Daughter of Invention

Julia Alvarez

That Sunday evening, I was reading some poetry to get myself inspired: Whitman in an old book with an engraved

cover my father had picked up in a thrift shop next to his office a few weeks back. “I celebrate myself and sing myself.

. .” “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” The poet’s words shocked and thrilled me. I

had gotten used to the nuns, a literature of appropriate sentiments, poems with a message, expurgated texts. But here

was a flesh and blood man, belching and laughing and sweating in poems. “Who touches this book touches a man.”

That night, at last, I started to write, recklessly, three, five pages, looking up once only to see my father passing by the

was propped up on his pillows, still awake, reading the Dominican papers, already days old. He had become interested

in his country’s fate again. The dictatorship had been toppled. The interim government was going to hold the first free

elections in thirty years. There was still some question in his mind whether or not we might want to move back.

History was in the making, freedom and hope were in the air again! But my mother had gotten used to the life here.

She did not want to go back to the old country where she was only a wife and a mother (and a failed one at that, since

she had never had the required son). She did not come straight out and disagree with my father’s plans. Instead, she

fussed with him about reading the papers in bed, soiling those sheets with those poorly printed, foreign tabloids. “The

Times is not that bad!” she’d claim if my father tried to humor her by saying they shared the same dirty habit.

The minute my father saw my mother and me, filing in, he put his paper down, and his face brightened as if at long last

his wife had delivered a son, and that was the news we were bringing him. His teeth were already grinning from the

finish without looking up. When I was done, I was a little embarrassed at my pride in my own words. I pretended to

quibble with a phrase or two I was sure I’d be talked out of changing. I looked questioningly to my mother. Her face

was radiant. She turned to share her pride with my father.

But the expression on his face shocked us both. His toothless mouth had collapsed into a dark zero. His eyes glared at

me, then shifted to my mother, accusingly. In barely audible Spanish, as if secret microphones or informers were all

about, he whispered, “You will permit her to read that?”

My mother’s eyebrows shot up, her mouth fell open. In the old country, any whisper of a challenge to authority could

bring the secret police in their black V.W.’s. But this was America. People could say what they thought. “What is

wrong with her speech?” my mother questioned him.

What ees wrrrong with her eh-speech?” My father wagged his head at her. His anger was always more frightening in

My mother leapt to her feet, a sign always that she was about to make a speech or deliver an ultimatum. She was a

small woman, and she spoke all her pronouncements standing up, either for more protection or as a carry-over from her

girlhood in convent schools where one asked for, and literally took, the floor in order to speak. She stood by my side,

shoulder to shoulder; we looked down at my father. “That is no tone of voice, Eduardo—” she began.

By now, my father was truly furious. I suppose it was bad enough I was rebelling, but here was my mother joining

forces with me. Soon he would be surrounded by a house full of independent American women. He too leapt from his

bed, throwing off his covers. The Spanish newspapers flew across the room. He snatched my speech out of my hands,

held it before my panicked eyes, a vengeful, mad look in his own, and then once, twice, three, four, countless times, he

tore my prize into shreds.

“Are you crazy?” My mother lunged at him. “Have you gone mad? That is her speech for tomorrow you have torn

before the assembly tomorrow morning. But not even a sibyl could have made sense of all those scattered pieces of

paper. All hope was lost. “He broke it, he broke it,” I moaned as I picked up a handful of pieces.

Probably, if I had thought a moment about it, I would not have done what I did next. I would have realized my father

had lost brothers and comrades to the dictator Trujillo. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by blood in the

streets and late night disappearances. Even after he had been in the states for years, he jumped if a black Volkswagen

passed him on the street. He feared anyone in uniform: the meter maid giving out parking tickets, a museum guard

approaching to tell him not to touch his favorite Goya at the Metropolitan.

I took a handful of the scraps I had gathered, stood up, and hurled them in his face. “Chapita!” I said in a low, ugly

whisper. “You’re just another Chapita!”

It took my father only a moment to register the hated nickname of our dictator, and he was after me. Down the halls we

“Eduardo,” she tried to calm him down. “Don’t you ruin my new locks.”

He finally did calm down, his anger spent. I heard their footsteps retreating down the hall. I heard their door close, the

clicking of their lock. Then, muffled voices, my mother’s peaking in anger, in persuasion, my father’s deep murmurs of

explanation and of self-defense. At last, the house fell silent, before I heard, far off, the gun blasts and explosions, the

serious, self-important voices of newscasters reporting their TV war.

A little while later, there was a quiet knock at my door, followed by a tentative attempt at the doorknob. “Cukita?” my

mother whispered. “Open up, Cukita.”

What we ended up doing that night was putting together a speech at the last moment. Two brief pages of stale

compliments and the polite commonplaces on teachers, wrought by necessity without much invention by mother for

daughter late into the night in the basement on the pad of paper and with the same pencil she had once used for her

own inventions, for I was too upset to compose the speech myself. After it was drafted, she typed it up while I stood

by, correcting her misnomers and mis-sayings.

She was so very proud of herself when I came home the next day with the success story of the assembly. The nuns had

been flattered, the audience had stood up and given “our devoted teachers a standing ovation,” what my mother had

protect you.” Finally, my mother came up and pleaded with me to go down and reconcile with him. “Your father did

not mean to harm. You must pardon him. Always it is better to let bygones be forgotten, no?”

I guess she was right. Downstairs, I found him setting up a brand new electric typewriter on the kitchen table. It was

even better than the one I’d been begging to get like my mother’s. My father had outdone himself with all the extra

features: a plastic carrying case with my initials, in decals, below the handle, a brace to lift the paper upright while I

typed, an erase cartridge, an automatic margin tab, a plastic hood like a toaster cover to keep the dust away. Not even

my mother, I think, could have invented such a machine!

But her inventing days were over just as mine were starting up with my schoolwide success. That’s why I’ve always

thought of that speech my mother wrote for me as her last invention rather than the suitcase rollers everyone else in the

family remembers. It was as if she had passed on to me her pencil and pad and said, “Okay, Cukita, here’s the buck.

You give it a shot.”

1. Did your feelings about any of the characters change as you read the story? Explain.

2. The narrator wants to use Whitman’s words: “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher”

(page 9 of the story). How does the girl’s father interpret the words? What do you think Whitman was really saying?

3. The narrator says, “She was a good enough Mami, fussing and scolding and giving advice, but a terrible girlfriend

parent, a real failure of a Mom” (page 3 of the story). What does the narrator mean?

4. What conflicts does the father face in this story? How does the narrator address the conflicts?

5. Review the notes you made while reading, and compare and contrast how Cukita, Mami, and Papi have adjusted to

life in the United States. What adjustments occur over the course of the story?

6. In this story, the father’s experience of politics in his country of origin clearly influences his behavior in the United