When You Tawk like a New Yawka
Ona Gritz
Word Count 428
Once, as a teenager—bored with studying, anxious over my pending SATs—I asked my mother if I absolutely had to go to college. After all, she hadn’t, nor had my father or older sister. Why was it expected of me?
“I hope you go,” she answered, “and that you’ll come out speaking beautifully.”
We lived in Far Rockaway, a thin strip of Queens flanked by the Atlantic ocean and Jamaica Bay, and what my mother meant was that she hoped my education might wash away the outer-borough New Yorkese that she, my father, sister, and nearly everyone around us spoke. Awe in our coffee. Don’t when doesn’t was called for. Potato and window both ending in a…
I did go to college where, despite staying in state, I eventually lost my Queens accent, just as my mother had wished.
Well, mostly. Something I’ve discovered in the ensuing decades is that dialects and speech patterns never actually leave us. They merely go underground. My New Yorkese, I’ve noticed, rises to the surface when I’m angry or overtired or when I talk on the phone with childhood friends. Seventeen years ago, newly in love with the man who is now my husband, I learned it also seeps out when I’m at my most porous and undefended.
“No way,” I insisted when he informed me that, as I clung to him the night before, I’d cried Oh, Gawd into his ear. He’d found it endearing. I felt mortified. “You have to promise me you’ll never tell a soul,” I said.
By then, I had lived in Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, and had finally landed a scant four miles across the river from Manhattan in Hoboken, New Jersey, a place often referred to as New York’s sixth borough.
These days, my husband and I reside in Pennsylvania and, due mostly to Covid and its growing number of unpredictable variants, I haven’t set foot on my concrete-covered native soil in nearly two years. As much as I love our creaky house and slow-paced town, I feel a deepening affection for my birthplace, which has suffered so profoundly with this virus. The word homesick doesn’t quite define it. It’s less a longing than a powerful need to claim. Mine, I think when I catch glimpses on screen of the Chrysler in its tiaras, a sign for the Verrazano Narrows, the gleaming Unisphere. Mine, when I hear the familiar squeeze-and-twist of that accent I once found so embarrassing. No, not mine exactly. Rather the word, the feeling, is Me.
Ona is a poet, memoirist, essayist, and children’s author. A longtime columnist for Literary Mama, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Brevity, Salon, and River Teeth, and been twice listed as Notable in The Best American Essays. Her most recent book, Present Imperfect, is a collection of essays.