by Sofia Amorim
I once heard a story about an iceberg that carved the Palisades, slicing through sandstone and silt, before it dissolved into the river. This probably isn’t true, but nonetheless, I was fascinated by the image of a block of cold jagged peaks splitting the earth like wood. When I told my mom this story, she liked to say that she was the iceberg, carving a path for the two of us, her words truncated by long winded sighs. It’s not hard to imagine mom pushing through walls of stones, or making waves along the Hudson shoreline. Her hands bent pliers, locking couplers together on New Jersey Transit. She kept her shoulders squared, her back straight, and her eyes fixed on whatever stood in her way. Her strength alone warrants anything else to yield to her.
Mom doesn’t like that I wake up earlier than her to push paperbacks to ‘ungrateful’ travelers. Her rheumatic fingers grip my lower jaw, pressing her disappointment deep into my skin like fossils, in the shape of half-moon marks. Every morning, I remember to readjust the pillow that lies between us and cross myself as I pass the framed photo of George W. Bush, stacked on top of college textbooks preserved in shrink wrap. Her pull slackens on my conscious as the tires on my car hit the pavement, and I can hear the road salt crunching beneath their grooves. The rest of my ride, my brain focuses on the barren limbs of the trees that line 24 and 78. Mile by mile, trees give way to houses, give way to strip malls, until all I see is car parks and the tarmac. I drive past the first two parking lots, before turning into the third, driving directly to the back corner of the lot. Cartlidge between knuckles creaks before sunrise, I knew that much from my mom, but it was my Granma who taught me that.
I think about her a lot while I watch sunrises from my car. I see flashes of wiry hair escaped from loose braids when the first rays peek from the horizon. I hear the squeak of sliding cartilage detangling my hair, as my own stiff joints press down on my car keys. But her voice is far away and I can’t make it out beneath rolling engines. The sound of the plane fades, and I’m left at the shuttle stop in a deafening silence, watching thick cotton clouds beginning to blanket the sky. My eyes come back down to look at grain like flakes of snow, abandoning any hope at trying to make out Granma’s voice. As the shuttle rolls up to the terminal, I find myself thinking about that primordial iceberg, imagining it careening through Departures and melting into an ocean around itself, creating an island of departees, stranded in a fragmented airport lounge, with Arrival Bay miles away. I chuckle, thinking about the irony of how, in my mind, being marooned in an airport ravaged by destruction is emblematic of solace I look for.
I watch a fuzz like sun split from the asphalt behind grey clouds, burning a deep orange like the color of clay pots Granma would bring to my house to cook. My ears pick up the hum of the coming shuttle, but my heart heard her browning garlic. I reach into my bag for the tangerine I stuffed in there, as per my mom’s thick morning voice reminder to take something to eat. She stockpiles every genus of apple known to the orchards of the Northeast, but today I really wanted a tangerine. My thumbnail pierced the rind, carving a line from its north pole to its south. The oils seeped into the minutiae of my thumbs, and the smell of tangerine oils reminded me of Granma peelings rinds of oranges, and limes, and mangos, tossing them into her clay pot, boiling them in rum for her novenas. Wedges are popped into my mouth, as I trace pith veins and press them deeper into my cavernous mouth, nearly swallowing them whole, trying to imprint its taste. The shuttle pulls up to Departures, I crush the last wedge in my mouth, and let the juice roll over my tongue as I made way inside.
I step over blanket bound travelers spread across the Departures Lounge floor like human icebergs. My pumps plod through the sea of passengers, my calves straining as I teeter around them. I count the number of foreign passports tucking out from luggage pockets, nearly tripping on a Burmese blocking the entrance to the bookstore. Nacho, delivering the new James Patterson novels, catches my wrist with cardboard calloused hands. My eyebrows raise in thanks as my fingers twist keys into the locks and lead Nacho inside.
“They say this storm is supposed to freeze the runways,” he said, stacking boxes on my counter. “I’m just glad ma shift’ll be over. Yours is my last delivery, y despúes, freedom, in all capital letters!” His fingernails dug into the packing tape, pulling the flaps open on his final words, like he was popping an orange from its rind.
“I don’t care if the tarmac turns into Beringia, my ass is not gonna be here after noon.” I responded between breaths, heaving hardcovers onto the trolley. “I gotta pick up my mom before one, so I’m dipping at 11:59.” “En tacones? Olvídate mija—” his words drop like old tin cans, my breath hitches, and my back stiffens.
“Nacho, I’m too far from the diction—”
“Right. Gutiérrez, I keep forgetting you not one of us.” I can hear the soles of his boots slap the linoleum floor, as he moves towards me to help rearrange the stacks I can’t reach, even with standard issue work pumps. “Too smart to be speaking Spanish.” His voice dips like grooves in canyons, and my fingers tighten along the spines in my hand. I fix my eyes to the scar along my index finger, when my mom dug her acrylic talons to scratch the word Abuela from my blood. Building mountains from Patterson, I mumbled a thanks to Nacho as he saluted me with box shells slung across his shoulder. The walkie talkie on his hip spat unintelligible sounds, and he threw his head back and let out a groan. “Sounds like I might be able to sneak you onto the mail car when your shift ends.”
“Hey Nacho! Wait a sec. I’ve got something for you.” I pulled out one of the Colombian coffee candies that I hide in the zippered divider in the purse my mom and I share. She kept molasses chews in the side pockets, and salt water taffies scattered across the bottom. But that dividing pouch, the one she ignores, that one’s all mine.
“Oyé! Thanks Yenny!”
“Jenny!” I pull the candy away, bartering his pronunciation for mine. He eyes me, then my fist holding the candy. He drew his coffee tinted eyes from the candy, they bored into mine and I felt something frozen inside me begin to crack.
I was the one trying to get my name from him.
“Fine. JENNY!” I dropped the candy into his palm, ridding myself of something he deemed sacred. He held out cupped palms and picked up the candy between his thumb and index finger and dropped it into his mouth, blessing himself to the Virgensita. “Que Dios me perdone, pero those things are amazing! I can’t find that stuff in Newark!”
“That’s why I go to Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth! Isn’t that a little too ‘Hispano’ for you?” he said, baiting me with air quotes.
“Then you can go there instead of asking me.” My tongue wedged itself into my cheek, while my eyes watched his fingers curve and twitch in the air. I turned on my heels and walked back to a stack of new Díaz books.
“Aw, c’mon Jenny. I’m juss sayin, you ain’t ever leave Morristown unless you drivin here. I mean, c’mon, Morristown is white as hell, and the brown section by Speedwell don’t count because there’ll like five families in a two block radius.”
“Yeah, well that’s why I gotta go to Elizabeth.” My words are truncated by the thud of the hardcovers. Nacho shook his head.
“Aight then. Show me. I get paid Friday, I’ll go witchu to see where you get them candies at. For all I know, you just sayin Elizabeth for street cred.”
I watched him purse his lips into a skeptical duckface, as he walked backwards out of the store. He tripped on the Burmese boulder, eliciting a wheeze of laughter from the base of my throat. I propped the glass doors open and continued reshaping and reclassifying books on the stand. The 6:35s to Frankfurt huddled by the travel guides, practicing their English with each other. I busy myself reorganizing landmark pamphlets, to get within earshot. Their voices are like echoes that sound foreign, yet faintly familiar, just like Nacho’s Spanish. I recognized the sounds from a past my mom has all but tried to wipe from our lips, but still feel my tongue try to recreate the blurry words Granma used to say. I remember her braiding my hair with yellow ribbons, singing my name like psalm. My tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth, my mandible twitching, slipping, and stumbling trying to fumble for her pronunciation.
Yennifair.
I know there was more to this memory, but mom’s voice bursts through my brain shouting “Her name is JENNIFER”! She doesn’t roll her r’s, or softened her j’s. She punctuates each letter, like a foot stomping in the clay dirt in the mezas. “You are her GRANDMA,” spitting the D into my Granma’s sunbleached skin, “not ABUELA!”, but I can feel the way her tongue falters like mine on the final word. Granma wipes my tears with a steady thumb, continues plaiting my braid, and weaving red ribbons through my hair, while as my mother storms out. “Granma” she says, rolling her r over the soft a, crashing like a small wave over the n, the m flowing right into it, and the final a carrying the word from her lips to my ears. She rubs the crusty tear tracks on my pale skin, scraping gently with a frail nail, like dust off a fossil, holding my hand gingerly as she led me to bed. I put mom’s pillow in the middle of the bed and crawl under the sheets. She takes the pillow and tosses it to the floor, her caramel skin glowing like the candle she lights at the foot of the bed. She sings me a Spanish lullaby, her fingers brushing over my lips when I try to sing with her.
“Abuela,” I hesitate, worried that my small mouth can’t say it right.
“Yennifair.” She sings, her hand on my cheek.
Last boarding calls crackled on the overhead, the travel guides fall like the snowflakes dusting the tarmac. Being pulled away from Granma, I bend down to collect the guides, my eyes struggling to recognize my language, quickly returning them to their slots on the shelf. For the rest of the morning I stand behind the till, charging cards and counting cash, placing receipts inside covers before sliding them into tissue paper sheaths. This reminds me of the archaeology class I audited in college, where they were wrapping arrowheads from the Hudson. Come to think about it, I think that’s where I heard the story about the iceberg. I had bought the books for the course without having registered, poring through photos of artifacts of cultures that have been beneath rock beds that cradle skyscrapers. Mom thought that I was better off taking an environmental science course. She said it was more relevant to the development of our future. I wasn’t sure if she meant us as humans, or she and I. Being forced into early retirement wasn’t easy on her, but her muscles started spazzing, and she’d fall on the job. Out of pity, they didn’t fire her, but she made it clear that if they did she would sue. She didn’t fight them when they offered her early retirement, but then she would fight with me. I dropped Anthropology, and failed Environmental Science. All my mother had left went to paying for school. Her receipt was a story about an iceberg.
And what did I have?
I was left with books that I was too scared to open in front of her, even more scared to open myself, and a memory of language she had forbade me to recall. I walked over to the pyramid of dictionaries, eyeing them cautiously, noticing several crooked ones along the base. My thumb and index fingers braced the edges of one and nudged it back. I moved over to the next, trying to nudge it back, but it wouldn’t budge, buckling and bending from pressure. My fingers pinched the bottom corner, trying to wiggle it into place, before the whole left half of the pyramid sloped into a landslide of jumbled words and translations.
“Damn.” I knelt down and started stacking the books into columns, when an elderly woman with sleek gray hair knelt opposite me. She looked at my ID and smiled. Her words were like warm drops of marmalade falling on cotton-stuffed ears. I felt my breath escape me, and instead my lungs were weighed down by my own disappointment. “Sorry. I—”
“Eese okay.” She gathered some books in her hand and placed them next to the ruins of my pyramid. She patted pat my arm and smiled, “Yennifair Gutiérrez.”
She left me there, and I imagined that she was on her way to visit her granddaughter, and that she would make her soup, and teach her words between spoonfuls. For the first time that morning, I felt that the iceberg inside me sublimated entirely.
I wanted my Granma.
I wanted to remember her, and not the memory of her.
I wanted mom to teach me Spanish.
I didn’t want to visit a frozen tombstone with only tangerine rinds.
The Spanish-English dictionary I had returned for an Englishman earlier in my shift was still on the counter. My hands trembled as it lay nestled in my hands. I wondered if it felt heavier in my hands than in anyone elses. I passed it between each hand, waiting to count the moment where it’s weight pressed itself deep into the lines along my palms. With the last of the 11:55’s to Mallorca out of the shop, I unsheathed the dictionary and crumpled the tissue paper. My fingers remained stiff as they dragged over the cover, my thumbnail pressing the pages down, to make them fan in front of me like sticky note animations. I don’t see words. I see shapes that bleed into each other, fitting like fault lines beneath tectonic plates.
Only, it’s my world that’s moving.
Melanie’s moussed ponytail swings round the corner, and I slip the dictionary into my purse beneath the counter. She smiles at me as she takes my seat behind the counter, her eyebrows darting up at the small stack of books left on the counter.
“You’re gonna read all that?” she flips to the back cover of the Cisneros, nodding her head as she buries it into the reading stack burrowed in the corner behind the register. Her red lips purse at Walden and the Whitman at the top, like they were sour grapes in her mouth. “I read these two in American lit my junior year. A leaf is a leaf, is a leaf. I didn’t get what that shit had to do with ‘America’.” she said, her fingers hooking in the air like Nacho’s.
I watched her carry the stack onto the cart before hauling them back to their places on the shelves. Rather than try to answer that loaded question, I grabbed my purse and waved to her as I walked through the doors into the Departures lounge. Melanie’s back is turned to me, the sound of my heart pounding starts to reverberate in my ears. My hands dig through my bag for the dictionary, the way I imagine archaeologists dig their hands into clay mounds; pushing the clay to make way for nimble fingers that probe earth for a cultural relic. But really, I was just a dog with a bone. The crook of my palm cupped the binding, lifting it to the brim of the bag when a low honk startled me and my hand jerked, dropping the book back into the basin of Colombian coffee candies and salt water taffies.
“Por que tanta prisa, chica? I said I’d bring the chariot,” Nacho called, driving one of the transport carts, nearly bowling through a pack dressed in Spanish jerseys. Not wanting to wait for the mumbled complaints of the group, I slid into the passenger side while fingering the cover edges of the dictionary.
“Thanks.”
“Ya know, I didn’t mean nothing by that Spanish stuff. It’s just—”
“It’s fine Nacho,” I dropped the words like rocks, hoping they would thud to the floor. We could leave them unturned. But Nacho isn’t the kind to leave well enough alone.
“But it isn’t. I mean, I get pissed when you give me them looks cuz I don’t nothin about them books you stock up. Shit, just cuz I ain’t in school, don’t mean I’m a dumbass.” His knuckles pull the fabric of his work gloves taught, his hands fixed on the wheel at ten and two. He relaxes them as he turns past loading, and I turn up the collar on my jacket to block the wind, and his view of me biting my cheek. “But just cuz you don’t understand Spanish don’t mean you’re not really one of us. Mira, I may be Colombian but I ain’t never been there, or dance salsa!” My eyes peeked over my collar, to see him trying to keep his eyes on the road while his face was turned towards me, and his hips wiggling to some imaginary music. I could feel the cold air wrapping around the joints in my fingers, shaking as I put my collar down.
“I’m not really Colombian. My Granma was. My mom was American.” I conceded. His hands pushed the gearshift down to a lower speed, puttering past the shuttle stop. I could feel his eyes on my ID, and I kept mine glued to the tread marks on the ground.
“You never learned Spanish?” His voice was soft, like silt, like loam, like the snow rolling in little cyclones around us. He took my silence as confirmation, letting out a low whistle that embodied the slow and powerful plummet I felt resounding in my chest. My brain fished for the words in the dry riverbeds of memories of Granma. My tongue flopped like trout in the dredged shorelines of the Hackensack, speared by my mother. How do I find words when my tongue is being pulled and tied, knotted to the point of muteness?
“Nope.” I try, popping the p popping, and the bubble around us. My face turns to look for the sun beneath the thick wool gray sky, my fingernails digging half-moon marks on the cover of the dictionary, as though I was digging into my own disappointment. From the corner of my eye, I see him turn his head back to face the road.
Good.
“For someone who reads hella books, you don’t say much.” My shoulders sag, and I feel my annoyance begin to rise. I dig my car keys out from my bag as we pull up to my car, jangling my keys excessively so that maybe he’d hear the feelings I don’t want to talk about. He waits until I unlock the car. I toss the purse into the passenger seat, and turn the key in the ignition.
“Thanks Nacho.”
“Yennifer,” he calls, as I had put my right foot in the car and sat down, looking back over my left shoulder at him. My heart stopped. I timed my breathing to the hum of the heat, melting the thin layer of ice on the windshield. I realized that name was mine. I turned to face him, still in the transport cart. “I got a word for ya.” He started moving the gearshift up, his foot easing up on the gas pedal. “Miedosa.”
I shut the car door and watch him drive away. The moment his cart made a turn, I pulled the dictionary out, scanning for the arrangement of letters that came close to those sounds. The muscles in my face wobbled like rolling stones, stumbling across the pronunciations until I found the right one.
Miedosa, adjective, fearful.
I pulled Granma’s prayer card from my visor and set it in the page fold, my fingers rubbing tracing the outline of fragmented memories buried in her face, while I screwed my eyes shut to see if I could hear her voice above my own. My lips pressed together and my tongue pushed the back of my bottom teeth, and pushed itself up, suspended in the cave of my mouth for a moment before it crashed against the back of my incisors. The skin around my mouth contracted like an ebb tide, my teeth barred as my tongue held up the roof of my mouth, air hissing around it, before I opened it wide to let the word tumble out nettled cattails in the wind. I closed the dictionary and stuffed it under my seat, practicing the muscle shifts in my cheeks and tongue.
I put the car in reverse, ready to lift my foot off the brake. Nacho’s transport car skirted along the horizon of the airport parking lot, and my eyes squinted at the brightness of the sun behind the down colored clouds. I shift the car into drive, and cut through the empty parking space. Once again I am reminded of that iceberg, and this time, I think that I am the iceberg carving my path.
My engine seizes for a moment when I brake, the dictionary darting towards the floor. For a second, I think about kicking it under so mom won’t see it. The engine turns over, but my foot is firm on the brake. I reach down to pick it up and place it back on the seat. Mom’ll have to hold it in her hands before she moves it to sit down. I take a deep breath and ease the accelerator. The thin layer of ice crunches and cracks beneath me, and I drive straight past Arrivals.
About the Author
Sofia Amorim holds a Bachelors in English (Honors) from Drew University where she minored in creative writing, as well as a Masters of in Teaching of English. She currently serves as a delegate of the Pi Epsilon Pi Writing Honors society at Drew, and teaches English, Journalism, and Creative Writing in Newark Public Schools.
