two halves of no whole

I never called my father’s parents abuela and abuelo. They’ve always been Grandma and Grandpa. They fell in love in a small town in upstate New York when they were seventeen, after my grandfather moved to the US after spending the summer with a relative that seemingly never ended. He worked in an autobody shop off the books, raising three sons with the love of his life in Brooklyn. He sent my father, the first and youngest, to college in the fall of 1989, a fact he’s always shared with me. 

I never called my mother’s parents nonna and nonno. They’ve always been Grandma and Grandpa. My mother was the first daughter to an Italian couple who’ve known each other since they were fourteen and fifteen, respectively. They got married when my grandmother was 19 and had my mother at 21. My mother was also the first in her family to go to college, writing her essay about her father’s work overseas and how she took care of her younger brothers and how it shaped her when she was younger. On her first night, she cried in her dorm for an hour before taking my grandfather’s sacred advice, taking it to heart as though it were the Gospel, according to Peter. She dusted herself off and wiped tears away before stepping outside. 

My Cuban grandmother plays with my curls. She sits in her usual suede recliner, while I rest at her feet as we watch TV together because I can’t sleep and she doesn’t want to start a fight. She says my curls are unruly and asks me why they can’t be more tamed like hers or my cousins. I’m six years old and I shrug. I’m always unsure of how to answer her when she asks questions like that. I’ve never had an answer that was satisfactory enough.

My Italian grandmother asks me when I’ll learn to cook. She’s hovering over a pot of sauce, letting the heat rise and the mixture to simmer. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a book in hand and an earbud in. I am fourteen years old and I tell her that I’ll get around to it eventually. She tells me that I won’t ever find a good husband if I can’t provide for him and be a good spouse. The feminist inside me boils while my mother whispers hushed, ignore her. I don’t know if she’ll ever know that maybe I’d like to provide for a wife. 

My father does not speak any Spanish and my limited school training has taught me more than he has ever known. He can say the basic phrases but cannot carry a conversation. His parents never taught him, for reasons even he is unsure of. I always assumed they didn’t want him being teased for growing up as a non-white kid in a neighborhood riddled with racism. I speak more of their tongue than he does. My grandfather speaks with a thick accent, even after sixty years in America. He always makes me laugh when he forgets the names for simple things like the TV remote. Sometimes I wonder if he does it on purpose. My grandparents would whisper to each other in their love language at night, as my cousins and I always would speculate exactly what they were discussing. We’d try to make out names and sounds of the dialect we never spoke from the spare bedroom, where pictures of their family members back home rested on the ancient dresser that’s been with them for decades. Most of what I remember hearing is the phrase mi amor. I hope I can find a love story like theirs someday, and sometimes I think I already did. 

My mother never learned to speak Italian, instead opting to take French in high school to impress a boy she liked, but she forgot most of it and can only say the Hail Mary now. The majority of her family had lived in the United States for three generations and the mother tongue had lost its purpose. She tells me that the last person to speak fluent Italian was her great-grandmother, who she never got to know all that well. The closest we have to speaking Italian on my mother’s side is spending Christmas Eve together, where the Feast of the Seven Fishes always manages to make its return (but it’s slowly transitioned into four.) The spread adorns a folding table, and we’ll eat with multiple conversations going all at once. It's loud, chaotic, but it's my favorite day of the year. It’s my grandfather’s birthday, so we wait until after he’s had his cake and presents before all the kids rush to the tree. As the years go on I grow up, things change, but the sentiment remains the same. It’s planned over weeks and is over in hours.

The first time I go to Puerto Rico, I’m roughly six years old and it’s whitewashed beyond belief. My parents and I are on a cruise and one of the stops is in Old San Juan that feels like a movie set instead of a real town. All I remember is the heat, and complaining to my mother as we walk the streets that were once my grandfather’s. He was born two hours away from the town we wandered around that day while my father told me stories that his father told him. I pretend to care and count down the hours until we could go back onto the boat. The weather is not my friend, as my hair expands with each passing minute. 

The first time I go to Italy, I’m sixteen. It’s my birthday gift from my mother, after I announce at 15 that I want to travel for my Sweet Sixteen rather than throw a party I wouldn’t have any fun at. I hated the eyes on me when family and friends sang around the cake at my parties growing up; there was no need to expand that into a party with a dress and a DJ. We book the trip in spring and spend the last week and a half before my junior year in Rome, Florence, and Venice. We eat gelato in the ancient streets and we get into a fight at the Leaning Tower of Pisa because I don’t want to take the picture where it looks like I’m holding the relic up. I state that the best city we see is Florence and vow to return at some point in my life. We know we have cousins somewhere in the country, distant ones whose names I will never know and faces I will never see, but we don’t see them for reasons I am unsure of. My mother says they have no idea we exist, and I don’t want to upset her.

I go to Catholic school until I’m in sixth grade. My mother’s logic is “If I went, you go, too.”  I hate the environment as a whole. I hate the endless rules and the anxiety it brings me of getting in trouble. I roll the sleeves of my sweater up the way the boys would and the teachers would say I was “unladylike”. On the first day at my second school, my new teacher scolds me for copying my homework down the “wrong” way. There isn’t much room for individuality, apparently. I learn to stay in line and keep myself quiet.

I wake up with stomach aches and headaches that would make me beg my parents to let me stay home. Eventually they cave,  and I start going to public schools before middle school.

My Cuban grandmother went to Catholic school, too. She was scolded and reprimanded for having the same speech impediment I do. She tripped over words and the nuns who taught her would hit her knuckles with a wooden ruler. Once for every word she’d mess up on. 

The cab driver asks me where I’m from. He knows my full name that’s attached to the rideshare app that my mother had me download for the nights I’d be at practice late. It’s a Saturday and I’ve spent the last five hours in a recording studio on 40th and 8th. The boys in my band walk to the train together, and although one of them is supposedly taking the same line as me, my mom insists I take a cab. She’s worried about me alone on the streets alone carrying an instrument on my back, even though it’s only a three block walk from the train station to my apartment. I’m fourteen years old, and my safety as a girl in a city is always on her mind. Hindsight taught me that she was right. 

“Where are you from?” the driver asks, making a turn onto 53rd and 3rd, Ramones Street. “Your name...It’s very holy.”

“New York,” I reply. I don’t see a reason to give him a whole cultural lesson.

“I figured, but where is your family from?”

“Puerto Rico and Cuba,” I say. “And Italy.”

“Your last name very common where I’m from,” he notes. “Medina. Do you know the significance of your name?”

“No,” I reply, texting a friend back as we continue the drive. We’re a mile away from my apartment by now.

“‘Jordan’ means to flow,” he begins. “It’s from the Hebrew word yarden. ‘Medina’ means city of the prophet.”

My Cuban grandmother asks me why I’m so pale. I’m seventeen, sitting on the edge of my cousin’s pool fully clothed. A black shirt and denim shorts that reach my mid-thigh hide my biggest insecurities, the ones she will never understand why I have. There’s a notebook and pen in my hand as a scratch poetry and lyrics to songs I may never write onto the worn pages. She asks me why I don’t go in the pool anymore, inquiring as to if there’s a swimsuit tucked away in my backpack that’s a few feet from me on the patio. 

“I’m just not feeling good today,” I reply. “I have a stomachache.” 

“But it’s so hot, you must be sweating,” she shoots back. She never takes no for an answer from me. “Go, I’m sure Taylor or Kristen have a swimsuit if you need one. You look very sick, Jordan. Please get some sun.”

I borrow a black bikini from my cousin Taylor and dip myself into the water. My cousin Justin, who’s exactly two months older than me, says I’m practically translucent, paler than his sister, who’s a ginger. I always guessed it was the Irish in her.  All of my cousins on my dad’s side are half white and half Hispanic. I will always wonder if they feel the same as I do. 

My grandmother smiles as I submerge my body. Up until my half-brother was born, I’ve been the baby. She’s always been very protective of me. 

My Italian grandfather and I are sitting at the table on his porch in the backyard. We’re drinking Pepsi from the cans and looking off into the distance as the sunset turns the sky orange and pink. His dog sits by my feet as we watch the trees dance from the wind. He tells me that I remind him of my mother. 

“Headstrong, adamant,” he notes. “Every time I look at you, I see her. It’s nice having you around like this.”

When I spend the nights there, he’ll leave ten dollars and a note with my name on it on the kitchen table. He tells me to save it or buy myself something nice. He always calls me his favorite of the five (almost six) of us. I’m the first-born and the only one who’s technically Catholic, even though I haven’t been to church since I was fifteen. Religion is something my family values when it’s convenient. I wear my version of his gold crucifix, a small silver guitar pick with my initials and my Confirmation date engraved on the opposing sides. I got it as a gift from my mother’s youngest brother, my sponsor. I keep a modest collection of his letters in my wallet and answer the questions from my mom as to why I have a growing collection of little slips of paper with my name on it. His heart is weak and I always worry about saying goodbye, but he insists on working every day. He’s headstrong, too.

My curls and tan always come back in the summer. I’ll go to the beach once or twice and metamorphosize into my “summer” self, as my mother puts it. The tan is naturally caused by just the sun and the curls are the byproduct of the notorious New York City humidity. Sometimes my hair gets lighter in the sun, natural highlights that would have people interrogating my mother to what hairdresser gave her small child balayage. The answer was always “No one! It's natural.”

On the first day of my junior year of high school, a girl I thought I was in love with tells me that my tan is unnatural and unattractive. She says I look like the “basic” girls she has grown to detest and that I don’t look like myself anymore. I’m not wearing a graphic tee that day, instead a sweater from a store she despises, and shorts with new sneakers. I felt really good walking into the pristine white halls I had grown so accustomed to. I promised myself this year would be different. No more old patterns, even though I was already slipping back into it without even realizing.

My hair is curly, too. I don’t even mind all that much. 

“This is me though,” I protest. 

“It’s not the way I like you. You look better when you’re...less that.”

I almost take it as a compliment. I began straightening my hair again, even though I had told myself days before that I didn’t need straight hair to feel pretty or to be pretty. The mantra repeats whenever I plug the tool into an outlet in my bathroom. My reflection stares back as the light hits my eyes just right.

 Sometimes even I don’t recognize the face looking back at me.