“I was panicked when I couldn’t find it,” she went on. “Mami and Papi helped me search all over. And just so you know,” she added, her voice full of self-righteousness, “I didn’t tell them where I found it.”
I guess I should have said, Thank you for saving mine and my mother’s hide. But the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Aren’t you going to at least tell me why you did it, Sarita?”
I shrugged, clutching my books to my chest as if a cold wind were blowing. But the day was unseasonably warm. Most of last night’s snowfall had melted, and the streets and sidewalks had that rainy smell of wet pavement.
“I don’t understand,” she said finally. I could feel her eyes looking intensely at me. “I thought we were close.” She left that sentence up in the air just begging for me to reassure her. But instead I kept on looking down at the sidewalk, studying all those cracks I was not supposed to step on so as not to break my mother’s back.
Over the years that Mamá and I stayed on with the García family, Yo and I never spoke of this incident again. Sometimes, we had long talks, and we’d end up hugging each other, but that stolen report was always between us. It wasn’t the stealing itself, but my silence when Yo asked me if we weren’t close. It was as if I had broken some bond all four of the García girls had taken for granted.
The report itself Yo gave me to keep when she got it back from her professor. I can’t say I ever read it, but I accepted it, and it stayed stacked on our shelf of things in the basement closet. Finally when Mamá went back to live on the island, she took it along. For all I know, the pages of that report were used by Abuelita to light her fogín that she insisted on using even after I bought her an electric stove.
I kept my promise to Mrs. García. I got all A’s at Sacred Heart and won a full scholarship to Fordham, which was only about ten blocks away from the house. The scholarship was part grades and part tennis. I’d gotten pretty good at the park program Mrs. García enrolled me in to get some exercise over the summers. A few years of Nueva York nutrition and I’d shot up like Fifi and gotten some skin on my bones. Once in college, my coach wanted me to go professional, but I decided against it. Those hobby professions were for the García girls—who ended up being unemployed poets and flower arrangers and therapists. Instead I majored in the sciences—which didn’t come so easy to me. But I made myself study the flow and movement of atoms and molecules with as much intense concentration as I had focused on those cracks in the sidewalk during my heart-to-heart talks with Yo García.
One day, years after Doña Laura and Don Carlos sold their house in the Bronx and moved to the city, Yo shows up at my clinic. Turns out she’s in Miami, peddling her manuscript at some convention. I hadn’t seen any of the García girls for at least two decades. One of my technicians comes in and says that there’s a kind of kooky-looking lady asking for me.
“Show her in,” I say—my heart pounding when I hear the name.
In she comes, a wisp of a woman with her long straight hair she used to wear in a braid now a tangle of gray-speckled curls. She’s still pretty, but it’s a prettiness tinged with weariness like her looks weren’t made for the knockabout life she’s had. “Wow, Sarita, girl, pretty nice digs here,” she says, rolling her eyes in that García girl way.
I catch my head involuntarily jerking up, and I feel the sharp pang of missing my mother.
And that’s why she’s here. She gives me a big hug, and we sit down on the couch. “I heard about Primi,” she says, her voice cracking. “I didn’t even know she was sick.” Her eyes fill, and on account of her mascara, she has black tears.
“She had a hard life,” I say in an even voice. It’s one of the skills that I’ve cultivated over the years—keeping tight control of my feelings. “And it was especially hard at the end when your family turned against her.”
“We never turned against her!” Yo stands up and paces back and forth in front of the couch. “My sisters and I were always on her side.”
I have to admit she’s right. Until the end, the USA Garcías never rejected Mamá. It was the de la Torre family back on the island that accused her of having lost her mind when she claimed—at the very end—that one of them was my father.
“Even Mami,” Yo continues her pacing, “even she said that your mother wouldn’t make up such a thing.”
I recall Mrs. García’s sweet smile, the special place she always had in her heart for me. Maybe she knew. Maybe that’s why she let me come up from the island to make something of myself in New York. “I believe you,” I tell Yo. “Now come sit next to me. You’re making me nervous pacing like that.”
She sits down, and suddenly we are face to face after all these years. What I’m thinking is, Mamá’s dream has turned out! Her baby, an orthopedist with one of the top sports medicine clinics in the country, with a Rolex that cost four times her annual wages before she came to New York, and beside me, Yo García, starving writer, sometime teacher, in a cheap jersey dress. “Your mother was like a mother to us,” she says. “Ay, Sarita, we thought of you as our sister.”
It’s too late now to try to set things straight. “You girls were good to us,” I agree. That is only part of the truth, of course. But it’s the part that I want to give her to make her feel good about the past. I can tell by looking at her that she’s going through hard times. She’s too skinny. There are bags under her eyes. She needs a good haircut.
I stand up—it’s time for me to get back to work—and when she stands up right after me, I put my arms around her. I can feel her dry skin against my cheeks.
She’s the first to pull away. “I better go,” she says, looking over her shoulder, laughing awkwardly. “Your boss is going to get on your case for keeping your patients waiting.”
“I am the boss,” I say, smiling straight at her.
“Just like predicted!” When I look at her quizzically, she adds, “I guess you never read my report, did you?”
“I didn’t know I was going to be graded on it twenty-five years later,” I say right back.
She is laughing, shaking her head. It’s not often someone has the last word with Yo García. “Let’s not wait another twenty years to see each other,” she says, picking up her coat. I nod, though I doubt I am ever going to see any of the García girls again. Mamá has died. The past is over. I don’t have to make believe anymore that we are five sisters.
“Take care of yourself,” I say to Yo as she heads out the door. “And say hello to your sisters.”
The teacher
romance
Once in a career there comes a student—he writes out in longhand. He is retiring at the end of this school year and has vowed never to touch a computer. The English department secretary will type up his garbled notes, and by that very afternoon a white envelope marked confidential will be in his box. Confidential in deed. Lord knows what his colleagues would say about Garfield’s indulgence of this latest plea for help from their troubled ex-student, Yolanda García.
Dear Professor Garfield, I’ve got to get my life back on track. I’ve decided to follow your advice at long last. I’m applying to graduate schools, and I hope that you will write me a letter of recommendation one more time. I know you don’t have any reason to believe that I will carry through with my plans, but who does a person turn to when all others have lost faith in her promise? I turn to you.
Fifteen years ago, Yolanda García turned up in his Milton seminar, a dark-haired, pretty young woman, an intense look in her eyes. At that point Garfield didn’t realize it was the only look she had. He had assumed that with a name like Yolanda García and a slight accent to her speech, she was a foreign student, and her writing would be ghastly and her comprehension of the text minimal. But she whipped out papers that sang with insight and passion. She wouldn’t leave the lines of Paradise Lost alone until she had tripled and quadrupled the double entendres, and Professor Garfield had to restrain her. “That will do, Miss García. Four puns a passage is q
uite enough, even for Milton’s Satan.”
I’ve finally decided to get my life back on track.—How many times has she written this line, or said it in a crackly, breathless voice in a late-night call from some place where it was probably still a decent hour. But of course, Miss García would not think that here, in western Massachusetts, it could be bedtime for her old professor who was just getting on track himself after a journey to heartbreak and back.
So, what’s one more time? The first letter of recommendation he wrote to the Fulbright committee was thirteen—or was it fourteen?—years ago, the fall of her senior year. Once in a career there comes a student. He could not think of a worthier candidate to be awarded a fellowship to go to Chile to translate contemporary Latin American writers. She was of Hispanic origin. Her first language, Spanish, would be indispensable to her in understanding the original texts. As for her English. Caramba! (Of course, he crossed out that silliness with a thick, inked line so not even the secretary could read it.) Yes, her English was flawless. Though still sporting a slight accent—that had indeed been his unfortunate verb, sporting—she had a native’s intuitive grasp of the language of Milton and Chaucer and Shakespeare. Gentlemen, you will not regret the choice of Miss Yolanda García as a Fulbright fellow.
He had had to eat those words. By the time Miss García had been awarded the grant, she had become enamored of a local hippy boy and had run off with him—spring of her senior year. He, Garfield, could not believe it when the dean called him up with the news. “Garfield, you’re her advisor, can you make any sense of this?” Garfield remembered a golden-haired young man waiting outside class for Yolanda, a boy of classic beauty—the girl had an eye all right. Darryl Dubois—she had introduced them—looked like an Arcadian shepherd in a pastoral. Garfield also remembered the boy couldn’t put two words of his own native language together. No, the professor and advisor told the dean, he could not make any sense of Miss García’s choice at all.
Her own father could not make sense of it either. The irate Hispanic man had shown up in the dean of student’s office. “Where is my Yo?” he had shouted in a broken English that made him all the more pathetic. Thompson, who’d accepted the deanship only on the proviso that he get a leave every fourth year, did not have the talent for this sort of thing. What could he do but sit the man down, get him a glass of water like a child, and say, “Dr. García, we at Commodore College are as perplexed as you are. We will do everything in our power to convince your daughter to graduate in time with her class. She is one of our top students. We are mystified. We are disappointed.”
According to Thompson, his tone of voice, the cadence of his short, futile statements calmed the furious man. “And Jesus, Garfield, what I haven’t seen in all my years dealing with parents, this dad put his face in his hands and wept.” Thompson had poured out the whole story to Garfield during their usual Friday evening at the Green Tavern. “I just can’t get the poor guy out of my mind.”
The truth was these students did get under your skin. They signed up for your Milton seminar or your Romantic poetry course, and before you knew it, you were not only teaching them how to scan iambic pentameter, you were also trying to save them, in many cases from their own selves. How could Yolanda García, with the highest grade point average in the department, run off with a high school dropout whose idea of literature was the ridiculous lyrics of some song by a band with the name of an animal—the monkeys or the turtles or the beetles, for heaven’s sake?
Thompson told how the father had ripped up the reimbursal check the college was returning to him for the second semester tuition. In a thundering voice with a hand lifted, finger pointing heavenward, like Moses (Thompson’s field was religion), the father had announced to the whole of the dean of students’ office that his daughter was dead to him. Off he went in that salmon suit, a color no one on this sleepy campus had ever before seen a man wearing. As for Yolanda García, her name was removed from the list of active students. “A waste, a damn waste,” Thompson concluded at the end of the evening.
But Garfield could not let the matter drop—though Helena again accused him of being obsessed with a student. “What about your own children?” she scolded, pouring herself a nightcap of straight vodka. “They’re not children,” he had argued back. “They’re in college.”
“And so is this Jocasta—”
“Yolanda. It’s a Spanish name,” he corrected her. She was right, of course. Yolanda was the same age as their eldest, Eliot. But Yolanda was unusual—she didn’t know the ropes in this culture. Someone had to teach her. “Once in a career there comes a student,” he began.
“Oh please, Jordan, spare me the bullshit.”
That they never saw eye to eye—Garfield had learned to live with. But that she had the coarse, foul mouth of a hussy when she had been drinking was still hard for him to bear. He, for whom words counted, for whom the world was held together by the glue of language. “Helena, please,” he protested and retreated to his study. There he made a few calls among the locals and found out the whereabouts of the young newlyweds.
Next day, he presented himself at the door of the rundown apartment on the North Side, next to the town dump. At first, Yolanda was shocked, and then grateful, embracing him and pulling him inside as if theirs were a clandestine meeting.
Once the door was closed, she seemed at a loss what to do with him. The place was a mess. The window sashes sagged, the painted wood floor was chipping, the few pieces of furniture looked as if they’d been dragged in from the dump outside. “It’s just temporary,” she apologized, her cheeks full of color. Her young husband was already at his bartending job, please sit down, what could she offer him?
He sat gingerly on a couch draped with an Indian bedspread of elephants linked tail to trunk, a rajah with an umbrella atop each one. A cat the color of the yellow fog in “Prufrock” observed him through narrowed eyes. Garfield expected it to open its mouth any minute and recite, “‘That is not it at all. That is not what I meant at all.’”
“No, thank you,” he said when Yolanda repeated her offer of refreshments. He wanted only to talk to her.
It took one or two questions before she tearfully admitted she had made a big mistake. “I mean, dropping out my senior spring,” she was quick to add. “I’m not sorry I got married.” She played with the band on her finger, no doubt still clinging to the hope that love would conquer all. “I only had nine more credits to go.”
“Well, that mistake can be rectified and we will rectify it.” Garfield nodded at her as if she had come in for a conference asking for his advice. “You are finishing up the semester, Miss García, and that is that.” Even in this run-down tenement with wallpaper Victorian ladies with parasols, coming unglued as if in shock over the invasion of Indian rajahs on elephants—even here, sitting on a dirty sofa that smelled of cat and spilled drinks and other mistakes, Garfield observed the formalities. Miss García. That is that. Didn’t he always proclaim to his classes the greatness of British civilization, how even in far colonies and dim outposts the Brits maintained their impeccable manners. He himself was from Minnesota, though he believed no one could guess it from his speech. If only Helena could observe some civilities from the dim reaches of her drinking, things might be better between them.
“But, Mr. Garfield, I can’t afford Commodore. My parents disowned me.” She looked at him with the doomed eyes of a Desdemona whom Othello has by the throat.
“Let’s not get carried away, here. We’ll talk to Dean Thompson. Even if you have to take out a loan, we will get you through.” The conversation was getting very personal. He checked his watch. “I have conference hours to attend to. I’ll look for you tomorrow morning in my office, nine o’clock sharp.”
“But—,” she began, glancing towards the door as if afraid the hippy boy might show up any minute. “I don’t think Sky Dancer will like it.”
Sky Dancer, good God! “That’s his name?”
She looked at him from un
der her brows with knowing eyes. “He changed it. He thinks it sounds more . . .” She hesitated. She had caught herself already making fun of the new husband.
“More interesting,” he concluded for her. She nodded, biting her lip. To keep a smile from surfacing? “Well, Miss García, if Mister Sky Dancer really does love you, he will not stand in your way. If he gives you any trouble, you tell him—” Who on earth did he, Garfield, think he was? This young woman was no relation, after all. His colleagues were bound to talk. “You tell Mister Sky Dancer to come see me.” He cleared his throat. “In loco parentis,” he added. “I am your advisor and that is as good as family.”
She bent her head, and when she looked back up at him, her eyes were wet. “Thank you, Mr. Garfield,” she said. “You’ve probably saved my life.”
“Is that all the credit I get? Probably?” he teased, casting a look around. On an upended crate that seemed to serve as an end table to the couch sat the edition of Stevens they had used fall semester in the modern poetry seminar. “‘After the final no there comes a yes,’” he quoted.
“‘And on that yes the future world depends,’” she finished, smiling.
She graduated with honors—the degree awarded to Yolanda María García, whose semi-reconciled family was in attendance. “That’s not her fucking name!” the hippy boy-husband stood up and shouted. After the ceremony, Garfield witnessed the scene on the green outside the chapel. This Sky Dancer snatched the sheepskin from Yolanda’s hands and, just as Dean Thompson had described the father tearing up the reimbursal check, the young man ripped up her diploma. “If they want you to graduate, let them give you one with your fucking name.” The father, who had just barely contained himself all weekend, cursed the fellow roundly in loud, furious Spanish in front of quite a crowd.
Six months later, the phone rang—a crackly, far-off voice from some dim outpost. She had gone down to the Dominican Republic and gotten a quickie divorce. She was calling from there, staying a few months to get her head together but she wanted to finally get her life on track, you know? (Yes, he knew!) And so, she was thinking of applying to his alma mater Harvard, what did he think?
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