When you want to talk to your father but don’t know how, you might end up with more frozen peas than you need. My grocery cart made it look like I was a vegan prepping for the end of the world, unsure of how to assemble a balanced meal, and I hadn’t yet summoned the courage to ask my father the question I needed to ask. Before this trip to the store, it had been a year since we’d spoken. It was 2021 and our silent stand-off started when I sided with my mother. When I was home the summer before, she’d been livid as she vented to me each night about his unwillingness to communicate. The final straw, she said, was him throwing a pillow at her while she was snoring. He’ll miss me when I’m dead, she said tearfully. It scared me that she would will herself dead to hurt him back.

The silence scared me, but in a different way than it used to. I thought of the TV show Vida, and the episode in which two Mexican American siblings mourn their father’s death. The brother breaks into sobs as he tells his sister he realizes he never knew his father, but also that his father didn’t know him. Recalling this episode, I sensed I was preemptively mourning the loss of both my parents. The current silence felt like a placeholder for more to come.

After this revelation, it still took me months to work up the courage to approach my father. I wanted to ask him about his life, but I didn’t know what he would say, and I still prime myself to be rejected by him. I didn’t want the proverbial pillow thrown at my head.

When I was home during that summer, I started small. Out of the house, there was no place for us to hide, no rooms to wall ourselves into, so I asked him if he would go to the grocery store with me.

I was nervous when he said yes.

***

There was a board game popular in the ’90s called “Don’t Wake Daddy.” It’s how my younger brother and I joke about our childhood. We never knew what mood our dad would be in when he came home from work. Would he speak softly and calmly, or would he walk in with a bomb on his face? Would he and my mom discuss what TV show to watch? Or would he get fed up, explode, and throw the TV out the second-story window? One never knew.

By the time the TV was flung to its death, which happened when I was in high school, my dad’s unpredictability was so normal that I was more upset we lost our TV than scared. We could live without a phone for months, which we did when my parents were behind on bills, but we couldn’t live without a television, the only constant source of sound and connection we could rely on, so my dad bought another one as quickly as he could.

Through Nickelodeon and Nick At Nite, my round-the-clock childhood companions, I came to understand that some families used words and affection to communicate. Mine was the kind that didn’t. Instead, there were moments of rage, like the murder of the TV, or unbearable silences, like every night at dinner. If my younger brother and I tried to chit-chat, my dad would remind us to Eat! No talking! As if he was worried my brother and I couldn’t handle the complex project of speaking between bites.

Despite my father’s mandate of silence, there were times when I tried to fill our apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with as many words as I could. Once, I even sang them. When I was ten, I became determined to perform “A Whole New World” from Aladdin for my father. I practiced in my room until I knew the lyrics by heart, then asked him to turn down the TV volume so he could hear better. He sat on the living room couch, hand still on the remote, as I stood in front of him and sang as if waiting to be discovered, incorporating hand gestures for emphasis at just the right moments.

A dazzling place I never knew! . . . 

A wondrous place!

For youuuu! And meeeeee!

I waited for a clap. For anything. Finally: “Dad, how did I do?”

After a pause, he shrugged.

I slunk back to my room like there would be dirt to kick there. It was just one of many times when I asked my dad for words and he gave me none.

Over the years, as I got the message that I shouldn’t sing for my supper nor speak at one, I expressed myself less and less. To this day I don’t like to leave voicemails. “Can you talk?” a classmate asked me in elementary school. I was startled at being addressed, so I didn’t answer back.

I found, too, that the school I went to rewarded silence. My parents had immigrated from Mexico, spoke little English, and hadn’t been able to pursue much education, but they were fully committed to giving my brother and me the best education they could afford with the money they brought home from working in Rhode Island’s jewelry factories. I ended up at a Catholic school because one of the few times my father spoke to another parent at the low-cost daycare I attended, he asked what a good school in the area was. Based on that parent’s response, I started first grade at a school named after a pope. The school wasn’t accredited, but what the school lacked in credentials it made up for in uniformity and discipline. The middle-aged white woman who served as the principal wore the same green plaid skirt, yellow blouse, and Mary Janes as all us female students and commanded obedience. If we spoke out of turn, we were reprimanded and sent to her office. In first grade, I saw a puddle forming under the seat of a male classmate, who was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom. I too was terrified of this frowning adult who dressed like a child. But I was never going to get sent to her office. I knew my parents worked hard in their factory jobs to send me to this school.

I learned to keep to myself and that I could respond to most religion class questions by writing “the word of God.” My quietness not only helped me succeed academically there, it seemed to inspire even more unsolicited feedback from my classmates. They were very eager to let me and the three other students of color know exactly what they thought of us. “You don’t belong here,” I heard in third grade from a short brunette who also liked to comment on my appearance. If she and the two boy twins who hung out with her didn’t laugh at the things I wore on non-uniform days, I would never have known what was appropriate. Apparently, they didn’t wear faded New Kids on the Block shirts (3 for 10 dollars!) bought at a flea market. Their cultural codes were a mystery to me. I started wearing a coat whenever I could to cover myself, even when I was hot and red in the face.

“You always live in junky houses,” I heard from another classmate—useful information I also stored in my mental bank. Teaching me the difference between shame and humiliation, a classmate held my face against the brick wall during recess and wouldn’t let me go. My cheek scraped the brick and I saw my classmates watch and do nothing. By the time I was in middle school, I was mum as a nun, rich with self-knowledge, and always sweaty.

***

At Stop & Shop, I tried to stay close to my father but then thought I was taking too long getting my items, so I sped through some aisles on my own. In the pasta section, I paused, told myself it didn’t matter if I was going too slowly. Passing dairy: I wasn’t responsible if he got bored or frustrated. In the bakery: Calm down. It’s OK.

I found him in the bakery, selecting rolls. My dad is 5’10, thin, and brown-skinned, and rarely wears anything but blues or grays. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt with jeans that day.

We were almost done, and I still hadn’t asked.

In the checkout line, I studied the magazine rack as he stood quietly beside me. I thought about the National Enquirer headlines that used to be so fun to read. How in elementary school, a teacher had called me a liar in front of the class because I told her I saw an alien baby with two heads.

Finally, Dad, would you be OK if I interviewed you? To hear your life story?

He looked surprised. Smiled slightly. Then nodded.

***

In contrast to what I experienced at home and school, book words were loving, inviting, safe. Luckily, my family always lived near a library. I loved the library because we didn’t have books at home. My parents were encouraging of my education—they just didn’t have money for books or know which ones to get. The only book my parents ever got me as a child was a Spanish-English Bible that my mom ordered after seeing a commercial for it on TV. I brought it to first grade and even though I didn’t know how to read Spanish, when my teacher encouraged me to read for the class, I made up words as I went. La palabra de Dios.

Because I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to read, I started reading all the books on one library shelf before moving on to the next shelf. I went through the kids and young adult sections that way. Judy Blume’s Deenie and Forever and every Christopher Pike book were my transition texts; they introduced me to topics like first loves and murders at slumber parties, topics not covered in my middle school literature textbook. When I finished all the YA books, I thought about taking books out from the adult section but was daunted by the prospect. I assumed the words would be too hard, that I wouldn’t understand. But I was running out of reading material and was relying on the Reader’s Digests my mom would bring back from her work as a nurse’s assistant, the job she got after the factory.

Finally, one hot muggy summer day, I made my way to the other side of the library, and after looking through shelves and kiosks, settled on a bright red book. Once I opened it that night, I was astounded. I could read the words! It really wasn’t much different from the books I had been reading, except for the content. It may have been a Jackie Collins book, I don’t recall. All I remember is that there was a film director who was having sex and his penis got stuck in a vagina like it was a Venus flytrap. The couple had to be taken to the hospital to be separated. From then on, I was hooked. I read all the books I could from the adult section.

***

In preparation for the interview, I set my iPhone on a tripod, so I could have both video and audio. I wanted our family to have these stories, too. We were in my parents’ living room and my dad sat on the couch in front of me in an orange t-shirt and blue shorts. My mom had picked out his clothes and he looked like he was about to go surfing instead of trauma-examined by his adult daughter with her own overactive nervous system. To make it seem manageable for him and me, I suggested we do forty-minutes each day. He agreed. Years ago, my brother’s high school friends had referred to my dad as “Major” because he looked so stern. But that day, there was no sign of him in battle.

It’s rare for my father to remove his barricades, but when he does, he has the tendency to sound like a book. His words flow with poignancy, lull you in with motifs. It’s like he doesn’t believe in sharing his drafts and saves it all for the reading at the book launch. As he leaned back and started García-Márquezing in his surfing outfit, I found myself transported to the small town he grew up in, in the mountains of Guerrero.

Through my father’s slightly accented, soft-spoken retelling, I saw: the adults working in the fields, and the men drinking and playing pool on weekends. The kids playing soccer barefoot because kicking the ball with sandals was too uncomfortable. The one TV in town. Owned by a man who charged a couple cents admission into his house, where people sat on the floor to watch shows like Bonanza. When my father didn’t have any money, he and other kids would watch from the outside, peering through the window.

I loved this image of my father, yearning for sounds, for discovery.

He recounted never once being celebrated on his birthday. His birthday always coincided with a regional festival and the whole town would leave for the nearest major city on that day. At nine he was adamant—he was not going. His parents and two sisters went to the festival without him.

You know those movies where everyone dies and the town is empty?

Like post-apocalyptic?

Yes, it felt like that. It was so lonely. 

It was the first time I’d considered my father could be hurt by silence, he who seemed to want it so much.

***

Because I didn’t know how to talk freely, I had a hard time feeling close to other kids growing up and felt more comfortable in the company of a screen or books. I was one of those kids who walked down the street while reading a book. Read the dictionary for fun. Stared into space to contemplate what I had just read. My dad found me during one of these meditative moments, and despite wanting me to do well in school, was concerned that I was not well-adjusted. He yelled at me to stop reading and go and play. I sulked as I went outside. There was a big metal doghouse in the back of our building, so I went there, as I often did, and pulled out my book to read in peace.

In my family’s home, or more specifically, in the aforementioned doghouse, my world felt small. Reading helped me cope with the unbearable loneliness and instability of this one. With my mother gone in the evenings, my dad retreating to the TV after work, and my brother too young to be a playmate, I grappled with the silences myself and learned about all the variety of TV dinners available in the US.

Looney Toons with mac and cheese and a brownie! Hungry-Man for when we were craving Thanksgiving foods on a Tuesday. Chef Boyardee and Cup-o-Noodles! I relished my education in salty, savory, American foods. Packaged comfort kept me company in the mornings too, after my parents had left for work and I waited for the school bus. Sitting by myself, I learned the sugary joy of having a new cereal box to read, with puzzles and riddles on the back, mulling over the parts not in print.

***

As my father continued telling me about his early years, I could see him at age eight. When he needed shoes for a school play and begged for boots. He finally got them, and with great anticipation, waited for the day he would get to wear them onstage. He had practiced weeks with his partner, a little girl who usually didn’t speak to him because she was so shy, but during rehearsals would giggle when he broke from the choreography and twirled around for her amusement.

His older sister took the boots the afternoon of the dance and told him she just wanted to wear them for her performance. She promised to give them right back. He believed her, but she kept the boots. He looked all over the school for her but she disappeared after her dance was over. He was left without shoes. He didn’t know what else to do but stand in the wings of the stage, where he hid from the rest of his class. He cried as he heard his name called out over the megaphone, even more bitterly when he saw that his partner had to dance on stage without him.

That night he beat up his sister, who was two years older than him and could usually match him in strength, but in that moment lacked the anger that provided the force behind his fists. She kicked back and protected her hair while she screamed for her mother. Their mother came running out, and as soon as she saw her son’s face, yelled for her husband. It took my grandfather only a moment to cross the yard, remove his belt, and begin whipping my dad. His father called him an embarrassment for fighting his sister. His mother called him selfish. He wept alone in his room that night, his legs stinging from the lashes he had received. He wondered too, as he cried into his pillow and felt frighteningly alone, whether he had been lied to, whether the boots hadn’t been meant for him at all.

***

Over the years, I learned to read the marks on bodies. A round indented scar on the upper arm meant you got a polio vaccine as a child in Mexico. Blackened raw hands meant what my dad did for a living, working at a polishing wheel at the jewelry factory. The vertical rather than the horizontal cesarean scar on my mother’s stomach meant the doctors had sliced her open as a nineteen-year-old to give bir­­­­­th to me, without regard to what her body would look like after, how her abdomen would be permanently cut in half. The small brown birthmark on my left leg, my brother’s, and my dad’s, all in the same place on the calf, meant we were all descendants from some original bequeather.

Inherited silences are tougher to decipher. I didn’t know then what it meant that my father was the child of an alcoholic. He never drank himself, but he still exhibited the mood swings of someone who grew up with one. I didn’t know he was beaten regularly as a child with a rope with spikes on the end used to tame animals because he was considered stubborn. His father and mother would both use the rope, and I wonder if the rope was ever used on them. Would they too have the scars that my father has? I’ll never know how much my father, deracinated of indigeneity but seen and treated as an indio, must push down and not say, just to get through the days.

I can only surmise too, because I wasn’t hit or tied with physical ropes, about the effects of ropes on the women in my family. Aunts and cousins tied to furniture or fences by their mothers so they wouldn’t leave the house. To go with friends, to go to a dance. How much their waists or ankles chafed I’ll never know. Beat and bruised if they tried to untie the ropes. They still have nightmares about it, my mom says.

***

What is the first memory you remember? This had been my opening question.

He thought about it. He told me he was seven years old and his father asked him if he wanted some watermelon.

Of course, I said yes. I thought, juicy watermelon.

He’s excited, waiting for the next day to arrive, thinking they’ll go into town for the watermelon.

In the morning my father takes me to the fields. He bends down and says, First, we have to prepare the soil.

Come on! My dad gestures emphatically with his hand. Bitterly disappointed, he saw this as another example of his father not caring for him. This father who hardly spoke, always drank, and never expressed affection. During the interview, he didn’t tell me about the time his father came home drunk and beat him so severely that an uncle found my father passed out on the floor and rescued him. I only know this story from my mom.

He rubs his jaw.

When I was older, I realized my father just wanted to spend time with me.

***

With all the books I have read, it never occurred to me that I had been reading incorrectly. That in reading for plot, I had missed the stories in the spaces in between.

I remember when I was twelve and still misreading our family, all of us feeling angry, lonely, distant, I screamed at my mother that I hated her, for who knows what, but I ran with my rage, ran to my room and slammed the door.

I threw myself on my bed, sobbing, and braced myself.

My father came in.

But he didn’t hit or yell. Instead, without a word, he put a single photograph on my bed and left.

It was a photo of my mother in a light-blue nightgown, pregnant with me, sitting with her arms around her stomach. A photo I’d seen before, when she and my father were living in Mexico City.

I held the photograph. A message my father was trying to give me. When you grow up in fearful love, it’s hard to not remain on guard. But without words, my father was telling me a story, one I interpreted as about love and sacrifice, then.

Now, I see a longer history of families and people containing too much and speaking in any ways they can. My father, silenced, taught me how to listen.

Rage too is a form of silence.

My mother in the photograph, pained, pre-scar, pre-United States. Far from their hometown and no family and friends to talk to.

I wanted them to listen to me. To hear me and respond even once. I didn’t know they were struggling to be heard themselves.

My father, out of frame, capturing something to pass on: a beginning of seeing what couldn’t be said, at the time and maybe never, but a quiet insistence to try, so that the tightness in and around us didn’t strangle, choking the words we were trying to say or even sing.