My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  I set the egg timer. Forty-five minutes. We rebounded with a deck of cards and a game of War. But I wanted to break free from my living room, from that card game, to run screaming through the streets of Philly, past the monumental art museum, past glistening brownstones, past the white-gloved doormen of Rittenhouse Square, all the way to the Free Library of Philadelphia, to hop up the stairs two at a time and into the stacks and ask James Baldwin or Pablo Neruda: “My cousin can’t read and I can. What do I do?” Except that now, praying in the temple of my literary saints was revealed as its own sick privilege. Still, I needed Baldwin and Neruda now more than ever, to make sense of one nation, one family, in which two cousins could walk such different paths.

  The timer rang. Nuchi kneeled at the bathtub and bent over its edge, her wet hair like tentacles slinking on the tub floor. I peeled off the shower cap, filled a cupful of water, and poured it over her head.

  “Did it stain my skin?” she asked. “Cheap dye does that sometimes.”

  “No,” I said, rinsing the dye away, “no stains.”

  * * *

  —

  I accepted Mr. Lafferty’s invitation to leave class early. It was a few moments before class let out and I savored the temporary privacy. Of all things, I hated myself most for crying during the debate. They would never take me seriously—the girl who blubbered when reasonable young men simply spoke. They hadn’t allowed for the possibility that Nuchi loved her children, but if I screamed and cried, they won on sheer optics.

  I wondered if Nuchi would’ve been mad at me for discussing her poverty in such detail. She was strong, a survivor. She hardly needed a weepy schoolgirl to protect her from a world whose cruelty she knew well. There was shame attached to being publicly poor and here I was, spreading the news.

  Had I seen Nuchi dance since that Fourth of July? Four years had passed since I’d spied her hips in motion. Four years of grief had been rent upon her—first a father, then a little brother, then a younger sister felled. Obituaries she would never read—she was, instead, her brethren’s living flesh-and-blood eulogy. Nowadays, Nuchi either avoided family gatherings altogether or sat in a corner. Despite her frailty, she still had the physical capacity to dance. Her stillness was, instead, evidence of a protest abandoned. Nuchi’s stillness was the ultimate, final precarity.

  The bell rang and students filed out from classrooms. Locker doors slammed open and shut, open and shut, open and shut.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Census data on Philly from www.pewtrusts.org/​~/media/​legacy/​uploadedfiles/​wwwpewtrustsorg/​reports/​philadelphia_research_initiative/​philadelphiapopulationethnicchangespdf.pdf. Central High data is based on me counting senior photos in the yearbook—so, a flawed method but it’s what I had on hand.

  *2 fivethirtyeight.com/​features/​the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/

  A Book Is Its Presence and Absence

  Every book, a horizon. A world I had no prior access to. An eye-opening.

  Books from Dr. Phillips’s class.

  Books from Giovanni’s Room, Borders, and the Free Library of Philadelphia.

  Books from mom’s favorite botánica.

  Books purchased by skipping meals for lunch money and walking home to save SEPTA fare.

  Qui Qui became two readers, split down the middle as if by an axe. There was real Quiara who read the book, same as ever. And there was What-If Quiara, who would never unearth the revelations in its pages. Each book became its presence and absence, its voice and its silence.

  Who would I be without Ralph Ellison? Without the battle royal’s electric brutality? Without five words strung together: “I am an invisible man”?

  Who would I be without reading Beloved on the El, North Philly zooming below? If I’d never known Sethe’s back scars? “He would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth.”

  Who would I be without The House on Mango Street? “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting.”

  I’d be more reticent, less bold, lonelier. My inner music would thrum more quietly. Those books were definitive experiences. Their impact on me felt unquantifiable yet certain as Abuela’s palm cupping dry rice. They were recipes for my inner life’s feast. They implicated me, demanded much of my consciousness, and thrust me into an American conversation.

  Books on the southbound 5 to the eastbound 42 on piano lesson Tuesdays. On the northbound Broad Street Line heading to Central. Books on 49th and Baltimore during trolley delays. Or on an Independence Hall bench, in the Saturday morning hush. Each one a stone on my path, guiding me one step further from Nuchi’s reality. And yet as I read with double vision, thinking of her often, each book had the strange effect of binding me to her. The more I learned of our divergence, the more I paid it attention.

  Mom’s Accent

  My non-Latino friends always had a comment when mom answered. After she handed me the phone they’d be like, “Her accent is decent!” “I don’t hear it,” I’d say. They’d be like, “Stop playing, yes you do.” Old friends found comfort in her vowel-rich “Hello?” New friends just got confused. If mom answered they’d be like, “Yo, are you a jungle fever baby? I thought you was white but your mom sounds pure Spanish Harlem!” Mom’s cadences were invisible to me, with a few exceptions.

  When mom said “obnoxious,” it rhymed with “precocious.” Precocious, obnoxious.

  When mom said “Home Depot,” it rhymed with “teapot.” Teapot, Home Depot.

  When mom said “realm,” it rhymed with “stay calm.” Stay calm, re-alm.

  I corrected her in the car. I corrected her in the living room. No cash register or playground was too public to fix her blunder. Sometimes it was embarrassment, which I pretended was charity, others it was the know-it-all cockiness of youth, and still others to tease a mystical giantess. Her numinous ass needed reminders that I was down here in the plebian realm. She never once said, “Fuck you, child, stop colonizing my ass.” But she never changed her pronunciation, either. We went to Home Depot a lot, so she was definitely asserting her right of mispronunciation.

  I wonder what it’s like. To grow up in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, learning English in first grade, starting with songs like “Pollito, Chicken,” to bring your papi his coffee on the farm, your papi who doesn’t speak a lick of English, made by your mami, who speaks even less, to leave Arecibo at eleven, come to Los Bronx as autumn breezes take hold, to have girl gangs mocking your spic accent and hurling rocks at your head, to wait until the janitor is done mopping and the floors are dry and he turns off the lights and is like “Out kid, I’m locking up,” and still the gang is there with the rocks, to have a Philly guidance counselor deny you a college conversation because I mean let’s be real, and anyway there was no money for college and anyway your parents didn’t make it past second grade so simmer down, to advocate for immigrant moms who can’t afford cereal or prenatal care, to be honored by the National Organization of Women for getting those immigrant moms cereal and prenatal care, to be hired by state senator Hardy Williams and while drafting his legislation to write in backdoor deals so your Boricua brethren aren’t left with crumbs, to do all that off a high school education and a hunger for books, and then to have your love child from a white hippie correct your pronunciation when she’s six years old. Then when she’s nine. Then when she’s seventeen and should fucking know better.

  As if the words I write are my language and not hers. The woman who taught me English. The woman who gifted it to me and I now drink ten-dollar prosecco and pay my river-view mortgage and take vacations off the English language she nursery-rhymed in my ear before I had words at all.

  I eat my words. I eat my corrections como una comemierda. Mom, if you ever read this book (and make it this far without disowning me), I ask you one favor:
break this English language today and tomorrow and the day after and bestow it new life with each breaking. Endow your fullness upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.

  Part III

  How Qui Qui Be?

  Dad Buys Me a Typewriter

  Soon after the horse farm wedding, dad and Sharon had left for Carroll Lane. A zip code over, the backyard woods were sliced in two by train tracks. Only one or two trains came through every hour, and the slick silver rails made good balance beams. The trees bordering the tracks were kind company, and though I never spoke to them directly as I had on the farm, their fellowship was preferable to the lonely shroud of my bedroom. Night sickness took hold, and I became well acquainted with the cold bathroom floor, the brown-tinted faux terra-cotta tiles. I would wake up to crickets and the moon’s blue-glow blanket, then sprint out of bed, the day’s meals spilling forth. I would quake and tremble, an elbow on the toilet for ballast, waiting for the next eruption. A few hours later, the bile would be spent. The first time this happened, unsure what was coming over me, I had made a mess of it: some sickness on my pillow and the brown tile floor. An internal voice said Learn to clean up after yourself: this is the way of visitors. If I didn’t ask for help, dad or Sharon would not get to deny me care. So I taught myself to hand-soap the sheets and ajax the bathroom floor. A small independence that put me, at three a.m., behind the wheel. It was early days after the separation. Custody was a biweekly matter, and my weeks at mom’s meant an hourlong commute from Philly to the “good school” near dad’s. It was the same daily trek, in reverse, that had once turned mom vacant and angry. Now I was latchkey of the highest order: training alone for two hours daily, too young for such voyages, my imagination now my one constant companion. Weeks at dad’s were logistically simpler—a fifteen-minute school bus rather than an hourlong train—but mom’s affection was a phantom limb. I had never gone a day without her touch, so I had never understood it as lifeline. Now there was no hand slapping my ass, no fingers raked through my hair, no cooing and expectation I would dance to her lullaby. I was an island, a castaway. I begged out of the biweekly home swap, moved to Philly permanently, and eventually transferred to a city school.

  Siblings were born and grew to toddlers, and dad moved to a rental with vaulted ceilings, wooden rafters, and abundant bedrooms. The tall sloping roof was handsome, with a steeply raked back lawn that echoed the architecture. I got no bedroom there, just a mattress on my brother’s floor. Finally, they purchased on Tinker Hill Lane: the very house where Sharon had spent her girlhood. Her parents gave them a good deal, which was apparently an insult to dad’s hopes and dreams. Still, they were ascending in status to proper American family.

  I visited the suburbs monthly now, like one visits a zoo, ogling a species through glass. The suburban nuclear unit: Oh, how their YMCA pool gleams! How their hair doesn’t frizz in August, how their thighs don’t touch! See them apply sunblock before going in water! See them cook different dinners for each family member’s preference! Oh, how they shuffle to gymnastics and rehearsal! Can we push back your visit three weekends, Quiara? So many birthday parties this fall!

  Compared to my North Philly cousins, they seemed normal. Over and over, the word tossed like a stone. Normal, normal. The mom and dad under one roof? Normal. The five-minute time-outs and weekly cash allowance? Normal. They had egg timers on their toothbrushes. Two minutes, two minutes! Even glimpsing the loneliness in Sharon’s insistent smile and the bitterness tossed in dad’s junk drawers, my envy of their whiteness chewed me like acid. Even preferring the Perezes’ corporeal, sometimes criminal parenting to the well-mannered masks of dad’s new living room, still the chorus sounded: normal, normal. Filmmakers loved capturing this polite sort of hell. The Free Library’s shelves sagged beneath the picket fence canon, so that even the dysfunction at dad’s was fucking aesthetic. They were an art-house genre. We, the Perezes, merited no novels, films, or dramas. I craved what they had: the routine, the constancy, the ubiquity of stories that explained them. Back in North Philly, mundane routines were fleeting. Everywhere lurked precarity, disruption the promise of each sunrise. The Perezes were in a constant state of mourning or preparing to mourn, because love was a synonym for tragedy. In North Philly, when we protested, did homework, or took on extra jobs, bedtimes were forgotten, meals skipped. In North Philly, no one invited the whole class to a birthday—there was a fifty-person family to host. In North Philly, when we danced, we pressed our shoulders against tomorrow’s surefire grief.

  * * *

  —

  Still, I favored dad and thirsted for his affection. I wanted him to shower me with countenance and attention, or to call every now and then and say hi. Everywhere I looked, a dad-shaped hologram shimmered. His froggy whisper. Keep your eye on the ball. Go read a book. His grip steadying my hold on the archery bow. How he let go of the bike seat and I stayed upright, balanced for the very first time. His patient breath, encouraging a campfire’s reticent flame. How he delicately licked the tissue-thin rolling paper and patted the joint closed. The cracked-open window of his pickup, sucking out the exhales, as January frost hammered me. Memories.

  At some birthday, back in grade school when I still spent weeks at Carroll Lane, when I still had a bedroom and dad still remembered my birthday, he made an event of driving me to Circuit City. Together we mazed through television aisles and surround-sound displays to the most extraordinary corridor in retail history: word processors. “Give ’em a spin,” he said. I typed my name on one machine after another, all the way up and down the aisle. One model could do italics and bold. One had built-in memory and could print copies. One did the accent in Alegría. Another could erase words or even sentences: I pressed delete and Quiara vanished from the page. Each had a three-digit price and I knew money was contentious between him and Sharon, but dad said choose anything. He bought me paper, ink ribbons, font inserts. Happiness tickled us in the checkout line. It was levity by the time the register guy called next! I was dad’s first child, the only one who knew his long hair and twenty-something laughter. If he had since pushed me from the airplane, the typewriter was a parachute made of our composite dreams. I set it up that same afternoon, typed in a frenzy. Treacly poems, fan essays about teenage heartthrobs, short stories. There was no connective aesthetic or topical focus, simply the act of imagination as a way to pass lonely days. When I wrote, I soared. If I ran out of ideas, I typed Top 40 lyrics to keep the jubilant racket going full-tilt. Dad took pride in the clatter: noisy proof of a fatherly triumph. He’d peek into my room, keep it up kid, then disappear again.

  Eventually, I took the typewriter to mom’s where I could use it more frequently.

  * * *

  —

  Now I was a senior with a Yale acceptance letter. Before leaving, I trained it out to the burbs. One last trek to dad’s. The trips had become intentionally rare. Overnights provided manifold chances for the word “guest” to rear its head. I’d lie in a bed not my own and a cavernous loneliness would swallow me till sunrise. A pillow borrowed, a blanket scrounged. Not one photo of me lived on a fridge layers-thick with their happiness. Honor roll certificates, team photos, and school portraits gleamed on end tables and sideboards, none bearing my name. By senior year I quietly vowed: day trips only. I wanted to see my six-year-old sister and four-year-old brother while honoring the house’s implicit instruction that I stay at arm’s length.

  Dad cranked the parking brake and my siblings ran up the path, begging me to build an obstacle course and play indoor HORSE. My little bro had a ringer where he tacoed himself, butt-first, into his hamper and hit a “backboard” shot off the ceiling. They were smart, lively, impeccably behaved children whose affection thickened a cord I wished to cut. How I yearned to set that daddy wish sailing. Love me, choose me.

  The horse farm was a distant memory, but Malvern’s whiteness remaine
d intact, uniform as rolled-out grass. Whiteness as landscape. There were no sidewalks—an omission that thwarted any potential mixing. In the 215, I strolled many blocks with ease. Between Central High, Quaker meeting, and piano lessons, I knew my way around white spaces, but Malvern’s homogeneity was chilling, complete. No wonder my kindergarten peers surrounded mom the day she brought cake. No wonder, years later, my four-year-old brother’s eyes sparkled at the sight of some Black hotel workers on the train platform. “Where did they come from?” he marveled aloud. Then, adopting a movie-trailer voice, he said, “They’re a secret gang who travels at night.” “They’re hotel employees at the end of a shift,” I said. He deflated at the crumpled fantasy.

  After traversing obstacle courses made of couch pillows and throttling me at HORSE, the kids washed their hands for dinner. It was this household’s nod to corporeality: handwashing. Otherwise hugs and kisses were kept to a minimum. The kids pushed buttered noodles around cereal bowls while we ate our adult dinner. Sharon tried her honey-voiced best to hide the unhappy marriage, and dad escaped his haiku of rage on occasion to laugh at one of the kids’ clever puns or jokes. Dad and Sharon had cultivated a civil enough rapport to mask their mutual hatred. Then Sharon nuked a Pepperidge Farm frozen cake, which had been pre-sliced for added convenience. The scene felt reminiscent of Duchamp’s Étant donnés…Realistic and pastoral, bordering on eerie.

  I planned to take the last R5 back to Philly but my siblings begged for a longer visit and I relented, promising a treasure hunt in the morning. I read them a bedtime story, then joined dad and Sharon in the living room for grown-up talk. Dad poured Coca-Cola into an etched tumbler and swirled ice cubes till they chimed like soft bells. The conversation turned from President Clinton to libertarianism, a new word to me. Were income and property taxes unfair? Not the particulars of implementation, but the very existence of enforced communal funds? It had been on Sharon’s mind. I leaned in, curious. “Say my neighbor has a child out of wedlock who she can’t afford to feed. No father in sight,” she began. “I see her at the mailbox, her belly’s looking pretty round. My taxes already support school lunches for her first kid. Now they’ll pay for prenatal care she can’t afford. Meanwhile, I pay my kids’ way. So I’m being penalized for her poor choices. How does that incentivize her to do better? How is that fair to me when I’ve been working hard?”