My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  Mom was no withering flower. A formidable presence, the spirits came to her direct. They slipped in quick, a no-splash dive in the deep end. When that happened, she didn’t have time to give warnings. She grabbed the reins and rode it. Mom weighed more during possession, too, like her veins had been filled by an iron spigot. She needed a man who could catch her when the spirit left. It never left lightly. It was a seismic exit.

  Sanchez caught her. Every last pound. Without warning or hesitation. He had been raised a Catholic of the most pious order, so this wasn’t a learned skill. It was his character, the weft and weave of his heart’s cloth.

  * * *

  —

  In the Perez family, there weren’t a ton of dudes modeling dudeness. Most men—Boricua, white, or African American—fathered a kid or three, then took off, leaving the Perez women to their insular bubble. Big Vic and Guillo had died. Mary Lou’s widower had moved back to Puerto Rico. Danito and JJ and Nuchi’s four boys were boogie-nosed tots. And Tío George, Ginny’s husband, was a milder genus, burrowed into his prized lazy boy, calm as the Eagles or Phillies allowed. But everything about Sedo was a culture shock.

  In a constant campaign to culture me, he cranked up the Fania and stomped my toes, spinning rag doll me too close to walls and furniture. No morning was too early, no evening too late, for him to curse local politics at volume eleven. Every election, the Democrats spat promises like sunflower shells: they would fix the schools, the potholes, the blight. Every election, Puerto Ricans delivered the vote, Sanchez yelled, and the Democrats dropped them like yesterday’s lotto tickets. “The Democratic Party never did shit for our people!” he cursed. He had, in fact, run for local office and a few of his campaign posters gathered dust in the basement.

  According to mom, his folks named him Mercedes after the luxury car, to assure an abundant future. Mom pursed her lips, kissing her own condescension. She loved calling out haughty Puerto Ricans who nosed the clouds like their shit didn’t stink. He couldn’t remember when he’d changed it to Sedo, but it stuck. Two syllables blunt as a butter knife in steak. I called him Sedo, same as mom, which felt slightly disrespectful. But I saw no better option.

  His biological children were punctual, I give ’em that. Every night during The Simpsons our phone rang. “Your mother’s a whore,” they whispered before hanging up. Sometimes they’d abbreviate it simply to “Whore.” Click. He had left them, my dad had left me. So we were tied in the dad department, but they didn’t know or care. It’s not like I wanted their cologne-scented, crisp-hairlined macho in my kitchen every morning. No one had consulted me on the great daddy swap-out that was now my life.

  One night they were really on a roll. Crank-calling a gazillion times in quick succession. Mom stormed up the steps, hands sticky from chopping sofrito. “Tell your friends that our phone line is not a fucking toy!” It rang again. She grabbed the receiver, double-palming it fingerlessly to not garlic-up the plastic. “Hello?” The word sounded through the earpiece: Whore. Click. She looked at me with surprise.

  “Wait…Was that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why this thing’s been ringing off the hook?” I had tried to shield her from the calls. Some nights she had been cooking and blasting Celia Cruz louder than the ringer, others she was out working late. Now it rang again. “Don’t answer,” mom said, running to rinse off the garlic. She returned clean-handed and grabbed the receiver with steady poise. “Hello?” Again, the word was hissed more than spoken. Whore. “That’s just sad. Do you even know what you’re saying?” mom sighed. The line went dead, the ring repeated, as did the slander. Whooore. “You know something…you may have a point. Call it to me again.” They obliged. Whooooooore. “I bet you didn’t think you’d be my teacher tonight. What am I?” WHOOOOOOOORE! When the line went dead, mom craned her neck to god. “I caught your transmission! Maferefún!” Her giggles gathered until the next ring, when she answered by simply blurting: “Give it to me.” WHOOOOO­OOOOO­ORE!

  Mom lost it. Woman cracked up. Laughter flying like Sunday hallelujahs. Hitting soprano notes I didn’t know she had.

  “Stop, mom. It’s not funny.”

  “They have no idea what they’re calling me! How do we say ‘whore’ en el barrio?” mom asked.

  “Puta?”

  “How else?”

  “Ho?”

  “Exacto: ho! Now tell me, Quiara, what is a ho?”

  “A woman who’s shamed for her sexuality?”

  “It’s the shame men have given us from the get-go. The shame that is written into the Bible! But think, Quiara, what else is a ho? I want you to make this connection yourself.” Racking my brain, I came up short. “HO!” she yelled, as if volume was a code-cracker. “AZADA! AZADA! AZADA! What is a ho, Quiara?”

  “A gardening tool.”

  “And what does a hoe do?” she asked.

  “Digs.”

  “It’s an ancient tool with a sharp blade for clearing and turning the soil. When the earth gets tired, you break the earth, you wound the earth, digging narrow troughs and trenches so you can do what?”

  “Plant seeds.”

  “Plant seeds!” she rejoiced, all affirmation. “They think they’re shaming me, but they have no clue that they’re praising me. We are not whores, we are hoes! We plow the land, we plow our reality! We plant seeds of potential! I am hoeing on Sedo’s potential. I am hoeing on the potential of my community. I have been hoeing your potential since day one, hija!”

  Resplendent and alive, she answered each call. The word “whore,” when missiled her way, was met with the laugh of a honey-sated bear. Mom’s laughter caught me, until both our feet hoofed the floorboards, both our fists pounded sofa and our faces contorted and torqued with pain. But still we laughed.

  * * *

  —

  I was eight when Sanchez first appeared. The second mom brought him home, I was on alert. Man brought an earthquake. The blackout drunk rages at three a.m. Mom stripped his pants, tugging at the ankles, and washclothed the shit away as he hollered and cursed. I would spy these struggles from the upstairs landing. My jaw would clench with animal instinct and I’d despise the devil in his voice. I tried transmitting instructions telepathically. Forget him, mom! Let him clean his own shit! No matter how loudly I thought, mom never seemed to hear.

  One rainy night I found trash bags out front, filled with his nice clothes.

  “Where’s Sedo, mom?”

  “Straightening up or getting out.” The following morning the bags were gone. The house quieted that week, as if listening for clues. Mom was tense for days, vague with the answers. She gripped my arm whenever near, as if to steady herself from stumbling. She offered unsolicited assurances. “We will be fine no matter what happens. You gotta believe in your mami, me entiendes?” She was shoulder-length from heartbreak, hollowed-out, teetering. She had lost love once, and it had nearly annihilated her. Would I watch her plummet again?

  Finally, she was pulling onto the Schuylkill. The on-ramp from West Philly was a treacherous blind merge with cars zooming by on her left and an impatient line accumulating behind her. If a gap slipped by unclaimed, angry honks pounced like wolves. “What do you want me to do, fly?” she screamed in the rearview. She swooped into a lane and in that moment out came her decision. “What I have to figure out is if I’m ready to put in the time. I’m not young, Quiara, and this is a major project, an investment of my best years. Cleaning up a man is no one-two-three quickie. Pero, with all his imperfections…” And now her voice cracked. “…when all I had around me was death…” She trailed off, leaving me to infer what death she referred to. I knew. It was the shroud that fell on her in those skinniest days. I had watched my mother erode. Being a Brown woman battling a white man in family court. Dad’s threats to kidnap me to California. Casa Comadre being destroyed when—and because—it flourished. “When al
l I had around me was death”—mom steadied her voice—“Sedo said get on your knees and give that to the universe. I tell you that was a powerful moment in my life. I will die thinking of it. He returned me to faith.”

  When Sedo resurfaced the next day, a chastened hush arrived with him. What mom anticipated as a years-long process—cleaning him up—he had begun to accomplish, it seemed, in those few days away. As time wore on, the temperance proved lasting. It’s not that he had shrunk, but he came back home with a sense of permission and humility. I wondered if by drawing a firm line, mom had made good on her spiritual debt. If in his darkest hour, she had restored him to himself.

  * * *

  —

  Sedo was a light-skinned Puerto Rican whose coloring might’ve matched my dad’s, but otherwise they were a different breed. He was, above all, a fantastically groomed man, and mornings in our home became a symphony of macho preening. The hiss of the Niagara spray as mom creased his slacks. The hum of the clipper as she edged his hairline. Spanish radio pummeled my ears too early, Mom and Sedo’s chatter bursting above it. She apparently knew every Héctor Lavoe lyric there was—news to me till I heard her sing them while spritzing cologne on his neck. He had never heard of the Beatles nor I of Johnny Pacheco, and we looked at each other like alien beings. Now it was all Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto as mom rolled lint off his dry-clean-only sweaters. They planned their day in Spanish. Argued in Spanish. Budgeted money in Spanish. Ridiculed Dan Quayle’s IQ in Spanish. For the first time in my life, there was Spanish in my home. Not at Abuela’s house or Titi Ginny’s or in the bodega on American Street. Spanish was no longer a way station I passed through. It was in my kitchen as I poured my Cheerios and scuttled away.

  Mom had done none of these things with dad. Not the ironing, not the hairline. Spanish—on the radio or in her mouth—was an infrequent visitor in my early years. Mom certainly never cooked rice and beans for dad. Back on the horse farm she had been an accomplished baker. I can still smell the yeast, feel my palm flouring the counter, hear the slurp and suck of the dough. Our tactile kneading. She was skinny in her bread-baking days. Her copper skin framed by Charlie’s Angel curls, shirts buttoned low so her cleavage could say hi. A beauty with a rolling pin. But mom’s last loaf of bread was baked on the horse farm. When they split, she became a stovetop cook, a rice and beans lady.

  Still, above all these new behaviors stood the biggest change of all. Mom had never worshipped around dad.

  So, which was the real mom? English-speaking never-prays Virginia? Or this new creature, stopping en route to the babalao’s, browsing the cologne counter at Macy*s so her man could walk North Philly smelling fine?

  The animal sacrifices had started in middle school. He was still Sedo in those days. But the night I witnessed mom possessed, I saw something else, too: a partner at her side. A man who earned her complexity. Soon after that I tried on “Pop” for size. He never dictated what I should call him and “Pop” seemed all right. Not too awkward or eager. An appropriate title for the man who caught my mother, probably the only person on earth up for that ancestral-level trust fall. His catch wasn’t just taking her weight. It was a total yielding, an acceptance of a woman’s full, impolite truth.

  * * *

  —

  There was that Sunday early on (he was still Sedo then) when his voice boomed from the porch. “Quiara, prop the door!” His crew was out front, clumped around an old upright. They stooped over, breathing hard. “Well? Final stretch?” he said. Sedo was not one to bark orders from the sidelines. He took rear position—the most weight-bearing—as they hauled the piano up five front steps, sweat pouring from noses, tears of exertion raining down. Their muscles quaked beneath the terrible weight, and if that thing toppled over, they were goners. Once the steps were conquered, they discovered that the piano’s old casters had rusted stiff, so even on a flat surface, the lifting must continue.

  The piano was placed by the dining table. Someone had given it a slapdash coat of dookie-brown paint. Chips here and there revealed older colors beneath. Two keys, missing the ivory, resembled gaps in grade-school smiles.

  “A church in Downingtown was about to be demolished.” Sedo beamed, wiping hand sweat on his slacks. “They auctioned off the contents first, and I bought almost everything! So, what do you think, Quiara? Was this worth twenty-two bucks?” Sedo lived to find gems in a garbage heap and throw a few hours’ work at a few willing guys. That’s how our West Philly twin went from tumbledown to handsome: because Sedo and mom scoured auctions and estate sales and, knowing how to build, they patched our house’s wounds room by room.

  I sat and played. Bach’s Minuet in G Major, the one classical piece I knew. I had learned it by ear on the school piano during recess. Tinny notes like chimes in a music box rang out. The keys required only the gentlest press to make music. The workers crowded around. They could hear it, too. She was sweeter than a lollipop, this worn-out piano. Sang like a parakeet. My fingers lifted from the final chord and I turned to face my audience. Their cheeks were still red from exertion but with brighter eyes.

  “¿Quien la escribió? ¿Tú?” one asked.

  “Bach.”

  “Bach,” he repeated. The guys chuckled at the name.

  Mimicking German pronunciation, I proclaimed: “Johann Sebastian Bach.”

  “Sabes otra?” Not knowing another, I replayed the minuet, life’s aperture widening with every note. Indeed, later that night, when the crew had gone and mom and Sedo were out working, I would carry my radio downstairs, pop in a Phil Collins tape, and rewind it over and over, plunking around for notes that matched the song. “Against All Odds.” An eighties power ballad of heartbreak. Though I did not know the word “triad,” my fingers intuited their structure. Each chord was an easel balanced on three points: the major fifth, anchored by a major or minor third in the middle. First came A minor. Then B minor. A progression would emerge, unspooling a thread of sound. Within minutes I would play the first verse, a fawn fumbling on new legs. Soon I would sing-play the melodrama of the chorus through tears. Miraculous: to be saturated in feeling. The fact of my sadness, no longer sad. The notes did that. They soared where English and Spanish failed. All testimony and evocation, no mistranslation.

  Soon my aunt Linda in New York would teach me to read music so that at a moment’s notice I’d hop a Greyhound north, hungry to advance. Soon she would sponsor weekly piano lessons and Chopin would knit an opalescent cocoon around my melancholy. Soon I would xerox “Maple Leaf Rag” at the school library, buy Gershwin’s “Three Preludes” at the piano store on Chestnut. And since, in pursuit of my melancholy music, I would learn to brave New York’s Port Authority alone and late-night West Philly on my way home from lessons, soon journeying solo to the library and Borders became second nature, so that Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg would become paperback mentors, all thanks to that upright.

  For now, my fingers rested as Bach’s final G-chord rang out. The workers nodded, smiling, easy converts to Bach’s orderly music. It was dainty in a way life rarely mimicked, an ephemeral koan. From a thick roll of cash, Sedo thumbed twenties and fifties to each guy. Then made a declaration. “My daughter’s a natural!”

  That’s how I got my first piano. And a few notes of a new language.

  Taíno Petroglyphs

  To escape and therefore understand my living room. To cram warring selves into one elegant space. To quell the grumbling in my gut and yet deeply mourn. To fathom the blood of it all: my own, my cousins’, the Sun Dance’s, the turtle’s. Maybe sitting in quiet for an hour would light the way. No one at Quaker meeting pulled me to a dance floor. It was as if the whole space were Abuela’s staircase. And the little girl within, who’d fled to the woods, again mistook refuge for safety.

  When I’d first attended, fall of sophomore year, I’d sat alone in the empty room before service began. A few months into this trial ru
n, it was still my habit. Other worshippers clumped by the simple wooden doors, chitchatting. How are your tomatoes this year? Did you bring your bulgur salad for the potluck? They wore ungelled hair, unironed skirts, and Mondale/Ferraro pins rusty with age. There were no stretch jeans or bleached hair or exposed midriffs, no Latinos far as I could tell. The few Black folks in the group seemed at ease with the frump. Mine was the gait of apologetic tourist. Pay me no mind, just looking. They demanded nothing of me—not a name, affiliation, or reason for attendance. They offered just enough eye contact to communicate that I could come or go with ease. But my shyness remained no matter how many meetings attended, and I rushed in and out, avoiding the commitment a hello might imply. Still, Meeting for Worship became habit. To a Joplin-playing poetry-writing child of volume elevens, silent worship might imply rebellion. Quite the opposite. Unvoiced contemplation was a skill learned at five, when mom led me out back and whispered god’s name in Spanish, far from dad’s ears. The quiet made me come alive. Zipping my lips meant swallowing my contradictions and confusions, guarding the flavor for only myself.

  The brick building was an aged structure in a city of old things. Its wood shutters and plain footprint spoke of modesty. Shallow tides of light dappled the walls. The window frames held bumpy glass of a century prior, so that even the sun felt old in that room. It was a calm place, simply appointed, with unadorned benches in semicircle formation. The dull mahogany shimmered only at the armrests, shined by all those repeated grips to stand up or sit down. Soundproofing was of little concern when the structure was built, so our silence was accompanied by the dull music of 15th and Cherry Streets. A hissing bus, a cooing dove.