Daughter of Invention
Julia Alvarez
She wanted to invent something, my mother. There was a period after we arrived in this country, until five or so years later, when my mother was inventing. They were never pressing, global needs she was addressing with her pencil and pad. She would have said that was for men to do, rockets and engines that ran on gasoline and turned the wheels of the world. She was just fussing with little house things, don’t mind her.
She always invented at night, after settling her house down. On his side of the bed my father would be conked out for an hour already, his Spanish newspaper draped over his chest, his glasses, propped up on his bedside table, looking out eerily at the darkened room like a disembodied guard. But in her lighted corner, like some devoted scholar burning the midnight oil, my mother was inventing, sheets pulled to her lap, pillows propped up behind her, her reading glasses riding the bridge of her nose like a schoolmarm’s. On her lap lay one of those innumerable pads of paper my father always brought home from his office, compliments of some pharmaceutical company, advertising tranquilizers or antibiotics or skin cream; in her other hand, my mother held a pencil that looked like a pen with a little cylinder of lead inside. She would work on a sketch of something familiar, but drawn at such close range so she could attach a special nozzle or handier handle, the thing looked peculiar. Once, I mistook the spiral of a corkscrew for a nautilus shell, but it could just as well have been a galaxy forming.
It was the only time all day we’d catch her sitting down, for she herself was living proof of the perpetuum mobilemachine so many inventors had sought over the ages. My sisters and I would seek her out now when she seemed to have a moment to talk to us: We were having trouble at school or we wanted her to persuade my father to give us permission to go into the city or to a shopping mall or a movie—in broad daylight! My mother would wave us out of her room. “The problem with you girls . . .” I can tell you right now what the problem always boiled down to: We wanted to become Americans and my father—and my mother, at first—would have none of it.
“You girls are going to drive me crazy!” She always threatened if we kept nagging. “When I end up in Bellevue, you’ll be safely sorry!”
She spoke in English when she argued with us, even though, in a matter of months, her daughters were the fluent ones. Her English was much better than my father’s, but it was still a mishmash of mixed-up idioms and sayings that showed she was “green behind the ears,” as she called it.
If my sisters and I tried to get her to talk in Spanish, she’d snap, “When in Rome, do unto the Romans . . .”
I had become the spokesman for my sisters, and I would stand my ground in that bedroom. “We’re not going to that school anymore, Mami!”
“You have to.” Her eyes would widen with worry. “In this country, it is against the law not to go to school. You want us to get thrown out?”
“You want us to get killed? Those kids were throwing stones today!”
“Sticks and stones don’t break bones . . .” she chanted. I could tell, though, by the look on her face, it was as if one of those stones the kids had aimed at us had hit her. But she always pretended we were at fault. “What did you do to provoke them? It takes two to tangle, you know.”
“Thanks, thanks a lot, Mom!” I’d storm out of that room and into mine. I never called her Mom except when I wanted her to feel how much she had failed us in this country. She was a good enough Mami, fussing and scolding and giving advice, but a terrible girlfriend parent, a real failure of a Mom.
Back she’d go to her pencil and pad, scribbling and tsking and tearing off paper, finally giving up, and taking up her New York Times. Some nights, though, she’d get a good idea, and she’d rush into my room, a flushed look on her face, her tablet of paper in her hand, a cursory knock on the door she’d just thrown open: “Do I have something to show you, Cukita!”
This was my time to myself, after I’d finished my homework, while my sisters were still downstairs watching TV in the basement. Hunched over my small desk, the overhead light turned off, my lamp shining poignantly on my paper, the rest of the room in warm, soft, uncreated darkness, I wrote my secret poems in my new language.
“You’re going to ruin your eyes!” My mother would storm into my room, turning on the overly bright overhead light, scaring off whatever shy passion I had just begun coaxing out of a labyrinth of feelings with the blue thread of my writing.
“Oh Mami!” I’d cry out, my eyes blinking up at her. “I’m writing.”
“Ay, Cukita.” That was her communal pet name for whoever was in her favor. “Cukita, when I make a million, I’ll buy you your very own typewriter.” (I’d been nagging my mother for one just like the one father had bought her to do his order forms at home.) “Gravy on the turkey” was what she called it when someone was buttering her up. She’d butter and pour. “I’ll hire you your very own typist.”
Down she’d plop on my bed and hold out her pad to me. “Take a guess, Cukita?” I’d study her rough sketch a moment: soap sprayed from the nozzle head of a shower when you turned the knob a certain way? Coffee with creamer already mixed in? Time-released water capsules for your plants when you were away? A key chain with a timer that would go off when your parking meter was about to expire? (The ticking would help you find your keys easily if you mislaid them.) The famous one, famous only in hindsight, was the stick person dragging a square by a rope—a suitcase with wheels? “Oh, of course,” we’d humor her. “What every household needs: a shower like a car wash, keys ticking like a bomb, luggage on a leash!” By now, as you can see, it’d become something of a family joke, our Thomas Edison Mami, our Benjamin Franklin Mom.
Her face would fall. “Come on now! Use your head.” One more wrong guess, and she’d tell me, pressing with her pencil point the different highlights of this incredible new wonder. “Remember that time we took the car to Bear Mountain, and we re-ah-lized that we had forgotten to pack an opener with our pick-a-nick?” (We kept correcting her, but she insisted this is how it should be said.) “When we were ready to eat we didn’t have any way to open the refreshments cans?” (This before fliptop lids, which she claimed had crossed her mind.) “You know what this is now?” A shake of my head. “Is a car bumper, but see this part is a removable can opener. So simple and yet so necessary, no?”
“Yeah, Mami. You should patent it.” I’d shrug. She’d tear off the scratch paper and fold it, carefully, corner to corner, as if she were going to save it. But then, she’d toss it in the wastebasket on her way out of the room and give a little laugh like a disclaimer. “It’s half of one or two dozen of another . . .”
I suppose none of her daughters was very encouraging. We resented her spending time on those dumb inventions. Here, we were trying to fit in America among Americans; we needed help figuring out who we were, why these Irish kids whose grandparents were micks two generations ago, why they were calling us spics. Why had we come to the country in the first place? Important, crucial, final things, you see, and here was our own mother, who didn’t have a second to help us puzzle any of this out, inventing gadgets to make life easier for American moms. Why, it seemed as if she were arming our own enemy against us!
One time, she did have a moment of triumph. Every night, she liked to read The New York Times in bed before turning off her light, to see what the Americans were up to. One night, she let out a yelp to wake up my father beside her, bolt upright, reaching for his glasses which, in his haste, he knocked across the room. “Que pasa? Que pasa?”3 What is wrong? There was terror in his voice, fear she’d seen in his eyes in the Dominican Republic before we left. We were being watched there; he was being followed; he and mother had often exchanged those looks. They could not talk, of course, though they must have whispered to each other in fear at night in the dark bed. Now in America, he was safe, a success even; his Centro Medico in Brooklyn was thronged with the sick and the homesick. But in dreams, he went back to those awful days and long nights, and my mother’s screams confirmed his secret fear: We had not gotten away after all; they had come for us at last.
“Ay, Papi, I’m sorry. Go back to sleep, Cukito. It’s nothing, nothing really.” My mother held up the Times for him to squint at the small print, back page headline, one hand tapping all over the top of the bedside table for his glasses, the other rubbing his eyes to wakefulness.
“Remember, remember how I showed you that suitcase with little wheels so we would not have to carry those heavy bags when we traveled? Someone stole my idea and made a million!” She shook the paper in his face. She shook the paper in all our faces that night. “See! See! This man was no bobo! He didn’t put all his pokers on a back burner. I kept telling you, one of these days my ship would pass me by in the night!” She wagged her finger at my sisters and my father and me, laughing all the while, one of those eerie laughs crazy people in movies laugh. We had congregated in her room to hear the good news she’d been yelling down the stairs, and now we eyed her and each other. I suppose we were all thinking the same thing: Wouldn’t it be weird and sad if Mami did end up in Bellevue as she’d always threatened she might?
“Ya, ya! Enough!” She waved us out of her room at last. “There is no use trying to drink spilt milk, that’s for sure.”
It was the suitcase rollers that stopped my mother’s hand; she had weather vaned a minor brainstorm. She would have to start taking herself seriously. That blocked the free play of her ingenuity. Besides, she had also begun working at my father’s office, and at night, she was too tired and busy filling in columns with how much money they had made that day to be fooling with gadgets!
She did take up her pencil and pad one last time to help me out. In ninth grade, I was chosen by my English teacher, Sister Mary Joseph, to deliver the teacher’s day address at the school assembly. Back in the Dominican Republic, I was a terrible student. No one could ever get me to sit down to a book. But in New York, I needed to settle somewhere, and the natives were unfriendly, the country inhospitable, so I took root in the language. By high school, the nuns were reading my stories and compositions out loud to my classmates as examples of imagination at work.
This time my imagination jammed. At first I didn’t want and then I couldn’t seem to write that speech. I suppose I should have thought of it as a “great honor,” as my father called it. But I was mortified. I still had a pronounced lilt to my accent, and I did not like to speak in public, subjecting myself to my classmates’ ridicule. Recently, they had begun to warm toward my sisters and me, and it took no great figuring to see that to deliver a eulogy for a convent full of crazy, old overweight nuns was no way to endear myself to the members of my class.
But I didn’t know how to get out of it. Week after week, I’d sit down, hoping to polish off some quick, noncommittal little speech. I couldn’t get anything down.
The weekend before our Monday morning assembly I went into a panic. My mother would just have to call in and say I was in the hospital, in a coma. I was in the Dominican Republic. Yeah, that was it! Recently, my father had been talking about going back home to live.
My mother tried to calm me down. “Just remember how Mister Lincoln couldn’t think of anything to say at the Gettysburg, but then, Bang! ‘Four score and once upon a time ago,’” she began reciting. Her version of history was half invention and half truths and whatever else she needed to prove a point. “Something is going to come if you just relax. You’ll see, like the Americans say, ‘Necessity is the daughter of invention.’ I’ll help you.”
All weekend, she kept coming into my room with help. “Please, Mami, just leave me alone, please,” I pleaded with her. But I’d get rid of the goose only to have to contend with the gander. My father kept poking his head in the door just to see if I had “fulfilled my obligations,” a phrase he’d used when we were a little younger, and he’d check to see whether we had gone to the bathroom before a car trip. Several times that weekend around the supper table, he’d recite his valedictorian speech from when he graduated from high school. He’d give me pointers on delivery, on the great orators and their tricks. (Humbleness and praise and falling silent with great emotion were his favorites.)
My mother sat across the table, the only one who seemed to be listening to him. My sisters and I were forgetting a lot of our Spanish, and my father’s formal, florid diction was even harder to understand. But my mother smiled softly to herself, and turned the Lazy Susan at the center of the table around and around as if it were the prime
mover, the first gear of attention.