Elements of Literature Course 5
http://nexuslearning.net/books/Elements_of_Lit_Course5/Daughter_Invention_1-8.htm[4/30/2014 4:42:53 PM]
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