Some nights, like this one, I lie awake waiting for you. Languages consume me during these sleepless hours: the português of my heritage, the ASL of my Deafness, the English of this country. I think about how they vied for a place in my mind and soul—a fight that almost cost me everything.

You could blame my parents like some did. They hopped between countries, cultures, and languages, loyal to none. It was a mess. Just look at our Thanksgiving dinners: my mother bringing out her favorite tablecloth full of bright tropical flowers that clashed with the late-autumn Michigan gray; cheap forks and knives from TJ Maxx next to real-deal gold-rimmed china smuggled from my mother’s family home in Rio de Janeiro; linen napkins folded fancy on plastic placemats, except my father’s. He got paper napkins he could scribble on with his leaky ballpoint. My mother, father, sister, and I sitting to eat the culinary horrors in front of us. Rubbery turkey slices, undercooked black beans, powdery instant potatoes—a collision of cuisines and cultures.

Here’s the thing. My mother had to—how do you say it?—learn from scratch. Her people came from the kind of money where you didn’t cook or clean, ever; the kind of money where her seven siblings fought like wolves over the carcass of the family fortune. Not a fighter, my mother fled northward to marry my father a month after meeting him at a wedding in São Paulo. He brought her to small-town Michigan where he taught applied mathematics and they were the only Brazilians for miles and miles. She learned how to cook from those booklets that come with the food processor.

It turned out well enough. My father got tenure before professors were expected to be golden-tongued entertainers. He wrote complicated equations on the whiteboard, muttering in his halting English. His students probably only understood his numbers and symbols, which were his real language, anyway. He left his equations everywhere, scrawled on napkins, junk mail, takeout menus. Sometimes my mother would stare at a marked-up receipt for a long time before tossing it into the trash. Once, I fished one out, the blotted equations strangely beautiful in their hieroglyphic elegance. Maybe they were a love poem we didn’t understand.

They’ve been married forty years now, so something must’ve worked.

The mealtime conversations were also messy, bits and pieces of different worlds.

“Putting the dishwasher to work!” would be the approximate translation of my mother’s disjointed sign language.

“Boa comida,” my father said as he ate. I never knew if he actually thought the food was good or if he was trying to spare my mother’s feelings. You never knew with him.

My mother and sister did most of the talking. My father and I remained mostly silent; my father absorbed in his equations, and me unable to follow the chatter. After a respectable amount of time, my sister would stand up, having secretly dumped out her food, and announce she was going to a friend’s house to do her nails. Her English was sharp and crisp, which would carry her deep into the corporate world and to a wedding in Kennebunkport, where she would marry a man who wore Ralph Lauren and boat shoes without the slightest twinge of irony. Nice enough guy who still remembers my birthdays.

The rest of our home life was a tangle of languages half-understood and half-spoken. Português was for hissed arguments, rushed phone calls to Brazil costing nearly a dollar a minute, and family secrets I’ll never know. ASL was for ordering me to brush my teeth, asking if I did my homework, and telling me not to ask so many questions. English, inglês, the right hand clasping the left, filled the gaps.

#

I didn’t think much of this chaos until our pilgrimage to the motherland when I was twelve. Our suitcases bulged with Americana: brand-name jeans from discount stores, knockoff game consoles, generic vitamins. Our tithe. We also brought our gilded American tongues. “Inglês! Teach us,” my cousins’ lips shaped at my sister and me. Even I, with my imperfect tongue and hearing, would do. English was the language of commerce, capitalism, and conquest. How can you blame them for wanting a taste?

We always stayed with my uncle, my father’s brother, in Rio. We tucked ourselves into a small concrete home that housed five generations of carpenters and tailors, guarded by tall walls topped with shards of broken glass. My mother spent most of the trip stuck in Rio traffic, packing two years’ worth of visits and errands into two weeks, and appeared only at mealtimes. My father held court in the cramped living room, dispensing advice for success. “Work hard,” he told relatives and neighbors, a true believer of the American tagline. My uncle worked at a bank where he was a step above a teller and wore the designer suit my mother got on clearance, the too-small jacket left unbuttoned. My sister and I, too soft and American for Rio streets, roamed the manioc-scented rooms, gazing at our great-grandmother’s crucifixes during one of our rare moments of unity.

This time, my sister became friends with the neighbor girl. They met every afternoon at the wrought-iron gate, pressing their fifteen-year-old faces against the warm metal, giggling and whispering. They could’ve opened the gate with the key my uncle left in the kitchen bowl, but it was more fun to pretend to be spies exchanging state secrets and names of cute boys. Too young and uncool to join, I watched them from the other side of the courtyard, breathing in the December heat, static crackling in my ear from my cochlear implant.

I decided to listen—really listen—with my whole body: eyes, skin, nose, and tongue. I started to understand. The easy grace of the neighbor’s lanky limbs shifting, languid and confident in her place in the world. My sister stood stiffly, her smile a notch too bright, the musk of her anxiety drifting toward me. Their mouths moved in that fast, narrow way that I had seen on my parents’ lips but …

Oh, wait. Oh, oh. I finally saw it, tasted it in the sourness in my mouth, felt the prickles. My sister knew português, and I didn’t. She had learned it, a typical—what do you call it?—first-generation child of two languages and two lands. And I was, well, I didn’t know what I was. Something else.

I walked inside, picked up a magazine, dusty from neglect, and stared at the open page. Words floated before me, words with accents that didn’t exist on American keyboards, words I should know deep in my bones, words of my latindade.

After that day, I studied the other language, the one of the body. My uncle nodding sim, sim to his superiors, the mothers tsk-tsking não to their naughty children, people fanning their mouths to call others in for mealtime, the bright smiles masking gritted teeth. The words that sometimes ended with -os, other times with -as. I tried to absorb it by osmosis.

Obrigado. I saw that word often on my uncle’s and father’s lips. My uncle said it in a bellow, my father distractedly, at every act of kindness, big or small. Obrigado, obrigado. An important word. A thanking word.

The evening before our departure, my uncle took us to an Italian restaurant decorated with Lisbon-imported tiles, an extravagance during inflationary times, but he wanted to treat us right. Family was family, and who knew when we’d come back? I prepared to dazzle them with my newfound Brazilian tongue.

The waiter laid a plate of carbonara on the table, and I declared in my most gracious voice, “Obrigado!”

The waiter’s hand jerked, my uncle gulped his wine, my sister giggled behind pink-tipped fingernails, and my mother blushed. Only my father didn’t react, too focused on his scribbling to notice.

“Obrigada,” my mother said to the waiter, who reluctantly returned to his duties. He snuck confused glances at me throughout the evening. I ate and wondered what I had done wrong, whether my tongue had twisted the gratitude into something ugly.

“It’s obrigad-A, moron,” my sister said later, her hand forming the letter A. “You called yourself a man!” She burst into laughter.

Only years later did I learn the root meaning of obrigar: to oblige. Obrigada, I am obliged, bound. I am obliged to my family and languages—all of them.

#

I think a lot about how it began. How I became obliged to English, Anglicized, Americanized. It goes back to the beginning.

The social workers came soon after they found out I was Deaf, or like the doctors said, severely hearing-impaired. They filled up our shabby apartment two blocks from the university with their scuffed pumps, misshapen purses, plastic clipboards, loud voices. English, teach her English, they said, the language of this land. If not by voice, then by signs, or she will be starved of language.

My parents stood in the cluttered living room wearing stiff, unfashionable polyester-cotton clothes of a different world, surrounded by furniture scavenged from Goodwill and kind-hearted colleagues. How strange and frightening the social workers’ words must have sounded to them.

Only English. Apenas inglês. Or she will be lost forever. Ou ela estará perdida para sempre. Without language. Sem língua.

Maybe this was why the decision was easy for my parents. Once we had better health insurance, I got a cochlear implant to improve my hearing at age eight. The surgeon drilled into my skull, inserted tiny electrodes, and wired my ears to receive sound. Faded murmurs became sharp static, and I came closer to understanding without getting there. So I had to learn English, the spoken kind.

Most of my memories of training—oh, they like to call it “rehabilitation” or “therapy,” but it was really training—have faded. Too many afternoons spent repeating r’s and s’s, too many hours half-choking on guttural k’s and g’s, just too many. That’s the thing about repetition: it makes you forget by fooling you into thinking that each day is the same and not worth remembering. Days, weeks, and much more have been lost that way.

Except one. I was thirteen, and it was a sunny afternoon, light filtering through drawn shades. Ms. Kaplan, a round-faced woman with feathery brown hair, covered her mouth. “We need to work on your a’s,” she said in her newscaster English. “I hear your mother’s accent.” Her hazel eyes watched me over the paper held to her mouth. “Repeat after me.”

I tried to hold onto the Brazilian lilt, but the repetition did its work.

Years later, as we lay in bed, I asked my boyfriend, Alex, what kind of accent I had. He knew about these things.

“Your accent has no name,” he said, not unkindly. “Like you’re from an unknown country.”

#

There was also my other accent. Oh, I never ran away from the Deaf like some do. No, I approached cautiously from the sides.

Out of college, I took a job at a D.C. nonprofit, a job that looked better on a resume than in reality. Paid barely enough for a rented room at the last stop on the metro in Maryland. It would lead to a real career, even if I spent equal amounts of time delivering coffee and writing reports nobody read. My parents had told me that I had no family here, so I better learn how to pay my bills. English paid their bills, and it would pay mine.

D.C. should be called the Deaf Capital, a city where you’re as likely to see two Deaf people talking as someone pissing in an alley. ASL became its own center of gravity, and here I finally had more than two people to talk to in this language.

Every Friday, I joined a group of Deaf yuppies for dinner. An IRS accountant, an ASL teacher, a linguistics PhD student, and me. They all worked in the triad of the Deaf economy: language, education, and the federal government. Except me.

The most eloquent one, of course, was Ben, the ASL teacher. The beauty of his words stunned me, poetry of movement and handshapes. His body moved with his every thought, like ASL lived in his cells. I envied the simplicity and purity of that existence. He owned the language, and it owned him.

Sometimes, Ben interrupted me, his face pained, No, that wasn’t right, not the ASL way. Mouthing too much, the word order too English, movements too stiff. English had contaminated my words.

The topic came up often, as it did one hot, humid August evening. We were at one of those fusion restaurants with neon palm trees and food that tasted salty and vaguely Latin. Things were different back then.

Kim, the linguistics PhD student, spoke in her precise, sharp movements. “I had to haul out the research to convince one of the fellows that ASL is a real language, and he calls himself educated.” Her lips thinned. “Just wait until I finish my dissertation.”

Ben drained his margarita and ordered another. “Hearing people don’t get it. ASL is ours, not some imitation of their”—sweeping his hand in the air to encompass the whole world— “language. And it’s the kids who get screwed, getting the broken-down version they can barely understand.” Pain flashed across his face. I suddenly knew what he had looked like as a child, hurt and misunderstood. The expression vanished, and he was just Ben again.

“Yes, yes. My research focuses on real ASL. Not the English crap,” Kim said.

Irene and I glanced at each other. We were the mutts of the group, the voicers who also signed. Irene looked away first and ate her taco. We remained silent as Kim and Ben spoke of linguistic autonomy, language deprivation, and Deaf education.

“Oppression, that’s what it is,” Ben said, his palm pressing down on his fist.

There was truth there, and I knew the history. Schools that forbade ASL and forced everyone to speak English, no matter what. Rulers slapped down on hands that moved too much. Nuns saying that ASL was the devil’s work. Proposals to ban Deaf people from marrying each other. Oppression, suppression, repression. The palm pressing down on the fist.

I wondered if I was the fist or the palm.

The night ended with Kim declaring she had a proposal to write in the morning and Ben staggering into a taxi. Irene and I walked to the metro, quiet under the streetlights that bleached the night orange.

I stopped just outside the entrance, breathing in the humid smog from beneath. “Don’t you get sick of talking about ASL and oppression? It’s like nothing else exists,” I said to Irene.

A tense, knowing smile passed over her face. “Sometimes,” she paused, “but if we don’t talk about it, who will?”

“So it’s our burden when they”—I gestured toward some onlookers gawking at us, fascinated by our ASL—“never think about it, and it’s consuming us, defining us. What if I don’t want that?”

My words shocked me as much as they did Irene. We stared at each other before I forced myself to smile, wave away the painful truth, and to bid her goodbye. We would never mention it again, our odd little secret. I rode the red line that night, English in the air and on the walls.

When I got home, I walked into my bathroom, turned on the bright lights, started to speak to the mirror, and studied the words in the reflection. All three of my languages were there. ASL in the roundness of my movement, português in the rhythm, and English around the edges. My accent was from nowhere and everywhere.

#

Men had trouble understanding that. There was Fernando during college, a Colombian with a gorgeous smile and big dreams. I loved his rolling r’s except when he said my Deaf friends were typical Americans clueless about how good they had it. I don’t remember how our last fight started, only how it ended—me crying on the floor of my dorm room surrounded by discarded clothes and pieces of my broken heart.

Then there was Owen in D.C., a law student and a Deaf advocate in the making. One night, tipsy on wine coolers, he told me he felt sorry about the compromises I made for my foreign parents who barely knew ASL (or English). “Terrible,” he said, and I felt his pity crushing me. When he left me for his high school sweetheart, a third-generation Deaf, I was relieved.

#

Finally, there was Alex. Friends introduced us, and we met for drinks one cool spring evening in Denver, where I had just moved. I had told him the facts over email: I was Deaf and was fine with that, but would he please use the damn microphone? I waited, dreading either rejection or too much interest. He responded with, “Okay, see you at seven.”

I chose a dive bar on a Tuesday night, when it’s the quietest. He was already there when I arrived, fiddling with his beer. His face stopped short of handsome, and when he smiled, it didn’t matter. For the first hour, not yet used to his low, intense voice, I smiled as if I understood. His expressions shifted between cocky and shy. I’d later learn it came from being the new Chinese kid at five different schools as his parents hopped from one academic post to the next. I decided he had a good face I could watch for a long time.

After two dates, we began to understand each other, and I was brave enough to ask, “Do you speak Mandarin?”

He tilted his head. “Strange question.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

He laughed. “No, no. It’s fine. I speak it with my parents and when ordering Chinese, but that’s pretty much it.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“It works.”

I envied him that simple pragmatism and wanted to steal it for myself.

That was the beginning of us. A few dates grew into a full calendar of each other. By the year’s end, we had moved in together.

But I couldn’t talk about him much with my Deaf friends. “He’s hearing?” they said, their eyebrows wrinkling in concern. “Does he know ASL?” I smiled and said, yes, yes. I didn’t mention that he wasn’t exactly fluent. I never invited him to my Deaf circle, and my friends never asked me to.

What I wish I could’ve told them is this: Within our home lived bits and pieces of all our languages. He whispered wo ai ni after we made love, and I replied with eu te amo or the handshape for love. ASL was for the gaps in my understanding, and English was for choosing microwaves and political debates. Everything else was a wonderful mess. “You left dirty clothes on the bathroom floor again! Who am I, your maid?” I said, drawing a question mark in the air. Alex responded with a sheepish smile and a “wo ai ni?” And I tsk-tsked in the Brazilian way and said, “Love doesn’t clean floors. Chenga. Enough.” At this point, we laughed and made up. Some things you don’t talk about.

It went like this for years, hopping from faction to faction. I had drinks after work with my Deaf friends, minding my ASL. The weekend brunch went to my Latinas, sipping cheap mimosas as I caught shreds of the conversations about governmental corruption—only if our homeland’s leaders could get their act together!—and clothes that fit us best. Work was English time, writing research reports and half-listening to the chatter. At home I could finally put down my purse and relax my tongue and hands.

When we married at a City Hall ceremony, Alex said, with his voice and hands, “I take you, Adriana, all of you.” I replied, “As I take you.”

A year later, Alex turned to me in bed. “A good time, don’t you think?” His hand curled up in his chest, cradling an imaginary baby.

My response was immediate. Yes, yes. A new life, a joining of two beings, a gift to the future.

We kissed and started the baby-making business. As he fell asleep, I lay beside him, sweat chilling my body. I imagined a small life inside me, growing until it parted from me and became a being of its own.

A thought struck me. One that had lived in the vagueness of “someday,” always pushed aside by more immediate concerns like bills and finicky supervisors, until someday became today. What language would the child speak, think in? English, ASL, Mandarin, or português? How would they learn them all? How would they know where they belonged?

“Classes, they’ll need classes,” I told Alex. “Us, too. I need to get better at Mandarin and Portuguese, and you need ASL lessons…”

“Oh Adriana, we don’t have time for this.”

“Maybe I should quit.”

“You love your job, and we can’t afford it. What’s wrong with what we have?”

The more we talked, the less we understood each other. Não entende. Head shaking with the index finger raising at the temple. No understanding.

We made love three times a week, knowing each other’s bodies so well that we could make the flesh feel pleasure without touching the heart. After he turned away one night, leaving me sore and sticky, I realized that the words had disappeared. No wo ai ni. No love handshape. No eu te amo. Just silence.

After three months of no pregnancy, I went to the doctor. Alone. I sat on the examination table, the metal’s chill spreading through the paper gown, and the words burst out: “Birth control. I want to go back on it.” I hadn’t meant to say that but didn’t correct myself.

The doctor paused, then asked the date of my last period.

I hid the gray package under my lotions, hair clips, and mascara in the bathroom drawer, where Alex would never look. I dry-swallowed the tiny pill every night, the pebble of guilt scraping down my esophagus. It was just until I figured out which language my child would live with, I told myself. Figured out their future.

Four months went by, and I found Alex sitting on the toilet with the lid down, his head in his hands. He raised the pill packet, a line of hollowed-out cavities along the top.

“Where did you find that?” I nearly shouted.

He lifted his head, his eyes flat. “How long?”

I pretended not to understand. “You snooped!”

“I was looking for a toothbrush. How long?”

My heart felt too big for my chest, and my stomach lurched. My hand moved to my temple. “You need to understand—”

“How long?”

We went back and forth until I held up four fingers.

He turned away, said something I was better off not understanding. After that, we stood still for a long time until he looked at me, hurt all over his face. “Why?” he asked.

I didn’t have an answer. Words in multiple languages collided in my mind, cancelling each other out. How could I explain the weight I felt whenever I thought of languages, of tongues, of inheritance? How I always felt a tightness in my chest, like a palm pressing on my heart, and how I didn’t want that for my child. I wanted something better for them, a life free of such burdens. But I couldn’t find the words and said nothing.

Alex scoffed, got up, and pushed past me. I stumbled backward, welcoming the small pain.

Only when I was sure he had left did I allow myself to cry. Big, walloping tears of a child who had done very wrong.

#

I had promised my parents we would come for Thanksgiving before the fight. I spent three weeks trying to figure out how to explain myself and failing. I tried to forgive him for not understanding and failed again. Words deserted me as he retreated to the couch in angry silence. I expected to come back from Michigan to a half-empty closet and divorce papers on the bed.

Reaching my parents’ faded blue house took eight hours of caffeine-fueled driving. Bleary-eyed, I dragged my suitcase up the driveway too steep for my weak car. The driveway was how we could afford a house in a prime school district.

The door swung open, and the smell of singed milk greeted me. My mother threw her arms around me and spoke too fast. Something about my sister, who had gone to Hawaii or somewhere for Thanksgiving with her family. My mother paused and asked, “Where’s Alex?”

“Had to work. I texted you.”

“On a Thanksgiving!”

My father came over. “I hope he comes back,” he said and kissed me, his lips cool on my hot cheek.

My mother bustled around the kitchen, a cooking magazine open to a complicated recipe she promised would be delicious. My father and I ate quietly. The rubbery turkey had a Cajun flair this year, and the beans were more tender. My mother fussed with the tablecloth, filling the void with her chatter.

After cleaning up, I settled on the couch and closed my eyes. My mother’s voice startled me. “Are you and Alex … all right?” she asked.

I opened my eyes to the sight of my mother sitting in front of me. Her dark, worried eyes returned my stare, enlarged by her rhinestone-studded bifocals. A thick braid coiled around her shoulder, streaks of white and gray crisscrossing, and she fiddled with the hem of her pink vest. Just an ordinary aging suburbanite, down to the knitting circle. Except she wasn’t quite American, not quite Brazilian, not quite anything. Anger rose in me, frightening in its irrationality, and it was soon replaced with despair.

I asked the question I had always wanted to ask. “Why do we speak English?”

Her forehead creased. “What? … Why do you …?”

My throat hurt, so I didn’t use my voice. “Is it because of me?” My palm pressed down on my fist.

“English …?” Her eyes widened suddenly. “Oh, oh. Is that what you think?” She tsk-tsked me. “Não, não. It wasn’t … no.”

The story came in fits and starts, some words in English, others in português, and some signs here and there. My mother had arrived in Detroit in December wearing a light jacket and stiletto boots. They were the warmest clothes she could find in Rio. My father had to drag her from the car to the house, her thin heels sliding across the ice and her body shaking with the deepest cold she’d ever felt. It took weeks to find better clothes. In the end, none of the bulky coats fit.

“I was a stupid, stupid girl. I knew nothing,” my mother said. In Rio’s warm chaos, she couldn’t whisper a word without someone shouting back; in Michigan, her voice could carry for miles without anyone understanding her. When a light bulb burnt out, she sat in the dark for hours, waiting for my father to come home so they could go to the store together. Before each ESL class, she snuck into the bathroom to breathe through her panic, convinced she would fail the class and everything else. Even now, the disembodied English on the phone unnerved her. “You know your father. No help at all,” she said, blinking. “I wanted something better for you and your sister. I thought … English would be better.”

I imagined her: black roots peeking through her bleached hair, shivering in the dark in her skimpy clothes and stilettos, thousands of miles away from home, waiting for a near stranger so they could brave the cold together.

I reached over and held my mother’s warm, wrinkled hand. “Oh, Mamãe,” I said.

#

Her magnified eyelashes fluttered. After a moment, she cleared her throat. “Everything came out fine. Time for dessert!”

She walked to the kitchen and darted around the small space, the malty smell of scorched sugar filling the house. My father scribbled on some paper at the dining table, face set in concentration. The bright tropical tablecloth, the gold-rimmed china, and blue plastic placemats clashed, but the discordant colors cast a warm glow into the dim room. Pots crashed in the sink, and my father looked up and watched my mother trying to rescue the doomed dessert. A slow smile spread on his face, and after a moment, he returned to his equations.

Everything was in disarray—the mismatched colors and cultures, the dubious smells coming from the kitchen, the jumble of languages and blotted scribbles. Nothing was what it was supposed to be. Yet, it worked, and it was beautiful.

I began to laugh, feeling the reverberations throughout my body. A weight eased off my chest, and I could breathe.

#

So, that is the story I will tell you, my darling Clara, when you are ready. There are other stories, like the one about how your father and I found the words to understand each other at last. But this one is for you to know where you came from so you can go forward. Oh! I feel your little kicks, so eager to start your life full of languages and worlds. Now we are finally ready for you.