How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay (6 page)

“I know more Spanish than you-” Juanita smirks.

It is Miguel’s turn to stick his tongue out at her.

While Mami and Papi continue their discussion in the kitchen, Miguel begins the first lesson. “Tía Lola, we’re going to learn names” He speaks slowly as if he were talking to an old person with a hearing problem. “What is your name?”

Tía Lola repeats, “What is your name?”

“No, no.” Juanita shakes her head. “You have to say, ‘My name is Lola.’”

“No, no,” Tía Lola says, pronouncing every word carefully. “You have to say—”

“It’s no use,” Miguel tells his sister. “She doesn’t really understand what she is saying.”

“She doesn’t really understand what she is saying,” Tía Lola rattles on.

Their mother comes to the door, their father behind her. “What’s going on here?” she asks.
Miguel cannot tell from looking at their faces what agreement they have come to.

“We’re teaching Tía Lola English,” Miguel explains. And then, remembering that one of the main reasons their mother has given for not letting them visit their father is that they are too young to travel alone, he adds, “Maybe Tía Lola can go down to New York with us if she knows a little English.”

“She can take care of us,” Juanita adds.

“Well see,” their mother says. It is what she always says when she hasn’t made up her mind whether to say yes or no to something they ask her for.

Every opportunity they have, Miguel and Juanita give their aunt an English lesson.

On the walk to town, Miguel stops at the sign beside the covered bridge. “Load limit: one ton.”

“Load-limit-one-ton,” Tía Lola repeats.

In town, Miguel points to the signs with the names of the streets they are waiting to cross. Hardscrabble, Main, College, and his favorite, Painter, because it reminds him of his father. Then the traffic signs. “One way,” he calls off. “Caution.”

The crossing guard holds up her stop sign to the traffic. “Have a nice day,” she says when they have crossed safely to the other side.

“One-way-caution-you’re-welcome-thanks-for-asking,” Tía Lola chatters on. That is the problem with Tía Lola’s English. Whenever she begins speaking it, she speaks all of it, all together.

The crossing guard looks worried. “Have-a-nice-day,” Tía Lola concludes. Sometimes, by chance, she says just the right phrase.

Down the street, walking toward them, comes Mrs. Prouty, accompanied by her chubby twin daughters. Miguel tries to steer Tía Lola into Scents and Spirits, Stargazer’s candle and card shop, but Mrs. Prouty has caught sight of them. “How nice to see you, Miguel. This must be the aunt your mother was telling me about.”

Miguel is so flustered, he mixes up everybody’s name. Mrs. Prouty’s daughters giggle and reach out to shake Tía Lola’s hand. But that is not Tía Lola’s way to greet a person.

“Load-limit-one-ton,” Tía Lola coos, hugging the girls, whose round faces turn pink. “Slippery-when-wet-proceed-with-caution.” Mrs. Prouty looks perplexed. Especially when Tía Lola throws her arms around her, too.

“Awesome-get-a4ife-chilLout,” Tía Lola chants. Miguel cringes. He has been teaching Tía Lola some slang expressions in order to make her sound a little more cool in English.

“It is a bit chilly for June, isn’t it?” Mrs. Prouty is saying, her jaw even stiffer than usual as she ushers her girls past the demented woman.

Miguel is eager to get Tía Lola home before she embarrasses them any further.

As they are walking past the post office, their mailman comes down the steps.

“Where-is-the-ladies’-room?” Tía Lola greets him.

The young man scratches his head and hurries away.

“Mi
inglés no funciona,”
Tía Lola finally admits. Her English isn’t working. She makes friends easier when she just speaks Spanish to everyone. Her magic doesn’t seem to work in a second language.

“You have to practice, Tía Lola,” Miguel reminds her. “You have to know what to say when.”

But every day Tía Lola cannot wait for her English lesson to be over. Then it is Miguel’s and Juanita’s turn to try to get along in their second language, Spanish.

*   *   *

Actually, Miguel and Juanita are not getting along any better in Spanish than in English. They are fighting more now that they have two languages to do it in. The fights get worse when they learn from their aunt that in Spanish, words have gender.

“What does
that
mean?” Juanita wants to know. Are some words pretty and feminine and some—she looks over at her brother—ugly and mean?

Tía Lola tries to explain. In Spanish, words have to be masculine or feminine. She doesn’t know exactly why that is. The male words usually end in
o
, and the female words in a. Like the word for sky,
cielo
, is masculine, while the word for earth,
tierra
, is feminine.

“We get the sky! We get the sky!” Miguel can’t help gloating at his sister. It’s as if they are playing Monopoly and he has just bought Boardwalk.

“Well, we own the earth! It ends in a.
La tierra!
“ It is Juanita’s turn to gloat. “And everything in the sky:
la luna, la lluvia, las estrellas!”

Tía Lola is shaking her head. That’s not the way it works. Boys don’t own the sky. Girls don’t
own the earth, the moon, the rain, and the stars-But neither Miguel nor Juanita is listening anymore.

Summer is here! On the way home from the last day of class, Miguel thinks of all the things he has to look forward to. Team practice will soon start up. Hopefully, he will get to visit his father and friends in New York. Meanwhile, Tía Lola is full of ideas for fun things for Miguel and Juanita to do.

The first day of vacation, they begin planting a garden in the backyard. Tía Lola slips on her highest of heels as if she were going out to a nightclub instead of to the backyard. Then, as she walks and zigzags and swerves up and down, making rows, Juanita and Miguel follow behind her, dropping seeds in the holes she makes with her heels.

They plant lettuce and
verduras, tomaticos
, and black beans from packets Tía Lola brought from the island. They clean the raspberry canes, which are already studded with bright crimson fruit. “I love these,” Miguel says, picking mouth-fuls as he works away.

Unfortunately, the blue jays and redwing blackbirds love them, too. But Tía Lola thinks of a solution. She brings out all her mantillas and drapes them over the raspberry bushes. Now when the birds swoop down, all they get is a few threads in their beaks. Miguel even feels a little sorry for them. He puts out a handful of berries in a dish so the birds can have a treat, too.

Soon green shoots are coming out of the ground in fanciful, zigzaggy rows. It turns out Tía Lola has laid out the garden in the shape of the island! Where her hometown would be on the map, she has planted
berenjenas
, her favorite vegetable, eggplants. For the border between the Dominican Republic and its neighbor, Haiti, she orders a special kind of rosebush without thorns. “For a rosier future between the two countries,” she explains in Spanish. She reserves her hot chili peppers for the spot where the capital would be.
“Para los políticos por las mentiras que dicen”
Miguel does not understand. For the politicians because of the lies they tell? Tía Lola laughs. It is a kind of adult joke you have to keep up with the news to understand.

At the center of the garden, Tía Lola posts her beloved Dominican flag. Then she puts her hand on her heart and sings the national anthem, which
she is trying to teach her niece and nephew to sing. It is the first time Miguel has seen his aunt teary-eyed. Mami explains that Tía Lola is understandably homesick from time to time. Having these reminders and rituals from home makes her feel a little less far away from her country and the rest of the family.

Of course, the raccoons don’t care a hoot about Tía Lola’s map. They start eating up the little shoots of lettuce and eggplant and shred the rosebushes to bits. But Tía Lola figures out a way to outsmart them as well. She ties her maracas to a pair of broomsticks and sticks the broomsticks in the ground by the garden. All day and all night, as the breeze blows on them, they clackety-clack, scaring away the raccoons.

But the most fun for Miguel is when they go out with garden shears and prune the bushes in the shapes of parrots and palm trees, monkeys and huge butterflies. Everyone who drives by stops to marvel at the transformed property.

“Keep-out-no-trespassing,” Tía Lola greets them, and quickly they get back in their cars and drive away.

*   *   *

If Miguel thinks Tía Lola is having a hard time catching on to plain English, using expressions around her proves downright dangerous.

“Becky has a green thumb,” Mami remarks one day as she comes in the door with a bunch of basil their neighbor has given her.

“!Emergencia!”
Tía Lola cries out. The thumb could be gangrenous! She reaches for the phone. Mami has taught her to dial 911 if there is ever an emergency.

“!No, no, Tía Lola!”
Mami stops her. The phrase is an expression in English that means that Becky is good with plants.

Then why didn’t she say so? Tía Lola asks, very reasonably for once.

The afternoon of the first big thunderstorm, Juanita and Miguel are playing outside. They come running in the house, soaking wet. “It’s raining cats and dogs!” Miguel remarks as he throws off his jacket.

“!No me diga!”
Tía Lola says, running out with a broom to chase the stray cats and dogs away from the front lawn. She slips on the wet steps and goes tumbling down, head over heels. Thank goodness only the broom snaps in two, though the next morning Tía Lola’s whole right side is black and blue.

*   *   *

Their mother has still not made up her mind about letting Miguel and his sister visit their father in New York.

“Mami, please, before practice starts up,” Miguel pleads. In a few weeks, the team will have daily practice, and Miguel does not want to miss one day of it-

But his mother is not convinced-Tía Lola is still lost in English-Traveling with her would be traveling with an adult who couldn’t really take care of them if they ran into a problem-Furthermore, the way that Miguel and Juanita are always arguing, they cannot be trusted to go anywhere together-

“I promise I’ll try,” Miguel offers-He’ll do anything in order to visit his father and friends and see New York City again-Even if it involves getting along with his little sister-

“I have to see some improvement first,” his mother declares.

Miguel finds his sister in her bedroom-She is putting her dolls in the cradles their father has made for her-They are cut out of cardboard and
colored with bright designs. Every time Papi drives up to visit, he brings a new one along.

“Truce, Nita!” Miguel holds up his hands. “I mean it. You can have
cielo, dinero, carro
—all the o words you want.”

Juanita glances up. A look of suspicion spreads across her face. She can have
sky, money, carl

Miguel nods, but he can see she is not quite sure what to make of her brother’s sudden generosity. He decides to tell his sister the truth. “Mami’s not going to let us go to New York unless she sees us getting along.” And there is one other thing. “We’ve got to get Tía Lola to say just a few things right so Mami feels okay about her English.”

“How are we going to do that?” Juanita abandons her dolls to work out a plan with her brother. They are quiet a moment, thinking. “I know, I know,” she pipes up. “It’ll be like the crossing lady. We’ll draw some signs on some cards and flash them to Tía Lola when Mami is around.”

“Great idea!” Miguel says, before he remembers it is his dumb little sister who has come up with it.

*   *   *

They draw a plate beside a red stop sign. They explain to their aunt that when they flash her that card, she should say, “I can’t eat another bite” in English.

“Lcan’t-eat-another-bite,” Tía Lola practices.

“Muy bien, Tía Lola,”
Miguel says. Very good.

On another card, Juanita draws a round bowl that looks sort of like a toilet bowl. She colors it pink. When Tía Lola sees that card, she has to say, “Where is the ladies’ room?”

On still another card, they draw a bright sun with a smiley face, “Have a nice day!” Miguel rehearses for his aunt.

“Have-a-nice-day!” Tía Lola repeats, smiling at the smiley face, “Where-is-the-ladies’-room-L can’t-eat-another-bite,”

“No, Tía Lola,”
Juanita explains,
“Una a la vez<”
Just say one at a time, Juanita holds up one finger while Miguel flashes one card. They practice several times.

Finally, Tía Lola understands what they want. It is gratifying when that happens. Their mother always says that the easiest language to learn but the hardest to speak is
mutual understanding.
It is
easy because you don’t even have to speak it with words, but hard because you never can seem to find the right person to speak it to.

At Rudy’s Restaurant for brunch that Sunday, their mother praises Miguel and Juanita for getting along so well lately. “I’m really proud of you guys for making an effort-”

It’s just a plot so you’ll let us go to New York, Miguel feels like saying. But it’s not so bad to be getting along with his little sister.

Across the table, Tía Lola is hungrily eating forkfuls of Rudy’s sourdough pancakes. It is time for step two of the plan.

Miguel reaches into his pocket. He is sitting next to his mother so she cannot see his left hand. He holds up the card with the drawing of a plate and stop sign and coughs.

Tía Lola looks up and smiles at the card. “I can’t eat another bite,” she says in perfect English. But she keeps right on shoveling pancake into her mouth.

Quickly, Miguel pulls Tía Lola’s plate toward him and offers to finish it. Before Tía Lola can protest, he holds up the drawing of the pink bowl.

“Where is the ladies’ room?” Tía Lola asks out loud. The waitress, happening by, says, “Just follow me.”

But Tía Lola remains sitting.

“Come on, Tía Lola,” Juanita urges, taking her aunt by the hand. “I’ve got to go, too.” Tía Lola looks a bit unsure, but she is game for whatever is going on.