My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  As we drove home I whimpered between stomach pangs. A pathetic, woozy chorus. “Sorry I ruined the day.” I was sure it was the last invitation they’d extend. “No, bendito, Qui Qui, we felt so bad leaving you like that.” Flor ordered everyone to roll down the windows, fresh air being good for carsickness, and she tapped my head, gently guiding it to her warm shoulder.

  During the ride south, they were subdued. Wiped out and whiplashed after all those rides, but also shielding me from the fun I’d missed. They’d recount the adventures another time. Intimidated as I had been by their earlier adult humor, their compassion came at me in surprising unison. They put on La Mega and listened in silence. By exit 5, Redheaded Joe was snoring, and Flor used my resting head as a pillow for hers.

  I missed the goodbyes as Flor and Nuchi and Redheaded Joe were deposited onto various North Philly corners. When we rolled up to American Street, it was just me and Cuca. I crawled straight for Abuela’s bathroom—I hadn’t gone all day. My guts were throbbing, my back hunched and radiating heat. Though I could uncurl myself enough to unbutton my shorts, pulling them to my ankles felt like Armageddon. At which point I saw my panties. Red, brown, and moist. “Cuca?” Her footsteps hopped upstairs and she tapped on the door. “¿Estás enferma, Qui Qui?” I waddled to the doorknob, cracked the door, and asked if this was what a period looks like. Suspended at my ankles, my panties made a horrible hammock. Then Cuca snorted, a tear shot out her eye like a BB pellet, and she unleashed a magnificent laugh made of rejoice. She disappeared down the hall and I heard Abuela’s bureau drawers open and shut. Cuca returned with clean fresh parachute panties, improvising a tune. “Oh my gah! Qui Qui’s a woman now!”

  She knew the precise shower temperature to ease the abdominal pressure. Clean and refreshed after, I pulled on Abuela’s bargain-bin panties, which were fit for a queen. Cuca brought me two Bayers and a cup of room-temperature water. Then skipped across traffic to buy a box of pads. “Don’t tell the bodega man!” I pleaded. The Always were thick as a Bible and rough as a brown bag, two features that struck me as the height of sophistication. Every fifteen minutes I changed them with vigor and industry. One drop of blood, time for a new one. “You only need to change them every couple hours,” Cuca said, smiling. “But won’t the blood, like…dirty me?” I asked. “Relax! A little dirt never hurt anybody!” She laughed, smacking her teeth, enjoying the mentorship.

  For the balance of the evening, North Philly was an oasis. The Wheel of Fortune marathon. My tranquil stomach. A strong night breeze making the screen door slam over and over. It was all right as rain. Flitting around, prepping for the work week, Cuca periodically swung by the sofa and kissed my forehead. Eventually I dozed off as Vanna White paced with a calm regal smile.

  Body Language

  One of the two birthday girls had gone missing. No matter. Brooklyn babies, South Jersey cousins, and North Philly aunts crammed the kitchen like sardines. Singing along to Juan Luis Guerra’s latest, gossip laced with vulgarities, cheek-kissing the incoming tide of arrivals. Abuela was the default host of all parties, funerals, rosaries, fights, bingo nights, late nights, overnights, emergency adoptions, breakfasts, after-schools and lazy Sundays. If Abuela could’ve hosted her own funeral, she would’ve.

  The Fourth of July, an auspicious birthday. None of us knew Abuela’s age. Far back as I recall, she was ancient—Moses with the tablets, except she’s holding una cuchara de cocina. The wrinkles, I suspected, had been present at birth. The increasing hunch of her osteoporosis was the only evidence of time’s march forward. “Are you eighty, Abuela?” “Pienso que sí, no se.” Surely, there was a baptismal record back on the island, but that was a galaxy far, far away.

  Abuela’s wrinkle of a sister, Tía Moncha, lived in the adjacent row home. They had a tidy way of passing ingredients through the back fence. You need some rice? You’re out of corn meal? Toma, coje el teléfono, it’s the cousins from Puerto Rico! But today Tía Moncha had actually walked down her stoop, traversed fifteen feet of sidewalk, and grunted her way up Abuela’s steps to join the festivities. They shuffled toward each other in a giggling embrace, eyes pooling with cataract tears, their frizzy buns in left-right stereo. How far they had migrated from tropical farms, rows of fibrous yuca and ñame left unharvested, to be side by side in this urban mayhem.

  Flor, the second birthday girl, wasn’t around. I’d last seen her in November and the incident still burned like sunlight through closed eyelids. It had been another afternoon at Abuela’s. I was lounging on the plastic-covered sofa as Looney Tunes played—one of two VHS tapes Abuela owned. Flor was upstairs giving Danito, her youngest of three, a bath. Suddenly Danito started wailing deep and fierce, a baritone cry no toddler should know. Flor shouted IF YOU DON’T SHET THE FUCK UP! Then, a series of thuds. I knew it without seeing it, just from the sound. Danito’s skull had met the bathtub. Cuca flew up the steps to intervene, four at a time, superhero-like, the way they say a granny can lift a car off a kid. Looney Tunes played on. I dared not move from my spot on the sofa. I homed in on Bugs Bunny and bit my lip. I became a statue facing the TV, shut my eyes when the ensuing mayhem bled into my peripheral vision. But I had no way to stop the sounds. The rotary phone clicked in a frenzy of spins. Abuela wept and whispered psalms. Cuca told Flor to get the fuck out. Don’t let the door hit you. I heard the screen door’s spring expanding and contracting, arriving footsteps on linoleum, decisive voices. Doctors were called. Titi Ginny, a pediatric nurse, discussed the steps that must be taken immediately. Mom would do the driving. Someone cradled Danito like a freshly fallen chick, draped in a white towel, davening, ice held at his crown. But I looked away before I saw who. And thankfully, thank god above, I heard Danito cry. It seemed impossible: Flor, my cuz with a laugh warm as September sun, had been plucked from sanity and blown to chaos, a dandelion seed on the devil’s breeze. “Drugs,” mom said on the car ride home. “Before that shit came into el barrio,” she sighed, “we were just another poor neighborhood trying to make do. But then came the overnight sensation.” Her straight-ahead stare put an end to further questions.

  Now, on her birthday, Flor was who-knows-where. Her boys, Danito and JJ, came to Abuela’s party sweaty and soiled from Hunting Park, where they played ball with Tío George. Candi, Flor’s middle child, and Cuca now licked a limber on the stoop, coconut melting a river down their forearms. Flor’s sisters, Mary Lou and Nuchi, were in the kitchen, shining with sweat. Tía Toña, Flor’s mom, called the bingo game. And Juan Luis Guerra sang us into ecstasy. Asses bouncing to claim one slice of North Philly. Heck, even dinner danced. Tap tap tap as arroz compelled the lid into movement. I walk-danced to the kitchen, my moves noncommittal, removing the top so my face got a rice-fragrant steam bath.

  * * *

  —

  Change had come for me, too. High school was a few months off, a fresh start beckoned. As years passed after leaving the horse farm, the malaise had soaked marrow-deep. By now, I could hardly inhale without grief’s noose yanking. If I forgot the depression for a moment, it came slicing back unprompted, catching me off guard. I was haunted by dad’s marriage and new kids—their suburban tableau hovered always in the back of my mind. Every time I took the train out and dined amongst their sunniness, a beast started tramping my insides. And yet, in that season of change there were shifting consolations. I was old enough now to take the Greyhound alone to New York, where my aunt Linda from dad’s side, a composer, taught me to read music. My new Russian piano teacher let me play Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat Minor. There were boys and girls to kiss. Mixtapes to make for summer hangouts. Bottles of wine to sip when mom was working. One Hundred Years of Solitude to finish so I could return again to page one.

  Juan Luis Guerra’s latest, Bachata Rosa, came that summer and had us an inch off the ground. That tape lifted us. Clarion trumpets, power-synth hits, Afropop vocals—the old world, new world, and middle passage braided like cornrows—just
$7.99 at the local Sam Goody or free if your busted antenna caught La Mega. Cuca played the tape till it melted in the deck, then quick-dropped $7.99 for its replacement. In his lyrics, romance in tough times was our way. His caribeños loved bigger than farmhouses and factory jobs. This throbbing, thriving music hit our tape decks midway through the zombie apocalypse. Latinidad in a nutshell: die loving. Its virtuosity transcended era, yes, but the joy mattered double in a decade of hijas lost to alleyways.

  That Fourth of July we could all feel the dawning precarity. Every few minutes I peeled the shirt from my torso, but it slurped right back on me like cling wrap. That there was no AC in a rude July, that both doors hung open begging for some breeze, still did not account for the sweat blanketing us. The constant commerce of our touch made it triple-hot. Arms around shoulders, salsa spins, cheek kisses, butt pinches, pile-ons and huddles before a Kodak disposable. Tía Toña, presiding over tabletop bingo, demanded kisses and bendiciones from all entering children, who had to push through other butt pinches, cheek kisses, and lift-ups to arrive at her side. I watched the procession from the nosebleeds (aka the backyard slab of concrete) until Toña summoned me to her. “What piano piece are you playing now?” she asked, and clung to my hand the entire response. “Pregúntala en español,” mom said, so that all the bingo elders looked up, eager to see me bumble. “Ay, Virginia, déjala quieta,” Titi Ginny cooed. “Coño, I can ask my niece however I want!” said Tía Toña. In Spanish, I described my recent piano recital until the elders, mom included, nodded approval. The meatiness of Tía Toña’s palms sandwiching mine was equal parts grotesque and baptismal. The harder she pressed, the stronger my urge to flee and yet the longer I spoke. There in her grip she touched me—daydreamer me, thinker me—into the material world. For a family whose migration was four generations deep and counting, a laying on of hands meant lineage, location, resting place. After I extricated myself and headed for the kitchen, the warmth of her palms lingered on mine.

  I served myself some rice and beans, went to the staircase, and rested the tin plate on my knees. Seated just inches outside the swirl, I had the perfect vantage on cousins and aunts, a flock breaking right and left in rhythm. Even their proximity and touch did not fully account for why my Perez women glistened, swampy. I knew shit was goin’ down by how hard Nuchi, Cuca, and Mary Lou danced that day. Like if their hips slowed a bit, Flor’s absence would be all we had left.

  Nuchi’s booty tested the limit of spandex. Prima’s curves had curves. Because she was tall enough to cast a shadow across the room, her imposing frame seemed to be in the living room, dining room, and kitchen all at once. Nuchi didn’t so much walk as thrust, and menacingly so. On her figure, the subtlest dance moves became acts of aggression. If Nuchi danced in your direction, best thing was to get out the way. That’s why I spied her from the steps. Watching agog, timid, trying not to get ensnared in the dance and gossip that formed a sticky web. She felt my eyes and shot me a smile. “Hi, Qui Qui!” She waved and I blew kisses back, recalling her Six Flags tenderness. Her eyes looked tireder than that distant day, but her towering majesty and righteous thighs were a dare. Try not to stare. Try not to gulp. Try not to feel a wee bit violated. Two years later, addiction would render her skeletal. She would become a walking dagger. But for now, the spandex was tight and right. White bike shorts, white sports bra, white hoop earrings. Everything white except her trigueña skin and rainbow elekes. Las siete potencías—the seven Lukumí Orishas—orbited her neck in a protective oval. She had brought her four babies to the party and they were fixed to hips like tool belts. Teens held babies, kids held babies, bowlegged babies, pamper-butt babies, grumpy toddlers frowning on the porch.

  Mary Lou was slender, boasting fewer curves. With an exposed midriff her dance moves looked slinky times ten. A wooden rosary hovered at her cleavage—Jesus pointing down at the sin. But it was Mary Lou’s joy that was outrageous, that made her so fun to watch from the steps. A happy that needed no café, that woke up that way and let loose on the world. Rejoice was her daily rhythm. With a pronounced overbite, mid salsa-step, she proclaimed she was moving to Florida “porque aquí no vale!” If she hated the neighborhood, she had a cheerful way of showing it. Mary Lou chased Nuchi’s babies around, planting an embarrassment of kisses on their foreheads, tutoring them how to do the butt. “Do the diaper,” she goaded as they obliged or ran away. “Right, Qui Qui? Tell them!” “Do the diaper! Do the diaper!” I rapped on cue, chewing my rice, swaying my fork in time. I ate slowly on the steps, counting out grains, prolonging my excuse not to dance. Then through Mary Lou’s joy, though, came a hissing sound, directed at her only child. Ashley was five and from the steps I watched Mary Lou cutting her down with razor eyes and a ferocious yell. Punishing love-strictness. I will not let these blocks make a mess of my daughter. Her meanness had originated in protective ambition but had grown into “I’m tired as shit” and “Life ain’t working out” and “These blocks be getting me down.” A year later, Mary Lou’s equine body would topple, an aneurysm knocking her to the floor at age twenty-seven. Ashley would grow up motherless, in girlhood’s ocean with no compass, her mami’s strictness a phantom voice.

  Tía Toña climbed the stairs, squeezing by me and using my shoulder as a resting spot, before disappearing into the bathroom. She was already large by this Fourth of July, but would soon be too massive to get up from the sofa. Having your husband die in his forties and a kid die in his twenties will do that to you. Gotta do something with all that sorrow. Might as well eat it. But for now, before the final death—Mary Lou’s—Toña was almost spry on those steps. Perhaps after using the bathroom, I thought, she snuck into Abuela’s room to cop a look at the X-rated playing cards. Each card boasted a different naked man, Black and Brown beauties captured in nature: leaning on rocks, splashing in waterfalls, their flaccid cocks arranged in scenic repose. My gin rummy skills peaked that summer.

  Flor had been the lone Perez who could pull me onto the dance floor. “Come on, Qui Qui, baila conmigo!” and she’d yank my hand till I succumbed. To Flor, dancing was stand-up comedy writ on the flesh, and ass-shakes were the punchlines. My awkwardness became an asset when she took the lead. That day, in her absence, I remained on the steps. Mine was a dance of the eyes and ears, watching, wondering what a life that corporeal must feel like. Motionless on the staircase, I had the privilege of spying on life, if not the courage to step onto the dance floor. I had never read a book like Abuela’s living room but still I savored it my preferred way—like the private, treasured pages of a novel.

  Sophomore Year English

  Freshman year the reading was lively enough—Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, “The Cask of Amontillado”—but I was the only kid who raised my hand or, for that matter, whose eyes stayed open the entire period. Our textbooks were generations old and had run out of spaces to write your name. Held together by duct tape or not at all. It was an arts school and my sleepy classmates weren’t lazy, they just stayed up late charcoal-sketching or hammering bass riffs or sculpting soda bottle bongs instead of reading English’s assigned pages. We were given three weeks to read Animal Farm, indulgent even for a slow reader like myself. At the end of which it was clear no one knew what “four legs good, two legs bad” referred to. Even as my zine thrived, I grew restless.

  Sophomore year I jumped ship for Central, an academic magnet that drew kids from all zip codes. It was a competitive school with four-digit enrollment whose milieu was decidedly African American and white. Us few Latinos and a smattering of Asians contributed to the “other” portion of the pie chart. Now I had trouble keeping up with the pages. Gulliver’s Travels, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Page after page of direct hit. They jangled me, incited me, and none more than Death of a Salesman. My jaw clenched at Arthur Miller’s picket-fence tableaus: sunny suburbia masking nightmare magma. Loman was sure some throne was his birthright; when it eluded him he grew d
isconnected, disconsolate.

  “What do you think, Quiara? You wrote this in your reading response: ‘The roots of the grass lawn are rotting.’ Say more.”

  “It just annoys me how Loman thinks he’s tragic. Two sons healthy enough to throw the pigskin. A marriage intact. Like, what’s so awful?”

  “You tell me. What’s his problem?” The teacher trained his eyes on me.

  “Well…Loman’s a Brady Bunch guy, the kind of patriarch smiling in an insurance ad. The billboards and TV shows make him out to be some kingly provider archetype. And I guess he drank the Kool-Aid and then, like, eventually had to face the fact that he’s average. So that’s his tragedy. Being average. Which I don’t find tragic.”

  “Write that down, everyone,” the teacher said. Shit, I wrote it down, too. The class took it from there, launching into discussion, as Arthur Miller yanked my shoulder hard and hoisted me out of the room, a child snatched in the night. I came untethered from my desk, tossed through a chasm, to be deposited on dad’s lawn in the burbs. There stood his house, witnessed during my now-occasional visits. Their impeccable manners and happy pantomime couldn’t hide dad’s malaise. I knew him too well. The more my suburban siblings thrived—gymnastics trophies and marching-band portraits—the deeper his unvoiced depression seeped until I could no longer tell tree trunk from invasive vine. Was he dad any longer or only a latticework of what-ifs and minor failures? I was his biggest failure, but his unhappy marriage and inability to find carpentry work didn’t help. Dad and Willy Loman. Willy Loman and dad. American archetypes. A crisis of inconsequence. Might dad’s misery lead him, one day, to an end like Willy’s? Alone in the garage, hosing exhaust fumes through the window, leaving us all to sort through the mire? I walked into a distant hallway of memory and conjured dad’s thick ponytail, how majestically it had grazed his lower back, how once when I was tiny I asked if I could Tarzan-swing from it. He had smiled and said yes. And I swung with abandon from his hippie hair until, worried I was hurting him, I let go and dropped back to earth.