ELA DAUGHTER OF INVENTION Ms. Mulligan
DAUGHTER OF INVENTION
Alvarez was born in New York but spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic until her family had to flee the country due to her father’s involvement in a political rebellion. The following story is from the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, which is about the lives of four sisters spanning thirty years in both the United States and the Dominican Republic. In this short story, Yolanda struggles to write a speech for school.
"Untitled" by Jess Waters is licensed under CC0.
[1]She wanted to invent something, my mother. There was a period after we arrived in this country, until five or so years later, when my mother was inventing. They were never pressing, global needs she was addressing with her pencil and pad. She would have said that was for men to do, rockets and engines that ran on gasoline and turned the wheels of the world. She was just fussing with little house things, don’t mind her.
She always invented at night, after settling her house down. On his side of the bed my father would be conked out for an hour already, his Spanish newspaper draped over his chest, his glasses, propped up on his bedside table, looking out eerily at the darkened room like a disembodied guard. But in her lighted corner, like some devoted scholar burning the midnight oil, my mother was inventing, sheets pulled to her lap, pillows propped up behind her, her reading glasses riding the bridge of her nose like a schoolmarm’s. On her lap lay one of those innumerable pads of paper my father always brought home from his office, compliments of some pharmaceutical company, advertising tranquilizers or antibiotics or skin cream; in her other hand, my mother held a pencil that looked like a pen with a little cylinder of lead inside. She would work on a sketch of something familiar, but drawn at such close range so she could attach a special nozzle or handier handle, the thing looked peculiar
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