This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  On that first trip to Guatemala, to the land my father still longs to return to someday, to the home my mother carries in her heart but vows never to inhabit again, I found other ways to communicate. I used gestures or made up words like watchear and la ketchup. Or, I begged my older sister to translate. She had a tighter grip on Spanish, perhaps because she was the first born and had more time to absorb the sounds and rhythms of the language, before I came along. During our visit to Guatemala my parents, it seemed, were around but not available. Either they remained plugged into hushed conversations around the table at night, adults sipping black coffee in which they dipped torn pieces of pan dulce, or they were totally unreachable in the midst of back-slapping laughter with neighbors and relatives they hadn’t seen in over a decade. So I was left to fend for my own words in which to express what it was I wanted.

  What I really wanted was to start fresh, to learn a language that was mostly my own, and not to subject myself to the burning humiliation of getting a word wrong in Spanish. So in sixth grade, when students were asked to select one language elective—French or Spanish—I imagined myself grabbing fistfuls of French words like a gambler extending his arms across a felt-covered blackjack table to collect his winning chips. I was greedy. I wanted three languages, I said. I wasn’t yet aware that I would always mourn the days when I only reached for words in Spanish, for the nights when I dreamed effortlessly in Spanish. Back then, though, I rationalized, it wouldn’t matter—I was learning French!

  In college, like in high school, I excelled in French and I ended up double majoring in International Relations and French Studies. I could easily write a five-page academic paper in French and pass an oral exam. And during my junior year when I lived with a host family in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, I could argue with my six-year-old host-brother, in French. He liked to jump on the mustard-yellow leather couch in the high-ceiling formal living room. Arrête! Arrête maintenant! I’d say, without trying, without making those mini-bridges of translation in my mind before my lips moved. French came easier to me than Spanish.

  Sometime in my twenties I read on a magnet: What would you do if you just gave yourself permission? The question throbbed in my subconscious, or my brain, or my heart, or wherever these questions live and feed and eventually demand your attention. What would I do if I could just give myself permission? I had never gone to Guatemala by myself, alone. So I gave myself permission to learn, or perhaps relearn, Spanish. I read, wrote, listened, spoke, and yes, eventually dreamed in Spanish.

  During the immediate years that followed, I would return to Guatemala again and again, even getting married in the old cobblestoned capital of Antigua, surrounded by friends and family, in English and Spanish and of course, those languages that transcend words—food, music, dance. By virtue of being fluent in Spanish, particularly as an adult, I experienced my surroundings differently. No one giggled at me. Instead I found I was able to speak of politics, women’s rights, and the cost of chicken. I held this new relationship to Spanish so tight, gripped it in my palm, my fingers curled around it. I belonged.

  Later, back in the States when I was pregnant with my son, like many expectant mothers I read everything I could about the “growing life inside me.” Blogs, websites, articles, books. This was my first pregnancy and I was deeply aware of its biology, and its magic. I had read about the benefits of expecting mothers singing to their babies in the womb, talking to them, reading to them. My own mother urged me to speak to the baby in Spanish. And I did, but with skepticism that the short phrases and occasional conversations wouldn’t be enough, that eventually, English would swallow any crumbs in Spanish whole, like it did me. I gave up before I had even tried.

  Once my son was born, and I mean the second the midwife thrust my son’s slimy body onto my chest, I cried. That was the first language, my animal language. Then I said, “Yo te quiero.” I love you. My first words to him needed to be in Spanish. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t know in advance what I was going to say, not say. But then, after dunking him ever so briefly onto my chest, the midwife passed him like a football to a nurse who whisked him across the room where a team of doctors poked him and tapped him and used a suction thing to eliminate the liquid in his mouth, lungs. I yelled to my husband, who was hunched over our baby, “Talk to him!” I watched all this from my delivery bed in the hospital, never doubting that my baby would live. Instead, what I worried about in those first minutes of his life, had to do with words, sounds. The nurse’s Boston accent, “Come on, honey, you gotta push!” The doctor’s doctory language. The voice on the intercom paging a surgeon. The sound of the air-conditioner buzzing. The early morning birds cawing in the distance before the metal and rubber of traffic were muting the sounds of nature. It was all wrong. My husband needed to speak to our son. My son needed to hear him, us. And he did. And our baby woke up, mad and wet, crying and wailing. Animal sounds.

  A few weeks after he was born, after the foggy, hormonal, timeless stretches where I traded the ability to sleep, eat, pee, or shower for those indescribable nose-kisses with my newborn, I could finally think again. One thought: he is growing so fast. The next: he needs to learn Spanish right now, while his brain is a sponge or what not. Hurry, hurry! We have to download nursery rhymes in Spanish, I told my husband. And where are all those picture books in Spanish? The ones we had put on the baby shower registry? I know! I said, remembering a chapter I had read in some baby book. You speak to him in English and I will speak to him in Spanish, okay? Okay!

  That didn’t happen.

  We played a few songs, though.

  During these early months when my son was an infant I attended a group for new mothers inside an old church on a one-way hilly street in Jamaica Plain. The group met once a week. Mothers sat in a circle as we held our babies in our arms or placed these warm cooing bundles onto baby blankets that we had stretched out onto the circle-shaped rug.

  One particular Wednesday, I asked the facilitator to hold my son while I ran downstairs to use the bathroom. Sure, this is why I’m here, she said. So I reveled in the weightless journey down the hall and down the stairs, nothing in my hands, no bag digging into my shoulder, no need for a wobbly balancing act over the toilet where I always feared dropping my baby. No. I used the bathroom, took my time. I washed my hands! As I began to make my way back upstairs I noticed a bulletin board—yellow and blue fish, pececitos, painted onto white paper plates. Numbers, letters, shapes, colors, all in Spanish. A Spanish immersion preschool. I took an informational folder with me back upstairs, collected my baby, and hugged him tight the rest of the class.

  I didn’t read through the folder immediately. To be honest, at the time I couldn’t imagine leaving my baby with strangers, not then, not in a year, two years, not ever. But even long before my son turned one, I felt the buzz of the preschool waitlist hysteria like an annoying mosquito in my ear. Sign up my son for preschool now? He can’t even keep his own head up. I wasn’t going to be one of those parents.

  I filled out the forms. Better to be safe. But then I blinked and it was September. Time to go back to work. My son spent that first year with my cousin and my mother, and yes, she spoke to my son in Spanish and yes, this made me feel less guilty for not speaking consistently to him in Spanish. Soon it was summer again. September. This time my now one-and-a-half-year-old boy would start school. Spanish immersion.

  I admit, many days I wonder if he is too young to spend stretches of time away from his mama. The guilt is a cement cloak I wear most mornings when I drop him off and swallow the question: Will he be okay? That he is hearing Spanish all day from his teachers (native Spanish speakers), that the songs they sing and the books they read and the games they play are all in Spanish, this is what soothes me.

  Still, there were two things I wasn’t prepared for: the expensive tuition, and the fact that most of the other kids are white.

  My family and I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country. I get that. Yet, what I
truly didn’t anticipate was that while learning Spanish day after day, my son would do so beside blonde and red-haired children who don’t look like him, whose parents don’t look like me. Does it matter? For me, the experience of speaking Spanish was always grounded in family, place. For my son, it will likely be associated with art, music, early friendships, and discovery. What will this mean for him later? For his identity? Will my son learn the kind of Spanish that sticks close to the bone, his core being? The way it does for me? When I lift him out of his crib and he asks for meatballs, is he coming off of a dream dreamt in Spanish?

  I don’t know.

  The truth is, I want to protect him. Yes, I want to empower him with fluency in Spanish, his mother’s mother tongue. But I want more. I want for him to be able to open and click that gate between languages with total confidence, never hunching his shoulders to embarrassment, shame, for forgetting where he started. I want him to keep this tradition alive for his kids and their kids. For all of us. And yes, I want him to sit between the blonde and red-haired children and feel at home in both languages. He is lucky to be learning in a time and space where Spanish is treated—mostly—like an asset, and not a disability he must conquer, like testing out of an English as a Second Language track at school. For instance.

  I want him to understand that Spanish is part of us, our family and our bond. I want him to feel that the words in Spanish are more than just an extra warm blanket piled on him at night, but that they are an extension of my love for him, for who he is and who he will become.

  By the time my now two-year-old son and I make it downstairs, into the kitchen on this overcast spring morning, and I prepare to take meatballs out of the freezer, he suddenly announces that he doesn’t want meatballs, he wants yogurt. Okay, I say. Yogurt it is. Then, between yawns, I let the dog out. Fill her silver bowl with food that makes a clang when it hits the bottom of the dish. Reach for a mug. Grind the coffee beans. Above the noise, I hear a small, sugary voice that requests, “Más please.” My son. Mi amor. And I give myself permission to leave words behind momentarily, think not of the day and its many tasks ahead, and instead I listen in the distance for the birds that fly in wind that has no language.

  Jennifer De Leon is the editor of Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and a current City of Boston Artist in Residence. Her short story “Home Movie,” originally published in the Briar Cliff Review, was chosen as the One City, One Story pick for the 2015 Boston Book Festival. Named the 2015–2016 Writer-in-Residence by the Associates of the Boston Public Library, De Leon is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University and a GrubStreet instructor and board member. She is working on a YA novel, Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From, which received a Walter Dean Myers Grant from We Need Diverse Books.

  The Privilege Button

  Maya Jewell Zeller

  Fairwood Park II HOA, Article II—Protective Covenants, Section 2.04—Temporary Structures: No trailer, basement, tent, shack, garage, barn, camper or other outbuilding or any structure of temporary character erected or placed on the property shall at any time be used as a residence.

  For nine years my husband and I lived in a beautiful turn-of-the-century four-bedroom house on North Jefferson Street, near West Central Spokane. We pulled as many weeds as we could work out of the cracks between the rocks, planted perennials—lilacs, phlox. We put plastic on our windows to help keep out the cold in winter, and when the temperature dropped into the negatives for over a week, we used a hair dryer to thaw the pipes that ran too close to the un-insulated wall in the basement. We tried wrapping them, too, but it seemed their freezing was a condition of their location, of the old foundation. There were things about the house that we couldn’t fix, and we loved it for its imperfection, for its charm.

  I always felt rich in this house, the first I’d owned. When we took out a loan for $100,000 in 2005, I thought we’d spent a fortune. We were homeowners! Or, at least, our payments each month went toward something we might get to keep. When I was growing up, my parents were renters, even squatters; sometimes, we lived in a garage. Sometimes, we lived in a van. When I repeated this to my husband, years into marriage, he shook his head and said, with a realization I hadn’t reached, “Maya, you were homeless.”

  I had never thought of myself as homeless. Itinerant, maybe, gypsy, sure—I didn’t yet know the term’s problematic usage. Not homeless. More like a mouse after a flood, finding a new place for its nest.

  No; our friend Joe was homeless; he tracked us down each Thanksgiving and gorged himself on the salmon my brother caught. He bummed a joint from my dad, took a shower if we had one. Joe was homeless—sometimes he had a car, sometimes he didn’t. When he did, it was full of his stuff. But we always had a roof, of some sort. We always had access to natural spaces (a benefit often ignored as a privilege of those in rural poverty). We didn’t always have a bathroom, or running water, but we always had a roof, a basin, a wood stove. We went to school (usually). I don’t remember being hungry for more than a few days at a time.

  My mother used to sing Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” while she darned our socks, and my father hummed “King of the Road” when he was only two beers into the night and still feeling jolly. When my father occasionally took up driving a tow truck, our homes were surrounded by cars in the bushes, treasure troves where we might find free cassette tapes, T-shirts. They were playhouses, magic passageways to other lives and times. We weren’t homeless.

  Fairwood Park II HOA, Article II—Protective Covenants, Section 2.05—Minimum Dwelling Cost: No single family dwelling shall be permitted on any lot at a cost of less than $100,000 exclusive of land.

  When I began college in 1997, the socioeconomic privilege of my peer cohort was often taken for granted by my instructors, who would say things like, “Well, we can’t really understand, being middle class.” They used words like cul-de-sac and IRA, and sometimes made cultural references from TV shows like Seinfeld and stations like CNN. They said The Dow is down two points; I kept my eyes low. I didn’t really know what middle class meant, though I’d been passing so far, and I spent a few years revamping my understanding. When I took a course in the culture of poverty as it related to education and language register, I finally understood: I grew up “in poverty,” “in a family of addiction.” But I knew how to move between formal and informal language register, so no one picked up on my past. Still, I was what we were studying: how to move from a culture of poverty into a culture of education. How to serve an “at risk” population. In my teaching practicums, my “at risk” students had family lives like mine: cycles of addiction, impermanent addresses, free and reduced lunches. During these discussions, my classmates often said things like “I had no idea so many people lived without blank and blank,” or “I realize now how lucky I was that both my parents went to all my soccer games,” or “I always thought of poverty as something that happened because of your choices, but it turns out it can be beyond your control.”

  I kept quiet; I was not interested in being a lab rat. I was not interested in changing, in their view, from the competent, assertive person I’d worked hard to be known as, into an anomaly of class transcendence. How many questions would follow? They were questions I did not feel comfortable answering. I still don’t.

  Two years ago, my husband and I were browsing Zillow and came across a home, a 4 bed/3 bath, with a beautiful treed yard near a partially protected wildlife area, outside the city, in the suburbs, on a quiet cul-de-sac.

  I’d always thought of suburbs with some measure of disdain. Suburbs were those places where children had bicycles from the time they were small, where fathers never came home drunk or yelled at the moon, where there were Christmas lights and where Santa always brought gifts, and where people believed it was Santa—those places so many of my peers in college imagined just meant America.

  As I grew into my identity as part of the working middle class, I held less disdain, but I never coveted that w
orld. Materially, I felt comfortable in our first home—it felt like enough. I was with the people, my people. There were renters among us; people who didn’t water their lawns; people who didn’t shovel their sidewalks; cars on blocks; tiny homes with large gardens; the occasional woman walking down the street with her garbage bag of clothes—I’d go out and see if she needed a ride to the shelter or a bus ticket to somewhere better than she’d been, a relative, maybe, a friend. I stood at my fence with my baby on my hip and I talked with Richard from across the street; he reminded me of my father: he said shit a lot, even in front of my little one, and when he developed an infection and abscess in his foot, we drove to Walgreens to buy his iodine ointment, kept watch over his place while he was in the hospital hitting on Wendy, his nurse. And there was a recent trend to have block parties; our neighbor Dave was starting a community garden, a farmers’ market. The neighborhood had a sense of community, of a little dirt in the cracks.

  Lately, though, we’d had nightly break-ins to our car, and the sirens screaming by all hours of the day made me constantly anxious. I’d never acclimated fully to city living. I couldn’t adjust to how close we were to major roads; our house was viewable by Google satellites, the tree cover too thin. We joked that we probably should not grow pot in our garden among the tomatoes, even if we wanted to. Outside our oasis of a yard, our children would grow up mostly playing on pavement, with the neighborhood kids who roamed freely, like quail, down the block. Would our children miss the fields they didn’t know? Could we bring the woods to their door?

  We calculated the economic reality. We weren’t debt-free, but we were frugal, and we both had decent, working-class jobs. I was teaching as a part-time professor; my husband coached cross country and track. After nine years, we didn’t owe much on our house; we’d paid down our loan quickly. So we could afford to move to this beautiful home outside of town. I had never dreamed of living in a suburb, but suddenly, after five years teaching at a university, I wanted to, and a small part of me, the part of which I was ashamed, felt I was entitled to live away from daily crime. Did my entitlement grow out of the privilege I’d managed to sustain?