“Why Susan specifically?”
“I know you’ve done that with Sharon. You’re getting married soon. But you and Susan stopped being friends while you and mom were still together. So, did you? Take off your clothes and get into bed with Susan?” Dad’s yes changed our relationship forever. That’s how my carpenter god climbed down from his sawdusty pedestal and became the lonely stranger I saw on occasional weekends.
“I wish I knew how to lie to you, Quiara,” he said. He had spent so many years as my hero and there in the bucket seat of his parked pickup we held a wordless ceremony, beholding the new canyon that glittered between us. Its span was panoramic, its beauty devastating. Then we got out of the truck and went inside.
* * *
—
In the immediate wake of their separation, a melancholy lumbered from dad like a bear from hibernation’s cave. I saw it during weekend stays at the farm that had only recently been my home. He met me at the R5 platform and lit a cigarette as his truck pulled onto the country road. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, one hand on the steering wheel, “about leaving Malvern. I’m not sure where to, but some place far, where nobody knows me. Maybe California, by the redwoods. Start over from scratch. What do you think, sweetie? Would you want to come?” His voice cracked a bit as he laid out dreams and goals. “Money would be very tight until I could get some jobs. I probably couldn’t buy you new school clothes. It would mean leaving your mother and friends and family, possibly not seeing them for a very long time.” I was moved to be cast in dad’s escape fantasy, but the timing seemed off.
“Aren’t you and Sharon getting married, like, in a month?”
“Yup,” he said.
The next time he met me at the station, he had cut off all his hair.
Picking me up from the train, dropping me back at the train. Pulling into Wawa for gas, unfiltered Camels, and black coffee. This became our ritual of coming and going. There were more bucket seat confessions as though I was his one and only confidante. His relationship was loveless, he said between drags. No carpentry work was coming in. Their lack of nice clothes and Florida vacations fell on his shoulders. Listening was now daughterhood. Talk less, cry never, and demonstrate devotion with eye contact and head nods.
* * *
—
As to how a girl should behave at her dad’s wedding, no instructions had been provided. I knew very little about what the day would bring and didn’t realize till the morning of that it would happen on the horse farm, a twenty-minute walk from mom’s now-withered circle garden. The first time I visited dad after leaving, I had run out back to pick some sage, to roll it in my palms and smell its strong medicine. What had greeted me was a circle of wilted stems. Plants shriveled and bent, untended broken things. By the day of the wedding it was a bald spot.
Far beyond the hills where mom and I once prayed was a blue-stone mansion owned by old-money Main Liners. An elderly matriarch oversaw the farm estate, including the house that we rented. The wedding ceremony would happen by her manicured hedges, the reception overlooking her lily pond. But first, strangers gathered for portraits. Feeling socially adventurous, and unaware of any protocol, I squeezed into a large group photo. Unfamiliar folks were calling out across the patio, waving arms, shouting, “Get in! Hurry!” So it seemed the social thing to do. But after the first flash, Sharon tapped my shoulder and curled her finger, beckoning me aside. She lifted her veil and bent to my eye level, smiling. “This is a portrait of my family members. I’ll let you know if you’re needed. Today is my day.” Her smile seemed reasonable, even kind, but it was no kumbaya when that word left her lips. My. I had never heard it used as a weapon before. Today is my day. She adjusted her veil and returned to the photograph.
I left. My ballet flats became handhelds as I ran past cows and horses, past the algae pond where bees had pocked me, past the high spot on the hill and the bald spot below, into the woods. The twenty-minute jog wrecked my stockings, and now I walked too close to the forest’s interior bramble, letting thorns catch my dress and snag its fabric. I kicked a few old mushrooms into oblivion, exploding them loose from fallen tree trunks. Today is my day. Why hadn’t she just let me in the photo or at least explained who the strangers were? Today is my day. Why had I presumed affinity, thinking the wedding might, in fact, be our day? I shouldn’t make that mistake again, I thought. I shouldn’t assume any our, ever, and it was best to relinquish all desire to belong. Solitude was reliably safe and enjoyable. The woods understood that, they had taught me well. I spent a long time visiting my old friends: the ferns, the toads, the moss. Finally, relief found me, now that I had decided who to be. The girl alone. The girl who despises the English word “my.”
Buoyed by this new self-awareness, and lightened by all I had let go, I was prepared to return to the wedding. Sharon was a college grad whose aspirations didn’t include a depressed stepdaughter with an angry Boricua mother. And dad had never intended to kidnap me into a great tomorrow, he had only mumbled a nice wish in his truck. But it would not upset me now, with my new armor of solitude. If the breastplate and helmet were heavy, such was the cost of warrior protection. Even the dirt stripes beneath my fingernails whispered: You have a quiet forest within, retreat there and none can hurt you.
After the long walk back across the farm, I discovered the folding chairs had been moved. No longer a ceremonial grid on the grass, they now circled luncheon tables. Buffet trays were picked over. Crumpled napkins littered tabletops and people milled here and there, wineglasses and car keys in hand. “How was it?” I asked a stranger. “Lovely,” the old woman said, “didn’t you think?”
I cruised the crowd’s perimeter hoping dad would extract himself. I didn’t expect much. Maybe thirty seconds or a minute. He’d clap my back, muster a “Where ya been, kid?” with a fatherly blend of reprimand and forgiveness. And I’d offer him the simple truth. “Sorry, dad, I lost track of time.” But for the remainder of the evening he did not approach me, and now, knowing who I was, I could live with his silence.
Part II
All the Languages of My Perez Women, and Yet All This Silence…
Latina Health Vocab from the Late ’80s
Mom hadn’t always been into community activism. Before my birth, she started her professional life as a carpenter, doing nontraditional work in restoration. But soon after my entrance, during our original stint on the West Philly block, the common-law feminists across the street would steer mom’s path wide of woodwork. Ms. Penny was frumpy and friendly with an unbrushed pouf of curls. Ms. Nancy, a professor, was tall, husky-voiced, and no less warm, always handsomely put together in ascots, suspenders, and wool trousers: trans before I’d heard the word. They were the original white folks on our block, before dad moved in. Coming and going, they made a point of brief hellos with us kids, otherwise leading a quiet life behind closed doors and drawn curtains. Mom called them brave and told me to address them with the courtesy reserved for sanctified elders.
It was the Good Old Days. Before the Horse Farm. Before the R5 Train. Back then, I’d be running the alleyways with my brat pack and come home thirsty, knees all scraped up, to find Ms. Penny and Ms. Nancy in the living room with mom. Far as I could tell, the topic was professional womanhood—words like “union” and “rights” and “labor” flung with animation as I gulped water and snacked. Even though mom grew to resent white feminism, she never had an ill word about those two: rebels who built bridges right to mom’s doorstep. Through connections from her professorship at Temple, Ms. Nancy connected mom with training for women entering the trades, to get union jobs with equity salaries. Soon mom was organizing the other participants, cofounding Tradeswomen in Nontraditional Jobs in our living room. The women shared relevant info gleaned from union pals, swapped tidbits overheard at day jobs. The stories about union women getting harassed by their male counterparts horrified mom, so she tried for a nonunion gig building s
ets for Channel 17. The boss man seemed supportive and promised freedom to work as she pleased. Mom pounced.
Still, she wasn’t living to her heart’s content. The organizing, not the carpentry, had made her come alive.
It was through her relationship with Lilian Chance, the old-money matriarch who owned the horse farm, that mom’s life path veered toward real advocacy. Mrs. Chance came from a long line of suffragettes, and while we lived on the farm, mom took the initiative to knock on her door. Back in Arecibo, elderly folks were to be checked on regularly, and mom carried the tradition with her to Malvern. They both loved gardening. They both had unhappy partnerships. And even if Mrs. Chance’s marriage to a renowned engineer left her isolated, she was tremendously wealthy, could afford top-shelf spirits any time of day, and found renewed joy in mentorship.
“You need to go do your work,” Mrs. Chance told mom. “I’m going to make a phone call for you.” She reached out to Women’s Way, a grant-making and advocacy umbrella in Philly run by upper-class white feminists from the Main Line. It was an inner sanctum of highly educated tough old-money cookies who had met through Daughters of the American Revolution. One phone call later, mom went to work for CHOICE, a reproductive health and childcare hotline housed in downtown Philadelphia.
* * *
—
But mom’s deepest spark of activism had been lit years before my birth, during one of the scoliosis massages she used to give Abuela. Applying firm touch to Abuela’s hip relieved the back pressure, and one day mom saw a small scratch on Abuela’s belly she had never noticed before.
“Que es esto?”
“La operación.” The operation.
That’s how mom learned of sterilization abuse in her hometown, Arecibo. Abuela insisted it didn’t matter, water under the bridge, which made mom all the more insistent that the scar be explained. The details Abuela reticently spoke, downplaying each bit, were alarming. In the mid-fifties in Arecibo and neighboring municipalities, poor women of reproductive age were given vouchers for cash and services in exchange for receiving cutting-edge birth control. “They always throw in a candy to catch you,” Abuela said, then described the long line of women who rode the carro público into town. In the hospital, Abuela went to sleep, woke up, and was sent home. Pin-pan-pun. A revolving door. Laparoscopic tubal ligation was not yet legal on the mainland, but it became so prevalent in Arecibo that schools shuttered after birth rates plummeted. Never mind that hospitals didn’t test women beforehand, so that Abuela was unknowingly sterilized while pregnant with mom. Never mind that the doctors emphasized the ease and reliability of this birth control, conveniently neglecting to mention its permanence. The medical establishment correctly wagered on Puerto Rican women’s silence because what Boricua would publicly declare her barrenness? Or let the town know she’d been bamboozled out of motherhood? Keep it quiet and move on with your life. Don’t make a scene. Abuela was luckier than many, with a full roster of young’uns. It had been happening forever, anyway. Indeed, mom would learn that in the decades leading up to Abuela’s operación, the island’s sterilization rate reached one-third—the highest in the world.
But that day, massaging her mother, mom quietly freaked out. After completing the laying on of hands, she immediately logged the details in her diary.
* * *
—
“I had never heard of that shit before.” Mom told me Abuela’s tale while organizing a conference on sterilization abuse. Fourth grade had come and I was acclimating to the after. After the Horse Farm. After the Split. Mom and I now had more time together and I spent it, in part, proving myself a respectful listener. She rewarded my attention with battle tales of her life as a dissident, in the trenches fighting for health justice. For the conference, mom had flown in the physician who risked her career to bring the sterilization abuse into light. “Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías is a true American hero,” mom said. “We were the guinea pigs, Quiara. It was population control. She uncovered all the government documentation to prove it.”
Beneath my engaged front, though, la operación was difficult for me to wrap my head around. A voice inside me whispered, That can’t be real, that doesn’t happen. My own body had never faced such danger. Not when the bees attacked, not standing alone on a late-night train platform. That’s urban legend stuff, a Twilight Zone plot, I thought. But even as the doubts swirled, I knew they only doubled the importance of mom’s advocacy and added to a silence whose cost had been too high.
Mom had to be on time for the conference, and first stop was greeting the keynote speaker at Terminal A. With one foot stuttering on the gas and the other stammering on the brake, mom’s driving was not for the faint of heart. The herky-jerky ride made me yank a plastic bag from the glove compartment. It was chock-full of the “sick bags” collected from Acme and ShopRite, and they were used regularly. Luckily, she turned into a lot and my head began its slow unscrambling. She covered the car windows, slid out of jeans, and squeezed into the magenta suit that had been hanging by the rear window. She applied lipstick in the rearview and handed me the conference brochure, asking me to check for typos. She could apologize to the participants if times or titles had been misspelled.
For the event, I was placed in a room with typewriters and given the code to the Xerox: a young poet’s playground. I planned the next issue of my self-published teen idol mag, listing possible titles and potential cover stories. I typed Beatles lyrics, imagining Paul inking them on stained cocktail napkins. A one-pager came out in a burst of energy, about a man who lived in a box before hitting the numbers. Occasionally I peeked into the conference room, impressed by all the well-dressed and distinguished-looking Latinas. Mom stood at a podium addressing this powerful crowd, her reverbed voice a blend of ferocity and feeling. The words were still new to me. The stories she told, like the story of my grandmother’s sterilization, came from what felt like another world. But that world was now mine. I knew none of it, till I knew all of it.
I had never gone to work with mom—I had hardly known what her job was—but now, out of necessity, her office and car became second homes. Dad’s garage workshop had been a rhapsodic after-school program, the floating sawdust a daylit cosmos, my silent reveries interrupted only by power tools. But there was no room for daydreaming when mom took the wheel, flinging state-of-the-union sermons about Latina health crises. It was a loud-ass, mile-a-minute crash course and I better keep up, and I better listen hard, and I better believe because most of the world sure as hell didn’t. As she sped down the Parkway schooling me in what SIDA stood for, I mourned the soulful gardener’s shiatsu massages. This outspoken firebrand, awash in urgent matters of the flesh, rarely had time for tendernesses now. What happened to the soil-palmed gardener, hoeing in the sun, confiding in me of her ghost dreams?
Mom broke down the catastrophic infant mortality rate in the Hispanic community—of which, make no mistake, I was suddenly a part. Our babies died at twice the rate of white ones, so take note. She shared mounting evidence of an AIDS crisis decimating Hispanic women. There was, she insisted, a two-block North Philly pocket where mothers were dropping like flies. It came through their needle-sharing partners, mom hypothesized. Cervical cancer was through the roof, she moaned, because Latin American women thought a speculum betrayed their wedding vows. No Pap smears, no cancer detection. The undocumented mushroom farmers who lived outside the city were having basement babies, afraid a hospital delivery would get them kicked out of the country. Even police brutality threatened our pregnancies. Mom brandished forensic photos of a bruised pregnant dome. I was to note the wounds formed the shape of a cop’s boot. The woman had been assaulted by uniformed officers in broad daylight for lingering near a fight rather than clearing the crime scene. The baby came out with a lump on his head.
How to get the word out to the women most affected? How to urge Latinas to visit the bilingual OB-GYNs mom had vetted? How to assi
st in filing civil suits against the police? How to explain stovetop methods for needle sterilization? How to convince that prenatal care would help rather than lead to another barrio tale of fatal hospital neglect? As long as Latinas didn’t phone the hotline where mom worked, all the resources she mustered were as good as useless.
She had responded powerfully to each case encountered: conferences with councilmen, marches with top-notch Hispanic leadership, multiple petitions, contentious Fraternal Order of Police negotiations, press releases of bruised bellies and urgent statistics. The incremental changes that resulted, however, affected those nearest the levers of change: politicians, healthcare providers, police commissioners, community leadership. Mom was not yet reaching la gente with the depth or breadth that marked a bootstraps trailblazer.
“They don’t have phones!” mom shouted to the dashboard one night. “They don’t have fucking telephones!” And though that struck me as sad, indicative of a poverty I’d once wished Malvern could glimpse for a second, mom said it like she’d struck gold. “Bingo! Maferefún! Cabiosile pa’ Changó! Thank you, Creator, for always pointing my compass toward the path!” We sped through North Philly with the windows rolled wide as mom shouted multilingual praise to busted streetlights. She thanked gods I had heard of and plenty I hadn’t. At Abuela’s, we had late-night rice and beans in tin bowls. Abuela fed a daily stream of blood and zip-code family, accepting payment in the form of stories, which, en el barrio, were never in short supply. The only things more bottomless than Abuela’s old pots were her listening ears. I related, preferring to absorb the cacophonous oral histories quietly, but savoring them nonetheless.
My Broken Language Page 4