You & the Dying Languages
In the early and lonely days of mothering, when you felt old at forty-one, you’d examine pictures posted of homegrown arugula, read updates on a chicken coop’s construction, the adoption of a baby goat. Everyone, it seemed, was washing cloth diapers, fermenting grains, ordering via poorly designed websites worms for their compost. They homeschooled, unschooled, free schooled, drove to the valley for a child-centered approach. Envying them, you rubbed lanolin on your nipples and declared it all a trend, like barbershop quartet mustaches or high-waisted jeans. You knew well the language of necessity and no way you’d speak it again. It was long gone with the factories and square of dirt between yard and shed, where your parents grew potatoes and lettuce and cucumbers, fertilizing them with chicken manure from a farm they’d drive to on weekends. Gone, too, the hens and rabbits, which you named and befriended before your mother swiftly snapped their necks. The pickling of vegetables, sewing of curtains, reupholstering the same terrible couch for years. Your father holding your brothers captive on weekends, only to botch after too many swigs one home improvement after another. Why hire a licensed contractor when your buddy from the factory has a concrete mixer to pave over the yard? Who needs a lawn anyway? Then there was the chorizo made with a grinder screwed to the kitchen table. You all wanted to crank it as your mother fed it chunks of meat. But only your father held the intestine to the funnel as it swelled and grew longer in his hands. Now you ask, were they really speaking the language of necessity or did you misunderstand the need — to make of a few recipes and the labor to produce them a way to lose no more than they had already lost, to speak in an endangered idiom to their kids, who would grow to be unlike them? Each meal a fraying tether to the homeland? If so, they couldn’t just go to the A&P up the street. Everyone has their personal mythology, and for you it involves chicken liver and cow’s brain. But in light of the peanut butter, in light of the reasonable hours and modest hungers, who are you? Only now and then do you yell across the house when you need something, flipping a switch that sheds light on your ignoble birth. Not long ago, you read an article about the generations of microbes dying out in the large intestine, thanks to the Big Macs broken down in the smaller one. How the researchers, a couple in California, diversified their microbial environment by fertilizing the kale in their garden with turkey manure, grinding their own wheat berries for pizza dough, even petting the family dog. And here you are, day after day, homogeneous microbes listless in yoga pants, unable to make much of anything, no skills to survive the apocalypse. You can’t even make a simple A-line skirt for your daughter’s American Girl doll (who survived, it should be noted, the 1918 flu inside a sooty tenement). You are hiding behind a hollow door, and when your daughter knocks you can’t say, Leave me alone, I am making a poem, as if that’s something useful. And it’s not like you are saying it in Spanish; you gave up speaking it to her ages ago.
* * * * *
You in Exile
At twenty-one, you vowed to free the country that was your childhood from tyranny. With sex, dancing, and weed — and an army of conscripted boyfriends — the campaign appeared to be working. Phase One: Destroy its radio towers and presses. Two: Drive its regime to the coast and into the sea. But when your father, then your mother, died, you imposed sanctions on your own grief and resumed your steady gait to work. Because who is ever really punished by a republic of troubled ghosts? Your daughter who refuses to turn off the TV and brush her hair? News from the regime intercepts the signal of the present until it becomes the present. In this pandemic, some exes haven’t seen their own parents in so long, or they talk to them through nursing home windows. And you? Your arms have become heavy, your hands. The weight of something unnameable pulling you down. You’ve stopped dyeing your hair and feeling alive in teen clothes. When will it happen, and to whom and where? You cannot straighten your neck. You miss your father’s hands, how he’d rub saliva into it when you’d wake up with a crick. The old remedies die with each human trial. Phase Three. You want to throw things away, who could wear them? In the deepest ocean, delicate slip embroidered with possessive. A future like ash that floats up and away.
* * * * *
A Girl Like You
if ever I see you again as I have sought you daily without success
I’ll speak to you, alas
too late! ask,
What are you doing on the
streets of Paterson?
—William Carlos Williams, from Paterson
1.
You made it into the lobby in the usual fashion. With a high school education, you answered an ad in the newspaper, probably the type for reception: eighteen, a little plump, pretty. Bilingual but not too bilingual. You held the line for the publisher, who saw in you something special. So you walked your white pumps into the newsroom, as in a Hollywood biopic, and shoved press release after press release into dozens of slots. Later, a step up: on weekends, you wrote obits, mainly of war veterans, and were on friendly terms with all the funeral directors. One day the deceased wasn’t a member of the Knights of Columbus, married to his high school sweetheart (née something). She was a girl, surname kept private, whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread. She was thirteen. You, a college freshman. When you told the city desk you were from that place and spoke its language, they said stop sorting and ride with the reporter to the scene. What were you thinking among your neighbors, flipping your skinny notebook as you translated what they said? Did you feel like an anthropologist among your own? You can still feel the excitement in the newsroom as the deadline loomed, the booming voice of the editor, his Texas drawl. How he asked for a first-person account of growing up in the neighborhood to accompany the story, and you wrote that although you avoided the street where she was found, you were never afraid. A kiss blown is no blow to the head. You must have felt important, suddenly someone to the reporters, the editors, who flirted and wondered aloud if you could jimmy a lock. Just like that, your name, a syllable less then, appeared on the newspaper’s front page. You didn’t know it yet, but you’d spend the rest of your life mapping the difference between the girl in the newsroom and the girl in the news.
2. (A Girl Like You Talks Back)
I know you’ve never stopped thinking about me, how similar we were except in how we got out of the neighborhood. My mother also sent me to the bodega, but instead for a bag of rice. I lived in the same apartment building as you once had. I learned to just keep walking past men who thought they were encouraging my budding body, but sometimes I’d talk back, some part of me always ready to fight. I had crushes on boys who wanted to be like their older brothers, their baby faces in front of the candy store pretending to be drug dealers. What they did with my body they did for the last time. They took me, all of them; he who did it and those who said nothing. I was beginning to understand the body I was becoming, what it said to them and seemed to invite. My silence was also my body. How my head hung, how I walked quickly, how I didn’t look at them. You wrote many years ago that until they found me, you felt safe, but still, you avoided the street where men gathered and read back to you your own body, that of your cousins. How little you understood safety then, even when I learned for you its limits. Now you are fifty, and I’m still thirteen. Both of our mothers are buried, mine next to me, and for eternity I’ll have to assure her it wasn’t her fault. The men who approach us now speak softly, gently. They even leave flowers. You are trying to find me on the internet, to know more of me than my brutal end. Googling me, you learn of another girl with the same name, who a few towns over suffered the same fate at the hands of a neighbor. But there will always be another girl with the same name, in the same state. I know that’s not what you want. You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave the answer into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. I am always of some use, of course. At your service. What? You thought you’d conjure me, and I’d answer your questions, eager to have my words in print, like those neighbors who crowded around you? Your mother ran from a man she never named, and taught you to do the same. She never said you could change the world, only that you should run. And what keeps you up at night is that I couldn’t run fast enough, and that if a girl trips as she flees, her story ends abruptly. It doesn’t click shut like a well-made poem, but with a thud like the lid of a dumpster. It should be evident to all your readers that you are speaking, not me. That you prop up the dead for your own purposes. Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard?
/ / /
The three pieces above appear in Rosa Alcalá’s YOU, published by Coffee House Press on April 9, 2024. You may acquire the book directly from the press by clicking here.