my english julia alvarez mommy and papi used to speak it when they had a secret they wanted to keep from us children we lived then in the dominican republic and the family as a whole spoke only spanish at home until my sisters and i started attending the carol morgan school and we became a bilingual family spanish had its many tongues as well there was the castillano of padre joaquin from spain whose lisp we all love to imitate then the educated espanol my parents family spoke aunts and uncles who were always correcting us children for we spent most of the day with the maids and so had picked up their bad spanish capensinas they spoke a little animated campuno essa swallowed endings chopped off funny turns of phrases this campuno was my true mother tongue not the spanish of calderon de la barca or cervantes or even naruto but of chucha and illuminata in gladys and urcelina from jun calinto and lisi and bocadeoma and san juan de la manguana those women yacked as they cooked the story told they gossiped theirs were the voices that belonged to the rain and the wind and the teeny tiny stars even a small child could blot out with her thumb besides all these versions of spanish every once in a while another strange tongue emerged from my puppy's mouth or my mommy's lips what i first recognized was not a language but a tone of voice serious urgent something important and top secret being said some uncle in trouble someone divorcing someone dead say it in english so the children won't understand i would listen straining to understand thinking that this was not a different language but just another and harder version of spanish it's hated english so the children won't understand from the beginning english was the sound of worry and secrets the sound of being left out i could make no sense of this harder spanish and so i tried by other means to find out what was going on i knew my mother's face by heart when the little lines in the corners of her eyes crinkled she was amused when her nostrils flared and she bit her lips she was trying hard not to laugh she held her head down eyes glancing up when she thought i was lying whenever she spoke that gibberish english i translated the general content by watching the spanish expressions on her face soon i began to learn more english at the carol morgan school that is when i had stopped gawking the teacher and some of the american children had the strangest coloration light hair light eyes light skin as if ursulina had soaked them in bleach too long tu dantino i did have some blonde cousins but they had deeply tanned skin and as they grew older their hair darkened so their earlier paleness seemed a phase of their acquiring normal color justice strange was a little girl in my reader who had a cat and a dog that looked just like ungatito her mommy was mother and her papi father why have a whole new language for school and for books with the teacher who could speak it teaching you double the amount of words you really needed butter butter butter butter all day one english word that had particularly struck me would go round and round in my mouth and weave through all the spanish in my head until by the end of the day the word did sound just like another spanish word and so i would say mommy please pass la mantechia she would scowl and say in english i'm sorry i don't understand but would you be needing some butter on your bread why my parents didn't first educate us in our native language by enrolling us in a dominican school i don't know part of it was that mommy's family had a tradition of sending the boys to the states to boarding school in college and she had been one of the first girls to be allowed to join her brothers at abbott academy whose school song was our lullaby's babies although columbus and cabinet never heard of abbott it's quite the place for you and me she had become quite americanized it was very important she kept saying that we learned our english she always used the possessive pronoun your english an inheritance we had come into and must wisely use unfortunately my english became all mixed up with our spanish mix-up or what is now called spanglish was a language who spoke for several years there wasn't a sentence that wasn't colonized by an english word at school a spanish word would suddenly slide into my english like someone butting into line teacher whose face i was learning to read as minutely as my mother's would scowl but no smile played on her lips her pale skin made her strange continents hard to read so that i often misjudged how much i could get away with whenever i made a mistake teacher would shake her head slowly in english julia there's no such word as coulombio do you mean a swing i would bow my head humiliated by the smiles and snickers of the american children around me i grew insecure about spanish my native tongue was not quite as good as english as if fords like olympio were illegal immigrants trying to cross a border into another language but teachers discerning grammar and vocabulary patrol ears could tell and send them back soon i was talking up in english storm did you eat english parrot my grandfather asked one sunday i had just enlisted yet one more patient servant to listen to my rendition of peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers at breakneck speed huh i asked him politely in english putting him in his place cat got your tongue no big deal so there take that holy tornado our teacher's favorite curse word go jump in the lake really dumb golly gosh slang cliches sayings hotset language that our teacher called ponderously idiomatic expressions riddles jokes puns conundrums what is yellow and goes click click why did the chicken cross the road see you later alligator how wonderful to call someone an alligator and not be scolded for being disrespectful in fact they were supposed to say back in a while crocodile there was also a neat little trick i wanted to try on an english-speaking adult at home i had learned it from elizabeth my smart alecky friend in fourth grade whom i alternately worshipped and resented i'd asked her a question that required an explanation and she'd answer because elizabeth how come you didn't go to isabel's birthday party because why didn't you put your name in your reader because i thought that's such a cool way to get around having to come up with answers so i practiced saying it under my breath planning for the day i could use it on an unsuspecting english-speaking adult one sunday at our extended family dinner my grandfather sat down at the children's table to chat with us he was famous in fact for the way he could carry on adult conversations with his grandchildren he often spoke to us in english so that we could practice speaking it outside the classroom he was a cornell man a united nations representative from our country he gave speeches in english perfect english my mother's phrase that sunday he asked me a question i can't even remember what it was because i wasn't really listening but lying and wait for my chance because i answered him papita waited a second for the rest of my sentence and then gave me a thumbnail grammar lesson because has to be followed by a clause why is that i asked nonplussed because he winked just because a beginning wordsmith i had so much left to learn sometimes it was disheartening once the august the family intellectual put a speck of salt on my grandparents big dining table during sunday dinner he said imagine this whole table is the human brain then this teensy grain is all we ever use of our intelligence he enumerated geniuses who had perhaps used two grains maybe three einstein michelangelo da vinci beethoven we children believed him it was a kind of impossible fact we thrived on proving as it did that the world out there was not drastically different from the one we were making up in our heads later at home mommy said that you had to take what her younger brother said with the grain of salt i thought she was still referring to theo gus's demonstration and i tried to puzzle out what she was saying finally i asked what she meant taking what someone says with a grain of salt is an idiomatic expression in english she explained it was pure voodoo is what it was what later i learned poetry could also do a grain of salt could symbolize both the human brain and a condiment for human nonsense and it could be itself too a grain of salt to flavor a bland plate of american food when we arrived in new york i was shocked a country where everyone spoke english these people must be smarter i thought maids waiters taxi drivers doormen bums on the street all spoke this difficult language it took some time before i understood that americans were not necessarily a smarter superior race it was as natural for them to learn their mother tongue as it was for a little dominican baby to learn spanish it came with mother's milk my mother explained and for a while i thought a mother tongue was a mother tongue because you got it from your mother's milk along with proteins and vitamins soon it wasn't so strange that everyone was speaking in english instead of spanish i learned not to hear it as english but as sense i no longer strained to understand i understood i relaxed in this second language only when someone with a heavy southern or british action spoke in a movie or at church when the priest droned his sermon only then did i experience that little catch of anxiety i worried that i would not be able to understand that i wouldn't be able to keep up with the voice speaking in this acquired language i would be like those people from the bible we had studied in religion class whom i imagined standing at the foot of an enormous tower that looked just like the skyscrapers around me they had been punished for their pride but being made to speak different languages so that they didn't understand what anyone was saying but at the foot of those towering new york skyscrapers i began to understand more and more not less and less english in sixth grade i had one of the first in a lucky line of great english teachers who began to nurture in me a love of language a love that had been there since my childhood of listening closely to words sister maria generosa did not make her class and terminally diagram sentences from a workbook or learn a catechism of grammar rules instead she asked us to write little stories imagining we were snowflakes birds pianos a stone in the pavement a star in the sky what would it feel like to be a flower with roots in the ground if the clouds could talk what would they say she had an expressive dreamy look that was accentuated by the wimple that framed her face supposing just supposing my mind would take off soaring into possibilities a flower with roots a star in the sky a cloud full of sad sad tears a piano crying out each time its back was tapped music only to our ears sister maria stood at the chalkboard her chalk was always snapping into because she wrote with such energy her whole habit shaking with the swing of her arm her hand tap tap tapping on the board here's a simple sentence the snow fell sister pointed with her chalk her eyebrows lifted her wimple poked up sometimes i could see whiffs or gray hair that strayed from under her head dressed but watch what happens if we put an adverb at the beginning and a pre-positional phrase at the end gently the snow fell on the bare hills i thought about the snow i saw how it might fall on the hills tapping lightly on the bare branches of trees softly it would fall on the cold bare fields and toys children had left out in the yard and on cars and on little birds and on people out late walking on the streets sister marie filled the chalkboard with snowy print on and on handling and shaping and moving the language scribbling all over the board until english those verbal gadgets those tricks and turns of phrases those little fixed units and counters became a charged fluid mass that carried me in its great fluent waves rolling and moving onward to deposit me on the shores of my new homeland i was no longer a foreigner with no ground to stand on i had landed in the english language