My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Author:Quiara Alegría Hudes [Hudes, Quiara Alegría]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Hola, Qui Qui!” As the lid nested onto the caldero, Ginny shouldered the screen door open and threw her purse on the sofa with an I’ll be hanging for a few hours vibe. She inspected my ass—yup, it’s still flat!—and pinched and slapped it in confirmation. Now Abuela passed the baton to her daughter. Waiting for the rice to cook, we drank sodas around the table as Ginny painted her own Philly canvas. Her memories, a generation more proximate, began to mingle with my own, till I couldn’t tell if I had experienced this part of it, overheard that part of it, or built a memory from an old polaroid.

American Street is where the bloodsickness tapped the Perez shoulder. Ginny, whose fast legs led the family to Philly, discovered health problems in her athlete’s body. They surfaced in the form of an ectopic pregnancy. Her uterus was swollen from PID—her first husband was in the Navy, y ya tú sabes, all those overseas prostitutes…The fertilized egg implanted outside her fallopian tube. When it burst she lost so much blood medics needed three pints to fill her up. The transfusion had been tested for HIV but not much else. Doctors gave her hep C to save her life. Ginny was grateful. If you want your garden to grow, you gotta feed it. Even if some of it is manure, she told me. “We’re losing her! We’re losing her!” was the last thing she’d heard before making peace with the world. And then, she woke up. She woke up.

Her uterus and ovaries were a jumble after that. Pregnancy was off the table, but Ginny became a sentinel. Woman slept with shoes on. God had other plans, she told people, and she’d be a parent. You just wait and see. So, when addiction ravaged Flor, when it Jekyll and Hyde’d her to an unrecognizable place, when Danito’s skull rang out on the bathtub like our family’s own Liberty Bell? Ginny was downtown the next morning, filling out the foster-care paperwork. In a matter of months Ginny was taking JJ and Danito, her nephews-turned-sons, to Hunting Park and teaching them to throw a softball. Or bringing them to the gardens she’d made of empty lots, where she taught them to harvest calabaza and oregano brujo. (Illegal child labor, JJ used to complain with a grin.) It was rigorous work rooted in her dad’s Taíno methods, and the local gardens she began with her sons continue as nonprofits today. With her legs buckling from base-running, her voice hoarse from calling her sons to home plate, her palms cracked from hoeing and sowing, Ginny would get home late and set the flame on high. Ginny perfected arroz con gandules for her adopted boys, JJ and Danito. Just like mom perfected arroz blanco for Pop. Just like Abuela perfected home cooking for her girls. Indeed, if I swung by Ginny’s late, after dinner ended, she turned the flame high beneath the “empty” rice pot. Then JJ, Danito, and I would hunch over the stove, scraping the burnt stuff from the caldero.

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