The Pub

My American Childhood

Alexa Adams

I barely know my mother. I’ve lived with her for twenty-one years and know nothing of where she comes from. Her mother, born and raised in Honduras, died from cancer six years before I was born. My mom was twenty-two. After my mom’s mother died, my grandfather remarried Mary. She is a petite, white-haired woman with cataracts and racist inclinations. She doesn’t talk much and loves Higgins Glass. She’s always tripping over shoes on the floor or roots in the grass and is afraid to drive out of the two-mile radius surrounding their eastern Michigan condominium. She is nothing like my own mother and I’m guessing she’s nothing like my mom’s mom was either. I’ve heard my mom’s vague and fading memories of her mother, about the way she muttered in Spanish when she got angry and how she came alive at parties. I’ve seen the way my mother has raised us, and it has been nothing short of American with no semblances of the Latin American culture I expect to have been passed down from her mother. Beyond rare murmurings and one tumultuous story involving my great-grandfather’s banana plantation, embezzlement, a stolen safe, and a hit man named Conrado, I don’t know anything of my grandmother’s life in Central America or the way it shaped my own mother.

This is what I do know:

My mom always burnt the toast. Most dinners growing up were accompanied by some kind of bread: rolls, garlic toast, French bread, and without fail my mom burnt all or some portion of it. Sometimes the damage was all consuming and we’d have to throw it all in the garbage after soaking it under the faucet to ensure none of the paper towels or old receipts in the trash caught fire. But if the damage wasn’t too severe, she would pull the bread out of the oven or toaster, carefully scrape the burnt edges into the sink, and spread some butter on what was left in an attempt to cover up that familiar, burnt after-taste. We became trained to head for the kitchen to eat when we heard that rough sound of steel knives against hard bread. She was Pavlov and we were her dogs.

My mom is a pretty good cook now. Two Thanksgivings ago, I had something of a domestic crisis when, in helping make dinner with the women, I realized how little I knew about cooking. My future kids’ lives flashed before my eyes, lives marked by Kraft macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at every meal. I realized that I would probably have to throw a little bit of their college educations away with every white, origami box of Chinese take-out. Aware of the risks involved, my mom put me on dessert duty. I read the directions and still managed to put egg yokes instead of whites in the crème brulee, two cups of water instead of milk. After some minor harassment from my relatives about what was a sensitive subject to begin with, I slipped out of the kitchen so no one would see me crying. She gave me a few minutes alone, but eventually, as expected, my mom leaned her head into the doorway of our family room and came to sit down beside me on the couch. “Come finish the dessert. Chase will help you.” But I was unyielding. My stubbornness was the only power I had left over my defeat and so I chose to sulk on the couch instead. “Okay, if you won’t finish it that’s fine. I can ask Chase to do it, but at least come help with the salad. No one’s tossed the salad together yet.” I took five more minutes to stick it to that crème brulee before I walked back to the kitchen to toss our Thanksgiving salad.

Eventually we caught on to my mom’s negligent toasting and once we did we teased her mercilessly: “Good thing our mouths have built up a tolerance to flames!” or “Now we won’t have to lick the oven anymore to get that ‘smoked’ taste.” She euphemized her problem by calling it “smoked” as though it were purposeful, like a good cheese or salmon. We weren’t all mean though. When she succeeded at toasting bread we praised her over-enthusiastically, like the trouble-making kid who gets smothered with affirmation when he does something good for a change. But amid our grumbling and backhanded praise she never complained. She never objected that she was being underappreciated or that we should live a day in her shoes before we attacked her for trying her best to do it. She simply laughed. She kept toasting bread, shrugged her shoulders when it burned, and crossed her fingers that next time she’d get it right, even though she hardly ever did.

I know that my mother has a rosary she keeps in her underwear drawer buried beneath rolls of coupled socks and a bag of potpourri. She converted from Catholicism sometime in college. We attend a contemporary, nondenominational church now, one decidedly lacking ritual, tradition, and weekend communion. Whenever we complained about being bored or not wanting to go on a Sunday morning, she would give us a short rebuttal about how lucky we were not to have to go to mass. Otherwise, she never talked about Catholicism, and I have never known it myself. It was the faith her mother and father had given her.

I used to spend one week every summer with Gree, my grandmother on my dad’s side. She lived in Traverse City, a small, forested town in northern Michigan. Her apartment building backed up to Little Traverse Bay. We spent the week the same way every summer—in her paddle boat on the water, circling the bay endlessly, crossing from one shore to the other until there was no daylight left to see by and no more conversation left between the two of us. Every week ended with another showing of Treasure Island on her small, boxy television and a bag of Fritos with Cheez Whiz and 7Up to share.

One summer my other set of grandparents caught wind of my weeklong getaways up north and got jealous. So I was bound to a weekend in Sparta. Considering the fact that most of my cousins on my mom’s side are significantly older than me, my grandparents were a little out of season with young grandkids. I spent three days building towers out of poker chips on the thick, salmon colored carpet in their living room while my grandpa went golfing and Mary played bingo at the local senior center. The weekend ended with Sunday mass. I sat through the service bored and confused by all the standing and kneeling and recitation I didn’t know and couldn’t follow. As I approached the table to take the bread and wine, my head bowed and hands extended like everyone else, I began to weep. I had been fighting tears the whole service, not sure why I was getting so upset. Finally, watching my grandfather ingest the body of Jesus Christ, seeing him place the thin, flesh colored wafer on his outstretched tongue and draw it into himself and swallow, became too much. The whole thing was horrifying. So I cried, and as I did I was not comforted but hushed instead. My grandfather told me I had to be quieter in church, to control myself, to take the body and sit back down in the pew silently. But I could not stop. Eventually, my grandparents ushered me out of the sanctuary to sit out in the parking lot until my mom pulled up to take me back.

That same summer I found my mother’s rosary beneath the potpourri and draped it around my neck. The long strand of beads leading to Jesus hung down past the waistband of my shorts. I would wrap myself in my mom’s oversized bathrobe, don a pair of high heels, make long fingernails out of masking tape, and my brothers and I would imagine with our toy cash register. I would swagger into the department store that was formerly our family room and thoughtfully fondle toy cars, the lamps set out on the coffee table, stacks of boys’ shorts, and Beanie Babies with the crucified Jesus at the end of the rosary always brushing across my t-shirt as I made my purchases. My mom usually walked in on our make believe and patiently explained the purpose of the rosary, that it was designed for prayer, that the beads themselves were meant to be fondled between my fingers with the same earnestness I showed running my hands over the plastic wheels of those matchbox cars or the covers of my dad’s novels arranged on the floor. I was to touch the necklace and thank Jesus for my daily bread and his continual grace towards me. My mother is no longer Catholic, but her patient reverence for the peach colored beads and tarnished cross has persisted. Day after day my brothers and I would wake up and set up shop in our family room, carefully laying out knick-knacks we thought would be of interest to wealthy people. My “rich lady” ensemble never seemed right to me without that rosary around my neck and I knew right where my mother kept it. Day after day she walked in after allowing us a half hour of play before she would lift her sacred beads from around my neck. She never scolded or shushed me outside to sit on our driveway and think about how I had treated the crucified Jesus, about how I had spoiled his body and blood. Instead, she would just explain once more the tenderness he deserved before putting the necklace back in her drawer again.

My mom’s dad was a mix of English and Scottish, but my mom’s mom was not, and that makes my mother half Honduran. You’d never know it looking at her. She highlights her light-brown hair blond. It’s stick-straight, thin, and goes flat in the Michigan humidity or right before it rains. She’s not very curvy or vivacious. She doesn’t know how to salsa dance or do the cha-cha, and none of her siblings do either. Her oldest brother lives in Newport Beach, California. He’s a lawyer and loves wearing linen and eating fish tacos from the seafood restaurant on the pier. Two of my uncles live in Newaygo, Michigan. Bob lives humbly. He’s a painter by trade but his own home’s white paint is peeling. I’m not sure how Ron makes a living in farm country, but I do know he perms his thinning grey hair, achieving something of an Albert Einstein coiffure with oversized, coke-bottle glasses he’s had since the sixties. And her sister, Beck, lives in Middleville. The town’s name is self-explanatory. She’s a second grade teacher with two boys of her own and a stepson. She’s perhaps the closest to what my grandmother was like as far as “curves” and “vivacity” go, but any guess is mostly formed by stereotypes rather than real understanding of my grandmother.

We are a Midwestern family. We live in a nice house in the suburbs of Detroit. It’s decorated with something along the lines of French décor –there are 27 rooster furnishings scattered throughout the rooms of our home last I counted—and we have a big, hairy dog named Ellie. We grew up reading Roald Dahl and taking swim lessons at the local pool. I’ve had the same shoe size since fifth grade—size 10. I was gangly and flat-chested until I was sixteen and I still don’t have hips. Aside from a few cousins and me who were born with dark features, we look Anglo-Saxon. My brothers burn easily in the sun and have my mom’s hair. My mother and I can hold a conversation in Español with the little we both learned in introductory Spanish, and in high school I eventually opted for French as my language of choice. My seventeen-year-old brother has done the same. The only proof at home of our Central American ancestry is one picture of a man who is supposedly my great-grandfather, dressed in khaki and wearing a safari hat in front of rows and rows of banana trees. It used to hang in my dad’s office at our old house, but I don’t know what happened to it since we moved five years ago.

I recently started going to Zumba, an aerobics class here on campus that incorporates Latin dance into a work out. For an hour we listen to Latin music sung in a language I don’t understand and that I usually think is too loud. A passionate Brazilian woman closes her eyes and follows the music while we try to follow her. She tells us that to salsa properly all movement should come from the hips. My roommate laughs every time she glances back and sees how stiff and uncomfortable I look when I really try to move the way the instructor tells me to.

I am middle class America. I ate toasted bread at every meal and thought mass involved plastic coins and toys. While my mother gave us an idyllic childhood, in many ways I’m uncomfortable with it. I feel a loss when I spend an hour every week in a stuffy dance room behind the pool in the sports center of a college in Wheaton, Illinois and I still cannot move my hips like I should. I’m uncomfortable realizing how well I fit in with forty other middle class American intellectuals who don’t know how to move like that either. I never met my mom’s mother, but I wonder if she would have purposely moved the way I wish I didn’t because she wanted to fall away, go unnoticed in a room of forty young Americans trying to dance salsa. I wonder how much of our separate identities have been sacrificed at the mercy of American oneness. I wonder if I have known an American childhood because my grandmother made sure my mom knew one too.

However American my family seems, I’ve heard that my mother grew up with a Latin-American mother who spoke Spanish when she got angry and whose personality sparked in large social settings. And I now know a mother who burns the toast faithfully and who still reveres the tokens of a faith she lost with her mother. I never heard my grandmother’s story or saw her dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin, but I’ve seen the way my mom has raised us and have to wonder if my grandmother would have been any different than my own mother is now.

My mother is half Honduran which makes me a quarter Honduran. I like to think that I’m among “my people” when I go to Zumba, but I’m not. When I’m there, I find myself wishing I grew up with merengue music playing in the background while my mom vacuumed the living room. I wish that I could have seen my mom doing the cha-cha over to the fridge to get another tomato every night around dinner, or that she grumbled in Spanish when she got mad at us like her mom sometimes did with her. But I’m sure that when I look at my mother I’m seeing some of her mother’s good nature and tolerance in her. It is for these things that I love her. I’m sure we’re growing up the way my mother grew up, the way her mother raised her in Sparta, Michigan. And while I see nothing of what I imagine or wish my grandmother to have been like in my mother, I do know that my mother burnt the toast when we were young, but kept making it. She keeps a rosary in her sock drawer, shows more grace to my brothers and me than we deserve, and that she had a mother born and raised in Honduras.

Alexa Adams is a senior English writing major from Bingham Farms, MI. She wrote this essay after reading Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood.”