Unit 3: Vocabulary from Readings 2

Our first few years in the States, though, ethnicity was not yet “in.”

“From the Caribbean,” I answered vaguely, for if I specified, no one was quite sure on what continent our island was located.

“Julia Altagracia María Teresa Álvarez Tavares Perello Espaillat Julia Pérez Rochet González.” I pronounced it slowly, a name as chaotic with sounds as a Middle Eastern bazaar or market day in a South American village.

After the commencement ceremony, my family waited outside in the parking lot while my friends and I signed yearbooks with nicknames which recalled our high school good times: “Beans” and “Pepperoni” and “Alcatraz.”

All that has gone before was preliminary. We have been preparing ourselves mentally for what lies ahead.

Paved roads and the development of the automobile have gone hand in hand, the automobile being civilized man’s antidote to overpopulation.

Most of these developments have been so incorporated into our day-to-day life that they are taken for granted, their origin not considered.

Physiologically, serving a tennis ball is nothing like hitting a forehand; they’re two completely different actions.

In turning aside during a backswing, the dominant eye can lose contact with the ball momentarily.

We had reached an impasse.

It would be years before I understood the emotional toll of repressing anger and natural frustration.

Knowing that I would not be admitted to certain tournaments protected me from direct rebuffs.

The kitchen was littered with appalling mounds of raw food: A slimy rock cod with bulging fish eyes that pleaded not to be thrown into a pan of hot oil.

And then they arrived—the minister’s family and all my relatives in a clamor of doorbells and rumpled Christmas packages.

Then my father poked his chopsticks just below the fish eye and plucked out the soft meat.