just safe harbor but something resembling a scream.
* * *
—
Our trip was courtesy of Coca-Cola. That summer they were running a promotion. Collect a bunch of cans, get a half-price ticket to Six Flags in New Jersey. We piled in a double-wide hooptie with four different-size tires and zero operational seatbelts, soda cans clattering in the trunk. Though it cost more, we gassed up in Philly cuz there was duct tape where a fuel cap oughta go and full-service Jersey didn’t mess with that crap. Every time we hit a bump, I could hear half-melted ice swish in the cooler, as bodega ham and Wonder Bread took a swim.
I got the hump in the back. My thighs stuck to the pleather seat and pressed up against Flor’s warm bare legs. Cuca’s shoulder pushed sweatily into mine. Zooming north on the turnpike, my cousins blasted La Mega and yelled Spanish lyrics at passing cars. There was a thick parade of trucks thundering along the highway. “Yank your fist like this, Qui Qui,” Flor said, cranking her arm. An eighteen-wheeler pulled up alongside us, rattling the hooptie with its gravity. Flor pinched my thigh and cooed warmly, “Go ’head, Qui Qui, don’t be afraid!” She had coined the nickname, coronating me Qui Qui when I was still in pampers. The childish title always sounded best in her mouth. But now all my big cousins chanted, “Qui Qui! Qui Qui! Qui Qui!” Finally the cab was level with the back window. The driver’s eyes flicked in our direction and I seized the moment, leaning into the cushion of Cuca’s shoulder so I was visible to the outside world, balling my right fist and cranking an invisible airhorn. The typhoon of sound that came at us when the trucker honked back was trumped only by the wild cheering of my cousins. “Okay, Qui Qui!” Flor hollered, and we all fell back laughing.
Now Redheaded Joe, whose eyelashes were freakishly blond for el barrio, told scatological jokes that were Egyptian to me. The X-rated ones he told in Spanish, but even the English punchlines flew over my head. I was certain they entailed sex and poop, but neither word was used, nor any synonyms I knew. Still, I laughed when they did. Nuchi giggled through her missing teeth and Cuca—proper Catholic, wait-until-marriage Cuca—cracked up, then slapped Joe’s shoulder hard, cuz he was corrupting her. And Flor had news about the new roller coaster. Six Flags had been running ads all summer long, but Flor knew some folks who’d actually braved it. They returned not just with apocryphal tales of steep drops and breakneck turns, but with actual-factual shitted shorts. “I hope y’all brought clean draws!” she laughed.
Carsickness was common for me but today was
different. My thigh started to sweat where it touched Flor’s and my guts felt like stew. AC was not one of the car’s few features. By the time we pulled into the Six Flags lot, I couldn’t un-hunch. “Look, Qui Qui, it’s a long walk to the ticket booth. By the time you get there, the fresh air will make you feel better,” Flor offered. But extracting myself from the backseat seemed herculean. “Should we take you home?” Nuchi asked kindly, the group’s responsible elder.
“No, I just want to take a nap. Please go without me.”
Redheaded Joe tried to lift me out of the backseat. “Let me give you a piggyback,” he said, but at ten years old, I was too heavy for that, plus my body was limp with nausea.
Nuchi and Cuca consulted with each other. “Should we call Titi Virginia? Quiara, you want to talk to your mom?”
“It’s just carsickness. It wears off eventually.” I would’ve been embarrassed if I hadn’t felt so sick. Despite initial reticence, they eventually agreed to start the fun without me. I’d join when they returned for a sandwich break. I curled fetal in the back, eyes throbbing shut, my hair wet spaghetti against the hot pleather, the car now my own personal hell as all four doors slammed.
Later, half-lulled from a knockout slumber, I was vaguely aware of my cousins’ voices coming through open windows. They were eating sandwiches on the trunk, spreading mayo on slices. Who needs mustard? Flor, pass me an orange soda. Ey yo, these pork rinds be poppin’. Apparently, hours had passed. They compared notes on which roller coasters had the shortest lines, which carnival games gave the most tickets. Wake up, Qui Qui, you feeling better? Want to join us? I muttered “no” from the depths of hell and they headed off. Again, I fell into the blackness of sleep.
My Broken Language Page 5
