The Daughter of Invention

“She never put anything actual on paper until she had settled her house down at night. On his side of the bed her husband would be conked out for an hour already, his Spanish news-papers draped over his chest, his glasses propped up on his bedside table, looking out eerily at the darkened room like a disembodied bodyguard. In her lighted corner, pillows propped behind her, Laura sat up inventing.”

Despite Laura’s independent and inventive spirit, her work can only really happen after the house has “settled down,” indicating that her primary role as a mother and wife is to tend to the family. While Laura stays up inventing, her husband’s sleep is riddled with memories—he is literally draped in Spanish newspapers, and he sleeps like a “disembodied bodyguard” as though he still needs to protect them from the old dangers of SIM. There is a parallel image in the final sentence of this paragraph that connects Laura staying up late in a “lighted corner” with Yoyo writing in a dark room lit by a single lamp.

“Once Yoyo was sure her mother had drawn a picture of a man’s you-know-what; she showed her sisters her find, and with coy, posed faces they inquired of their mother what she was up to. Ay, that was one of her failures, she explained to them, a child's double-compartment drinking glass with an outsized, built-in straw.”

Laura’s daughters do not take her inventions seriously because they primarily see her as a wife and mother, and to see her otherwise would be to accept her as a woman outside of her traditional gender role. They laugh at her drawing, which they think looks like a “man’s you-know-what,” linking Laura’s independent creative practice to her role as a wife. The drawing is of a gadget meant to help a child, signifying that Laura’s inventions will only ever emerge within the confines of wife and mother.

“‘Thanks, thanks a lot, Mom!’ Yoyo stormed out of that room and into her own. Her daughters never called her Mom except when they wanted her to feel how much she had failed them in this country. She was a good enough Mami, fussing and scolding and giving advice, but a terrible girlfriend parent, a real failure of a Mom.”

Laura’s daughters expect her to fill many roles for them. When Yoyo calls her “Mom,” she means to insult her failures as an ideal American mother. They use “Mami” to signify Laura’s role as a Dominican mother, which presents in “fussing and scolding and giving advice.” When moving to a new country, Laura suddenly is expected to not only fulfill the roles she did in the Dominican Republic but also those expected of her as a new American.

“This was Yoyo’s time to herself, after she finished her home-work, while her sisters were still downstairs watching TV in the basement. Hunched over her small desk, the overhead light turned off, her desk lamp poignantly lighting only her paper, the rest of the room in warm, soft, uncreated darkness, she wrote her secret poems in her new language.”

Yoyo’s writing practice here is represented much like Laura’s practice of inventing. She writes in the dark and under a “lamp poignantly lighting only her paper,” which signifies that writing is something private and illuminating in an otherwise dark and uncertain period of Yoyo’s life. She keeps her writing secret, revealing that her writing means something to her privately and does not require the acknowledgment of anyone else to make it valuable.

“Yoyo shrugged as her mother tore off the scratch paper and folded it, carefully, corner to corner, as if she were going to save it. But then, she tossed it in the wastebasket on her way out of the room and gave a little laugh like a disclaimer.”

Laura destroys her own invention here, despite running into Yoyo’s room to proudly show it to her. The care with which she folds it makes it seem as though she is saving it like something precious, but her destruction reveals her belief that she is ultimately bound to her traditional roles.

“Important, crucial, final things, and here was their own mother, who didn’t have a second to help them puzzle any of this out, inventing gadgets to make life easier for the American Moms.”

The girls and their mother have different ideas of what is important and deserves attention in their new life in America. They imagine their own problems at school as “important, crucial, final,” while her inventions are frivolous and about “American Mom,” not them. This passage indicates how living in America creates distance between members of the family as they struggle to understand each other’s behavior.

“Still, in the hierarchy of things, a poem seemed much more important than a potty that played music when a toilet-training toddler went in its bowl.”

Alvarez here creates a direct juxtaposition between Laura’s inventions and Yoyo’s writing. The word “hierarchy” contributes to a sense that one is more powerful or valued than the other, and Yoyo has decided that poetry trumps her mother’s inventions. Here, the invention named is specifically related to the realm of the mother, part of Laura’s traditional role, and something that registers as less valuable to Yoyo.

“‘García de la Torre,’ Laura would enunciate carefully, giving her maiden as well as married name when they first arrived. But the blank smiles had never heard of her name. She would show them. She would prove to these Americans what a smart woman could do with a pencil and pad.”

The power of Laura’s name in the Dominican Republic reveals her motivation for inventing new things. The “blank smiles” of the Americans who don’t recognize her family’s importance in the Dominican Republic signify that Laura is starting from nothing in this new country. Drawing with a “pencil and pad” is a way to fill in that “blank” with something of her own design.

“Now in America, he was safe, a success even; his Centro de Medicina in the Bronx was thronged with the sick and the homesick yearning to go home again.”

Carlos is in many ways represented as being infected by the power his past holds on his present. His fear affects how he behaves like a symptom, and this passage explores how homesickness is something that requires healing. His work as a doctor makes him a “success,” but even this work is connected to a desire to return home, as he works with so many who have left their native countries.

“But in New York, she needed to settle somewhere, and since the natives were unfriendly, and the country inhospitable, she took root in the language. By high school, the nuns were reading her stories and compositions out loud in English class.”

For Yoyo, writing and language are places where she can “settle,” a word directly relating to the relationship between someone in a new, foreign land. The phrase “take root” signifies that for Yoyo, comfort with English is a way for her to grow in America, which might require accepting the less-than-welcoming conditions presented to her.

“That weekend, her mother turned all her energy towards helping Yoyo write her speech. ‘Please, Mami, just leave me alone, please,’ Yoyo pleaded with her. But Yoyo would get rid of the goose only to have to contend with the gander. ”

Laura turns her inventive energy away from her own work toward Yoyo’s speech, even though Yoyo begs her to let her be. The idiom at the end of this passage recalls the idioms Laura frequently uses and often gets incorrect. This one is printed correctly, as though from the perspective of Yoyo, representing the ways Yoyo’s English surpasses her mother's. Nonetheless, she still needs her mother to help her with her speech.

“The poet’s words shocked and thrilled her. She had gotten used to the nuns, a literature of appropriate sentiments, poems with a message, expurgated texts. But here was a flesh and blood man, belching and laughing and sweating in poems.”

Yoyo here is moved by the words of Walt Whitman and the ways he presents something uncensored and reckless, which is unlike the sterile offerings of the nuns at school. The language of the body—flesh, blood, belching, laughing, sweating—connects Yoyo to something that feels truer than any writing she has encountered before. The masculine recklessness of this poet signifies a type of writing far from any traditional expectations of her.

“The minute Carlos saw his wife and daughter filing in, he put his paper down, and his face brightened as if at long last his wife had delivered the son, and that was the news she was bringing him. His teeth were already grinning from the glass of water next to his bedside lamp, so he lisped when he said, ‘Eh-speech, eh-speech!’”

Carlos lives in a house full of women but still possesses a traditional masculine power to which they all must defer. Here, when Yoyo comes to deliver her speech, Alvarez equates his pride to that of having had a son, connecting Yoyo’s success in school to a distinctly masculine sense of power. Though not a man, Carlos sees Yoyo as having the potential to move through the world in a way that is not limited to traditional feminine roles.