How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay by Julia Álvarez Read Free Book Online

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’town 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