Fish Bowl Girl

Jane Alberdeston Coralin


          It is not clear when I first became a fish out of water, my dorsal fins slapping against the icy asphalt of American streets instead of swimming the tepid waters of the Antillean island strings. I cannot pinpoint the particular moment of my first breathlessness.  I do not know when I was plucked into migration: child of Puerto Rican parents, born into a small middle class barrio in Santurce, the sun falling through Florida windows. Only three short and turbulent years later, I was the child of an enlisted private of the United States Army, residing in the boxy monotony of military housing.

          In the outside, the otherworld on the outskirts of a military installation, my siblings and I were mercilessly taunted for being U.S. government property, army brats without individuality, cookie-cutouts of our father’s combat fatigues. But within the confines of neighborhoods warheads, radar, and shiny brass protected us; it was place where uniformity was encouraged, if not demanded. We and other military issue were segregated only by our fathers’ ranks and MOSs, their particular missions or duties. Hardly were we fish out of the tank – our parents never let my brother, sister and I out of the perimeter of their sight. We rode our bicycles in the weekend quiet of a resting motor pool, newly washed, trucks, jeeps and tanks basking in the Sunday afternoon glow. Our backyard was our only playground (other than the school yard), speckled with pastel-colored buckets, chipped tea sets that had seen better play-days, and a tipped-over entourage of stray plastic-green army men.  We needed nothing and no one except for our family. Our father was fond of pontificating that everything we needed he could provide.  We stayed close. Like the three infamous monkeys of Asian lore, we heard, saw and spoke to no one, except for what we snuck into our playtimes, conversations we kept secret from Papi, Abuela and Mami, who only spoke behind closed doors and made sure we were respectable, unblemished and clean. We were shaped-up little soldiers, hidden from view, waylaid from the cracked world created by our fathers. Papi laughingly called his three kids U.S. government property. Somehow, it stripped us down, made us a little bit lost. Still, there were moments sweet as turon candy eaten the night before Christmas, its pearled almond flakes and nougat nestled in your sticky palms:

          I think about my grandmother’s beat up wooden bowl where at Christmas time she would squeeze her hands (usually adept for chores like mending and soothing bruised knees) into soggy stale bread for her famous pan pudin (bread pudding.) I think about the rarities discovered by my father on his errant field trips and brought home in large green camouflage canvas sacks, such as Old Colony grape soda or Malta India (a non-alcoholic malt beverage whose flavor falls somewhere in between cola, hops and cream soda. You could say it might taste like an ice cream soda with slightly alcoholic twist) and plantain chips. I remember Brazo Gitano, a sweet cake rolled in strawberry jam and sprinkled heavily in heavenly confectioner’s sugar, delivered every Monday morning in a plain white delivery truck with its driver dressed in the same.  I remember my tongue-buds popping slightly with anticipation as soon as the delivery truck’s wheels skid against the curbside and the first footfalls of the deliveryman’s step crossed the driveway.  Usually Mami reserved access to the confection for Saturday when the sounds of Puerto Rican ballads to long lost loved men and the rattle and roll of salsa music rippled through the house, spilling into the backyard.  I think about my mother and grandmother dancing plena on the kitchen linoleum. I think about parties where my father, after two shots of anejo (aged rum), scratched against a slotted gourd called a guiro, singing the songs of yesterday, the nostalgia in the room as palpable as the scent of meat pies frying in the flame and lard blackened cauldron.  It was those days when you could taste your heritage, though you lived on a sand-bagged dead end street of barbecue Saturdays and the only palm frond in your life swung like mistletoe above your grandmother’s bedroom door nailed to the frame one day after Palm Sunday. But there were other stories; stories no one told around the dinner table but that sometimes crept into keyholes and out sheet rock as if the words were termites making their out instead of in. These stories were secrets about humiliations, immediacies, hungers in the tongue.

          According to the post-divorce stories told by my mother, my father squelched his Spanish accent after being ridiculed and scorned on several occasions by his supervisors. He dropped his heavily accented English and adopted instead a practiced American-English, speaking in rounded tonalities and the perfect oval of pronunciation; the consonants were said so clearly you heard the click of saliva against the roof of his mouth. His reticence, the hardness of his stare lived in the way he spoke.   My mother’s tongue  on the other hand was beautifully different.

          My mother never worked her accent out of her speech; in fact, she relished its unevenness, how words in Ingles in her mouth sounded like her Spanish. ‘Vegetable’ in the cradle of her voice was pronounced ‘vej-e-t-a-ble, with the letter ‘a’ rising loudly before tripping over the funny ‘b-l-e’.  We loved how Mami could never quite say the word “sheet” without feeling compelled to spell it out for us, for fear that our child-brains would mistake it for mierda, (which of course we always did.) Though many times we in our careers as children corrected my mother’s English, we secretly loved how the sound of her voice folded into it, as if her vocabulary were an adored quilted heirloom resting amid new, store-bought bed sheets.  Listening to Mami and my grandmother share stories back in forth in both languages, a comforting volley of familial tongues, influenced the way I speak both English and Spanish and it certainly influenced the way I write my poems and stories.  Some unnamed viscera allow the two to mingle, to twine, and reflect off the other. You could call it a literary personality disorder or you could call it enmeshed speech, though instead of being trapped, it is free to play and interact and embrace the effects of an imposed exile.  Though my family was not from the campo, the hills, I can hear hill Spanish in my own speech, dropping letters, leaving spaces for apostrophes on the tongue, thick hill holes in the language.  On the island, when I speak, I hear rebirth, return, renewal. They hear American-born, girl who leapt away from the island stone to stone to stone till she was so far away she lost her home. Still, in the string of my mother’s tongue, I live in those words, a mix that has pickled and sweetened my own writing, not because it has made it fit the curves of the new audience hunger for all things Hispanic but because it responds to and satisfies the daughter I am to my heritage.