My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  “Which house does she live in?” I’d never seen the woman in question. Then again, I had spent very little time at this house.

  “It’s hypothetical.”

  “You don’t believe in helping your neighbor?”

  “Not in being forced to. Of course, I can choose to, but that’s my personal prerogative.” This was my opportunity to yawn, claim sleepiness, and pad off to bed. But they had apparently decided I was an adult now, prime for grown-up conversation, and the phrase barreled in before I could escape.

  “It’s the inner-city problem,” dad said. He had been making Sharon-doesn’t-know-shit eyes up till then, but now this seemed a rare point of alignment between them.

  “What does that refer to?” I asked. What I meant was whom does that refer to, but he didn’t catch my implication, and I didn’t have the courage to say what I meant.

  “Take public education. Teachers are the worst-paid employees in this nation, when they should earn more than doctors. And schools need up-to-date textbooks. No one’s questioning that. But no budget can replace actual parenting. Values come from the home.”

  “Values like…?”

  And so it began.

  Values? Here’s one. Graduate high school. Without getting pregnant. Create a two-parent household. Marry.

  But you never married mom, even though she wanted to.

  Put a hundred dollars toward books instead of Nikes.

  So Nuchi’s boys don’t deserve a nice thing?

  There’s Air Jordans that cost three times that. But people let their kids starve to buy sneakers.

  Like Flor? It’s fine if her pantry’s bare, but she better not have good shoes.

  Eat less McDonald’s. Your child is obese.

  Okay, stop. Please?

  I hate to say it, because it’s the children who suffer.

  You mean Danito, JJ, and Candi? I bet it keeps you up at night.

  But at the end of the day, I tend my backyard, so go tend yours.

  Ah. The English word “my.” Now I remembered. My backyard. Right.

  It’s a shame…

  Because there are children involved…

  But having compassion doesn’t mean there’s no accountability.

  Inner City was some kind of code all right. Culture of Poverty had a lofty ring. They couldn’t mean the Perez family, no no, surely not. They might as well have been talking about a rodent infestation at an upscale department store—surprisingly kind rats, to be sure. They took great pains never to call them nasty creatures—though if a rat grazed Sharon’s ankle she would’ve leapt up onto the nearest chair. Hey, dad felt for the rats. But the real conundrum, of course, was which department store would provide a better shopping experience next time.

  Clink clink went their ice.

  Man, I started having this fantasy…A van pulls into their driveway. This occasions some concern because on Tinker Hill Lane, where there are no sidewalks, you don’t touch someone’s property unless invited or to pull a three-point turn. The van pulls all the way to the garage, then the engine goes quiet and car doors slam. By the time the doorbell rings, my entire Puerto Rican family’s gathered out front. “Hey, we hear you’re talking about us. Can we join the conversation?”

  Who were dad and Sharon anyway? King and queen of Shit-Don’t-Stink Land? Where were my child-support checks? Not in our 215 mailbox, that’s for sure. Someone needed to check them, turn on the houselights and stop the show. Probably, I should have. But I stayed quiet as a confidante, a nonconfrontational good girl, the dutiful eldest, cooperative and diplomatic, every unvoiced retort piling up and burning. Once I had ajaxed the bathroom floor, now I ajaxed my mouth and I hated myself for it. Any onlooker would think me their ally.

  Clink clink as the ice cubes melted into Coca-Cola.

  Did I, in truth, have more compassion than dad and Sharon? Hadn’t I once seen mom mounted by an ancestral spirit and another time slicing the blade across a chicken’s jugular—hadn’t I beheld she who lullabied me with repulsion? Toña roared into mind, her church-floor wailing at Big Vic’s funeral, her corpulent limbs pooling on the marble floor. Hadn’t I stepped around and past my elder’s valley of darkness, vowing not me, dear god, I will never be so grotesque. Hadn’t I witnessed the aunt I claimed to love and reeled, thinking, beast, swamp creature, ghoul, monstrosity. From all angles, it was I, not dad or Sharon, who hosted the horror show.

  Drip drip went the condensation down dad’s etched tumbler.

  And the memory came…Oh god, unremember it. (Drip drip pooled the condensation at the base of dad’s tumbler.) And boom: I was thirteen again, in Sharon’s minivan after she met me at the train. She asked how things had been, I mentioned highlights from my week with mom and my baby sis, Gabi. The van fell silent. Sharon’s eyes left the road, pinning me till I met her gaze. “Please don’t talk about Virginia around me. Or Gabi. I don’t enjoy hearing about them. It makes me uncomfortable.” Then she turned her gaze back to the road. Banishing mom’s name was ask enough, but Gabi was a damn baby. I told myself, That’s it, this is my last visit to dad’s. I told myself, How ’bout I mention mom and Gabi in every goddamn sentence for the next twenty-four hours? She will regret the day, I swore. She will suffer my wrath, I vowed. I will never, ever love you. I hurled the thought from the back of my head, eyes fixed out the window. Say anything, I begged myself. Say no, at least. Instead I bit my lip. Really? Not one word? Traitor. I removed mom and Gabi from my mouth for every visit, for years.

  Clink clink went the ice on the sitcom soundstage. Clink clink went north on the wholesome American compass. Innocuous and jovial, all in good fun. Sure you don’t want some soda, kid? They left me two options that night in the living room: be white or be Puerto Rican. Their rules. They forced my hand. Fine. My heels dug further into North Philly. My soul took a side that lasts to this day.

  If I’d had Ginny’s cropped afro or Nuchi’s walnut hue, this dialogue would not have happened in my presence. It was disquieting, how my fair skin provided familiarity, how it gained me access to a conversation that blistered my heart. Around light-skinned Qui Qui, Malvern held forth with impunity. My silence was their playground. I was accomplice to the slander and to my own uneasy awakening.

  Part of me, to this day, remains in that living room, hearing the ice clink and swirl. Quiara is the sentinel who never took the R5 home. That after-dinner chat, and the fury it ignited, are as much of a birth as I can claim in my life. A picket fence of civility gleamed around me. I didn’t have the language yet to tramp it to the ground, but I swore to eventually find one.

  * * *

  —

  I boarded the R5 in the morning after the treasure hunt was over, telling myself day-trips only. No sleep came on the ride, though I tried. I’d have happily woken up in Delaware if it meant forgetting the visit for an hour. Disassociation wrapped me in its mist. This always happened on the train home from dad’s. The weighted blanket of numbness. Life as a blur, ten million miles away. A comforting, cool-to-the-touch hazy blue from which no tears need spring. I pulled Yale’s course catalogue from my bag. Underlines marked classes I might take, dog-ears marked disciplines I’d not previously heard of. I was firmly on the path to assimilation, wasn’t I? The kind of bootstraps American who rises above and gets out. During the overnight visit, Yale had hovered, shimmering, above the proceedings. While serving microwaved cake, Sharon even invited me to participate more fully in my sister’s life. Perhaps a campus visit? An overnight in your dorm?

  Out the train window, the Main Line’s manicured lawns gave way to gravel. St. Joe’s Prep’s freshly painted ball courts, fifteen minutes later, were milk crates on wood poles. Electric wires swooped, water towers stood firm, and graffiti whipped by in a here-and-gone blur.

  She Said Norf Philly and One-Two-Free

  That same summer Gabi ran in naked. She
had four years to my seventeen. Her hair and body dripped from the bath. It was a high-speed chase wrangling her into pjs. Her pouf of curls, typically bouncing in a cloud, now slithered down her back like wet snakes. Taunting me, she circled the room. Any time I got close wielding the towel, she shrieked and darted away. It was our usual game but today she froze abruptly, shocked by her reflection in the full-length mirror. She ogled the chubby nude reflection. Experimented with poses: forward-facing, profile, hand-on-hip. She poked her butt cheek so its fat jiggled. She smooshed her abundant belly into a volcano whose tip was the navel, then sucked in Mount Gabi till her ribcage protruded. Finally came a grand proclamation: “My belly is round as the earth!”

  Here was big sisterhood: watching a child discover herself. At four, Gabi had no reason to doubt her life force—planetary in scale. Girl held the cosmos in her torso. Immediately, I was improvising a refrain to DMX’s “Party Up.” Y’all gon’ watch my belly curve! Up in here! Up in here! Y’all gon’ watch my jiggle butt! Up in here! Up in here! Naked, she busted some one-leg moves, a hopping flamingo to my serenade. She would dance a loop around the room, then pause before the mirror and palm her stomach. “Round as the earth!” she would shout, before repeating the orbit.

  * * *

  —

  When she was two days old, I thought Gabi’s crying would be the worst, best, and only part of my adolescence henceforth. On the ride home from the hospital, her howls were earth-shattering and unstoppable. The tiny life in the contraption beside me hit a high note to decimate a rabid dog. Pop eyed me in the rearview and chuckled, Get used to it! Later that afternoon, other sounds would emerge. A nursing gurgle, a sleeping purr. But her distress, I knew quickly, would become my own. By the time we turned onto our block and carried her up past Eleguá, the baptism was complete. Reborn into sisterhood.

  Mom had labored for eighteen hours and Gabi’s head, blocked at the cervix, finally burst forth and ripped mom like paper. Hollers drummed the birthing suite as Gabi exploded toward us, and a flood of crimson and murk drenched the linens beneath mom’s knees. The wriggling newborn was gooey, a messy ordeal, a weird wet relative. Then the midwife laid the baby atop mom’s breast, which throbbed from anticipation. I couldn’t believe mom’s boob was visibly enlarging, and she wept at the baby’s first drink.

  The Baby. Long after bottles then pampers were outgrown, that was her name. Mom, can I put The Baby to sleep? Mom, can I take The Baby to Clark Park? Mom, can I nuke The Baby a Cheez Whiz sandwich?

  Because “Quiara” catches in a young mouth, my name became Ra Ra.

  Ra Ra and The Baby. The Baby and Ra Ra.

  By Gabi’s side, I regressed to a childhood more playful than my original go-round. She was my do-over youth. Not once did I sit on the steps and observe her from a distance. I never wondered what size batteries made her go nor did I crown her a god, lying prostrate at her magnificence. More accessible than my cousins, less towering than mom. I dove in headlong to the mire of playtime. We danced together daily. Inhibitions were dropped like old school clothes. I had a body now, because I had a sister.

  My bony hip was The Baby’s throne. Before she could walk that’s how we rolled to the corner store, the pizza place, the cheesesteak counter. My back went numb before I’d put her in the stroller, and when feeling returned, she’d be back on the hip-throne.

  From the get-go we were Odd Couple Extraordinaire. She said Norf Philly and one-two-free. Her past tenses were runaway locomotives. We played-ed-ed in the park then biked-ed-ed home! She was made of exclamation points. When I got her dressed in the morning, the diva threw fits. “No, Ra Ra! Socks and skirt gotta match! I been told-ed-ed you that every day!” My fair skin and freckles offset her matte tan. My gross bony kneecaps a punchline beside her ample thighs, dimpled and rippling. So rotund were her nalgas that from the bathroom she’d holler: “Ra Ra, come wipe me!” Girl’s butt was too plump for a full reach-behind. But if the word “sister” confused people, their confusion became our game.

  Since she took herself as the scandalous half of our duo, I endeavored to surprise her with boldness. Like when we walked to Purple Fox for fish hoagies and a man called out the driver’s side, “Hey, baby, smile!” “I’m not your baby,” I hollered. The Baby’s jaw dropped. “You sassy!” she sang, highest praise.

  And when, senior year, I had a stomach so full of butterflies I nearly choked on their wings, I sat The Baby down on the front porch. A talk was to be had. Sister business. Not even a best friend, my same age, had earned this ceremony:

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Is it a joke?” she asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because you smiling funny.”

  I tried to fix my face.

  “Whaaaa? Tell me, stop being weird!”

  “I like a boy.”

  “He likes you, too?”

  “I think so.”

  Then she nodded, like he better. And she gripped my knee like an elder implying good luck, kid, cuz love makes a mess of things.

  When the boy in question met Gabi, she threw herself on our Scrabble board. It was a tantrum for the ages. Her limbs became windshield wipers, sent the Z tile beneath the kitchen stove and the S ricocheting upstairs. On his second visit, we were careful to pay her more attention. She sat on his lap, chitchatted about Ricky Martin’s cute smile, then farted and asked if he would leave cuz it stunk so bad. On his third visit we made clay snakes from a kit. When his snake was complete, she lifted it gently. “You did the zigzag perfect.” Then she smooshed it in one squeeze. Before he came to get me for senior prom, Gabi dressed for the event in pink overalls, pink-trimmed socks, and a soft-serve twist with pink baubles. The big event, no one had told her, would happen off-site, making our front porch photos simply the sendoff. “Why can’t I be your date, too?” she wept, big tears falling, as the boy slid a corsage onto my wrist and mom snapped photos.

  Having a kid on your side like that? There’s no hurdle you can’t leap over. It’s narcotic to be a girl’s whole universe, to have tantrums thrown in your honor. You forget about that daddy wish for a day. The bloodsickness that nipped Tico’s heels fades away. You lose track of how long Flor has been M.I.A., and you visit Cuca less because girlhood lives right there in your home. The conundrum of mom’s worship recedes when Gabi’s telling stupid knock-knock jokes on the hammock out back.

  One night after tuck-in, after Czerny and Chopin had been exhausted and AP Spanish flash cards had been studied, I wanted one more whiff of the girl. Her sleeping purr was the same as on day one, though she was nearly five now. I nuzzled into her neck and inhaled youth’s perfume. It evoked Cheerios mornings, swing-set afternoons, mosquito evenings in the alleyway hammock. Then I noticed a string coming out her mouth. A choking hazard. But when I tugged, she clamped her jaw down. Now I looped the string around my finger and pulled till red shone between her sleeping lips. I leaned in close. Yes, there flowed the tiniest ribbon of blood, like the first swirl of yellow from a punctured yolk. The Baby was bleeding. Alarmed, I plunged a finger into her wet mouth, searching gums and cheek, realized the string was knotted around a tooth. I had nearly pulled the thing out. I startled backward so that my head hit the bathroom door. How could mom and Pop fail to mention Gabi’s first loose tooth? How could they dare try removing it without me? As if she was theirs and not mine. Gabi gnawed the string dreamily, then turned over and continued purring.

  It had been close. I had nearly torn a piece of her body. The world, I knew, stood ready to do such things to girls, chubby Norf Philly ones especially. Tie strings around their wobbliest bits and begin the demolition. The day she sang in the mirror—round as the earth!—while palming her big belly, I had wondered: How long, this utopia? When will the belly become a source of horror?

  * * *

  —

  And so as Yale approached, it became less a horizon tha
n an abandonment. I was in deep for two Philly souls. A sister and a boy. I ached from the thought of a day without them; four years was torturous, an impossibility. He left first for college in Minnesota and I cried into my pillow, sure the college girls would be blond and a Boricua crush from West 50th would be forgotten. It was the noisy pillow cry of a million teen movies. The kind I had never let loose during childhood conundrums. Not during mom’s possession or blood sacrifices, as I needed to remain undercover. Certainly not during dad’s slow fade to stranger, which was omnipresent as air, too everywhere for tears. Now my snot and howls were tributaries in the swamp of teenage heartbreak.

  I didn’t cry when mom and Pop drove off the freshman quad and Gabi craned back for one last wave. But betrayal’s heavy veil descended when they turned onto Elm Street, out of view. I was a sister-leaver. I was cold-turkey in an indifferent world. College meant abandoning Gabi midcourse, entrusting her flourishing to sinister hands. My fears, it turned out, were dead-on. Mean teachers would taunt the Norf Philly in her cadence, declare her remedial, put her in an ESL class. Four years of schoolyard fat jokes would pummel her. And I would miss it all, offer no nightly antidote. I knew Gabi was live bait in the Skinny Pale Cabaret that called itself America. I wanted to whisper in her sleeping ear, to vaccinate daily against the slander: You are mother earth, sis, don’tcha forget it. But she was gone.