Her mother once threw a cup at her father’s head. My mother can’t remember if the ceramic cup makes impact with my grandfather’s head or the wall. She tells me the tale simply, indifferent, devoid of judgment, of critique. Justified is this cup throwing, no doubt, because he was a cheater, because he had abandoned my grandmother with six children in these United States, because she was living out the condition of the Puerto Rican woman without options, without help. My grandmother throws the cup and does not explain herself. Perhaps there’s nothing to explain, really, no words or ideas she can express out loud, in narrative coherence. She lets the crash against head or wall speak for itself.
The sound of the crashing the story my mother tells.
And there are my grandparents in the 70’s, here before me and my parents in the 90’s. At odds, in tense silence. Both hurt, hurting through time. We hurt, and in turn, in vengeance and recompense, hurt those we love. It’s about setting the record straight. Putting into the record that there was a fight, there was an effort made to do better, to reconcile with the fact of oppression. That the story was not that story, the one heard through the grapevine. But something else entirely. Something unmentioned in the story, the history, unmentionable in and of itself.
This memory in the kitchen of my mother and father that I write in the present tense is much like that. Unmentioned to them that I remember this moment, unmentionable in words. How to bring up a scene of violence witnessed as a child? When the child cannot bring to sentences and paragraphs and narrative what happens to them? Here I am recalling, remembering, recreating the scene, her palm across his skin, the rice and beans in my nostrils, the sound of the crashing the story I tell.