How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  He was giggling with pleasure and could not get the words out at first. He had had too much to drink. “That was Mami,” he said in a coy little voice.

  “No! Wrong!” all the women cried out.

  “Carla?” he guessed the oldest. He was going down the line.

  ” Wrong!” More shouts.

  “Sandi? Yoyo?”

  “You guessed it,” his third oldest said.

  The women clapped; some bent over in hilarious laughter. Everyone had had too much to drink. And the old man was having his good time too.

  “Okay, here’s another coming at you.” The eldest took up the game again. She put her index finger to her lips, gave everyone a meaningful glance, quietly circled the old man, and kissed him from behind on top of his head. Then she tiptoed back to where she had been standing when she had first spoken. “Who was that, Papi?” she asked, extra innocent.

  “Mami?” His voice rode up, exposed and vulnerable. Then it sank back into its certainties. “That was Mami.”

  “Count me out,” his wife said from the couch where she’d finally given in to exhaustion.

  The father never guessed any of the other women in the room. That would have been disrespectful. Besides, their strange-sounding American names were hard to remember and difficult to pronounce. Still he got the benefit of their kisses under cover of his daughters. Down the line, the father went each time: “Carla?” “Sandi?” “Yoyo?” Sometimes, he altered the order, put the third daughter first or the oldest one second.

  Sofía had been in the bedroom, tending to her son, who was wild with all the noise in the house tonight. She came back into the living room, buttoning her dress front, and happened upon the game. “Ooh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s getting raunchy in here, ha!” She worked her hips in a mock rotation, and the men all laughed. She thrust her girlfriends into the circle and whispered to her little girl to plant the next kiss on her grandfather’s nose. The women all pecked and puckered at the old man’s face. The second daughter sat briefly on his lap and clucked him under the chin. Every time the father took a wrong guess, the youngest daughter laughed loudly. But soon, she noticed that he never guessed her name. After all her hard work, she was not to be included in his daughter count. Damn him! She’d take her turn and make him know it was her!

  Quickly, she swooped into the circle and gave the old man a wet, open-mouthed kiss in his ear. She ran her tongue in the whorls of his ear and nibbled the tip. Then she moved back.

  “Oh la la,” the oldest said, laughing. “Who was that, Papi?”

  The old man did not answer. The smile that had played on his lips throughout the game was gone. He sat up, alert. There was a long pause; everyone leaned forward, waiting for the father to begin with his usual, “Mami?”

  But the father did not guess his wife’s name. He tore at his blindfold as if it were a contagious body whose disease he might catch. The receiving blanket fell in a soft heap beside his chair. His face had darkened with shame at having his pleasure aroused in public by one of his daughters. He looked from one to the other. His gaze faltered. On the face of his youngest was the brilliant, impassive look he remembered from when she had snatched her love letters out of his hands.

  “That’s enough of that,” he commanded in a low, furious voice. And sure enough, his party was over.

  The Four Girls

  Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

  The mother still calls them the four girls even though the youngest is twenty-six and the oldest will be thirty-one next month. She has always called them the four girls for as long as they can remember, and the oldest remembers all the way back to the day the fourth girl was born. Before that, the mother must have called them the three girls, and before that the two girls, but not even the oldest, who was once the only girl, remembers the mother calling them anything but the four girls.

  The mother dressed them all alike in diminishing-sized, different color versions of what she wore, so that the husband sometimes joked, calling them the five girls. No one really knew if he was secretly displeased in his heart of hearts that he had never had a son, for the father always bragged, “Good bulls sire cows” and the mother patted his arm, and the four girls tumbled and skipped and giggled and raced by in yellow and baby blue and pastel pink and white, and strangers counted them, “One, two, three, four girls! No sons?”

  “No,” the mother said, apologetically. “Just the four girls.”

  Each of the four girls had the same party dress, school clothes, underwear, toothbrush, bedspread, nightgown, plastic cup, towel, brush and comb set as the other three, but the first girl brushed in yellow, the second one boarded the school bus in blue, the third one slept in pink, and the baby did every-thing she pleased in white. As the baby grew older, she cast an envying look at pink. The mother tried to convince the third daughter that white was the best color, and the little one wanted pink because she was a baby and didn’t know any better, but the third girl was clever and would not be persuaded. She had always believed that she had gotten the best deal since pink was the color for girls. “You girls are going to drive me crazy!” the mother said, but the girls had gotten used to the mother’s rhetorical threats.

  The mother had devised the color code to save time. With four girls so close in age, she couldn’t indulge identities and hunt down a red cowboy shirt when the third daughter turned tomboy or a Mexican peasant blouse when the oldest discovered her Hispanic roots. As women, the four girls criticized the mother’s efficiency. The little one claimed that the whole color system smacked of an assembly-line mentality. The eldest, a child psychologist, admonished the mother in an autobiographical paper, “I Was There Too,” by saying that the color system had weakened the four girls’ identity differentiation abilities and made them forever unclear about personality boundaries. The eldest also intimated that the mother was a mild anal retentive personality.

  The mother did not understand all that psychology talk, but she knew when she was being criticized. The next time the four girls were all together, she took the opportunity of crying a little and saying that she had done the best she could by the four girls. All four girls praised the good job the mother had done in raising four girls so close in age, and they poured more wine into the mother’s glass and into the father’s glass, and the father patted the mother’s arm and said thickly, “Good cows breed cows,” and the mother told the story she liked to tell about the oldest, Carla.

  For although the mother confused their names or called them all by the generic pet name, “Cuquita,” and switched their birthdates and their careers, and sometimes forgot which husband or boyfriend went with which daughter, she had a favorite story she liked to tell about each one as a way of celebrating that daughter on special occasions. The last time she told the story she liked to tell about the eldest was when Carla got married. The mother, tipsy on champagne, seized the mike during the band’s break and recounted the story of the red sneakers to the wedding guests. After her good cry at the dinner table, the mother repeated the story. Carla, of course, knew the story well, and had analyzed it for unresolved childhood issues with her analyst husband. But she never tired of hearing it because it was her story, and whenever the mother told it, Carla knew she was the favorite of the moment.

  “You know, of course, the story of the red sneakers?” the mother asked the table in general.

  “Oh no,” the second daughter groaned. “Not again.”

  Carla glared at her. “Listen to that negativity.” She nodded at her husband as if to confirm something they had talked about.

  “Listen to that jargon,” the second one countered, rolling her eyes.

  “Listen to my story.” The mother sipped from her wine glass and set it down a little too heavily. Wine spilled on her hand. She looked up at the ceiling as if she had moved back in time to when they were living on the Island. Those downpours! Leaks, leaks—no roof could keep them out during rainy season. “You all know that when we were first married, we w
ere really really poor?” The father nodded, he remembered. “And your sister”—the stories were always told as if the daughter in question were not present—“your sister wanted some new sneakers. She drove me crazy, night and day, she wanted sneakers, she wanted sneakers. Anyhow, we couldn’t afford to make any ends, no less start in with sneakers! If you girls only knew what we went through in those days. Words can’t describe it. Four—no, three of you, back then—three girls, and no money coming in.”

  “Well,” the father interrupted. “I was working.”

  “Your father was working.” The mother frowned. Once she got started on a story, she did not acknowledge interruptions. “But that measly little paycheck barely covered the rent.” The father frowned. “And my father,” the mother confided, “was helping us out—”

  “It was only a loan,” the father explained to his son-in-law. “Paid every penny back.”

  “It was only a loan,” the mother continued. “Anyhow—the point is to make the story short—we did not have money for one little frill like sneakers. Well, she drove me crazy, night and day, I want sneakers, I want sneakers.” The mother was a good mimic, and everybody laughed and sipped their wine. Carla’s husband rubbed the back of her neck in slow, arousing circles.

  “But the good Lord always provides.” Although she was not particularly religious, the mother liked to make her plots providential. “It just so happened that a very nice lady who lived down the block with a little girl who was a little older than Carla and much bigger—”

  “Much bigger,” The father blew out his cheeks and made a monkey face to show how much bigger.

  “This little girl’s grandmother had sent her some sneakers for her birthday from New York, not knowing she had gotten so much bigger, and the little sneakers wouldn’t fit her.”

  The father kept his cheeks puffed out because the third oldest burst into giggles every time she looked over at him. She never held her liquor well.

  The mother waited for her to control herself and gave the father a sobering stare. “So the nice lady offers me the sneakers because she knows how much that Carla has been pestering me that she wants some. And you know what?” The table waited for the mother to enjoy answering her own question. “They were just her size. Always provides,” the mother said, nodding.

  “But Señorita Miss Carla could not be bothered with white sneakers. She wanted red sneakers, she wanted red sneakers.” The mother rolled her eyes the same way that the second daughter had rolled her eyes at her older sister. “Can you believe it?”

  “Uh-huh,” the second daughter said. “I can believe it.”

  “Hostile, aren’t we?” Carla said. Her husband whispered something in her ear. They laughed.

  “Let me finish” the mother said, sensing dissension.

  The youngest got up and poured everyone some more wine. The third oldest turned her glass, stem up, and giggled without much enthusiasm when the father puffed out his cheeks again for her benefit. Her own cheeks had gone pale; her lids drooped over her eyes; she held her head up in her hand. But the mother was too absorbed in her story to scold the elbow off the table.

  “I told your sister, It’s white sneakers or no sneakers! And she had some temper, that Carla. She threw them across the room and yelled, Red sneakers, red sneakers.”

  The four girls shifted in their chairs, anxious to get to the end of the story. Carla’s husband fondled her shoulder as if it were a breast.

  The mother hurried her story. “So your father, who spoiled you all rotten”—the father grinned from his place at the head of the table—“comes and rescues the sneakers and, behind my back, whispers to Carlita that she’s going to have red sneakers just like she wants them. I find them, the both of them on the floor in the bathroom with my nail polish painting those sneakers red!”

  “To Mami,” the father said sheepishly, lifting his glass in a toast. “And to the red sneakers,” he added.

  The room rang with laughter. The daughters raised their glasses. “To the red sneakers.”

  “That’s classic,” the analyst said, winking at his wife.

  “Red sneakers at that.” Carla shook her head, stressing the word red.

  “Jesus!” the second oldest groaned.

  “Always provides,” the mother added.

  “Red sneakers,” the father said, trying to get one more laugh from the table. But everyone was tired, and the third oldest said she was afraid she was going to throw up.

  Yolanda, the third of the four girls, became a schoolteacher but not on purpose. For years after graduate school, she wrote down poet under profession in questionnaires and income tax forms, and later amended it to writer-slash-teacher. Finally, acknowledging that she had not written much of anything in years, she announced to her family that she was not a poet anymore.

  Secretly, the mother was disappointed because she had al-ways meant for her Yo to be the famous one. The story she told about her third daughter no longer had the charm of a prophetic ending: “And, of course, she became a poet.” But the mother tried to convince her daughter that it was better to be a happy nobody than a sad somebody. Yolanda, who was still as clever as when the mother had tried to persuade her that white was a better color than pink, was not convinced.

  The mother used to go to all the poetry readings her daughter gave in town and sit in the front row applauding each poem and giving standing ovations. Yolanda was so embarrassed that she tried to keep her readings a secret from her mother, but somehow the mother always found out about them and appeared, first row, center. Even when she behaved herself, the mother threw her daughter off just by her presence. Yolanda often read poems addressed to lovers, sonnets set in bedrooms, and she knew her mother did not believe in sex for girls. But the mother seemed not to notice the subject of the poems, or if she did, to ascribe the love scenes to her Yoyo’s great imagination.

  “That one has always had a great imagination,” the mother confided to whoever sat next to her. At a recent reading the daughter gave after her long silence, the mother’s neighbor was the daughter’s lover. The mother did not know that the hand-some, greying professor at her side knew her daughter at all; she thought he was just someone interested in her poetry. “Of all the four girls,” the mother told the lover, “that Yo has always loved poetry.”

  “That’s her nickname, Yo, Yoyo,” the mother explained. “She complains she wants her name, but you have to take shortcuts when there’s four of them. Four girls, imagine!”

  “Really?” the lover said, although Yolanda had already filled him in on her family and her bastardized name—Yo, Joe, Yoyo. He knew better than to take shortcuts. Jo-laahn-dah, she had drilled him. Supposedly, the parents were heavy-duty Old World, but the four daughters sounded pretty wild for all that. There had been several divorces among them, including Yolanda’s. The oldest, a child psychologist, had married the analyst she’d been seeing when her first marriage broke up, something of the sort. The second one was doing a lot of drugs to keep her weight down. The youngest had just gone off with a German man when they discovered she was pregnant.

  “But that Yo,” the mother continued, pointing to her daughter where she sat with the other readers waiting for the sound system to work properly so the program could begin, “that Yo has always had a great imagination.” The buzz of talk was punctuated now and then by a crackling, amplified “testing” spoken too close to the microphone. Yolanda watched the absorbed conversation of her mother and lover with growing uneasiness.

  “Yes, Yoyo has always loved poetry. Why, I remember the time we went on a trip to New York. She couldn’t have been more than three.” The mother was warming to her story. The lover noticed that the mother’s eyes were those that looked at him softly at night from the daughter’s face.

  “Testing,” a voice exploded into the room.

  The mother looked up, thinking the poetry reading had begun. The lover waved the voice away. He wanted to hear the story.

  “We went up to N
ew York, Lolo and I. He had a convention there, and we decided to make a vacation of it. We hadn’t had a vacation since the first baby was born. We were very poor.” The mother lowered her voice. “Words can’t describe how poor we were. But we were starting to see better days.”

  “Really?” the lover said. He had fixed on that word as one that gave the appropriate amount of encouragement but did not interrupt the flow of the mother’s story.

  “We left the girls back home, but that one”—the mother pointed again to the daughter, who widened her eyes at her lover—“that one was losing all her hair. We took her with us so she could see a specialist. Turned out to be just nerves.”

  The lover knew Yolanda would not have wanted him to know about this indelicacy of her body. She did not even like to pluck her eyebrows in his presence. An immediate bathrobe after her bath. Lights out when they made love. Other times, she carried on about the Great Mother and the holiness of the body and sexual energy being eternal delight. Sometimes, he complained he felt caught between the woman’s libber and the Catholic señorita. “You sound like my ex,” she accused him.

  “We got on this crowded bus one afternoon.” The mother shook her head remembering how crowded the bus had been. “I couldn’t begin to tell you how crowded it was. It was more sardines in a can than you could shake sticks at.”

  “Really?”

  “You don’t believe me?” the mother accused him. The lover nodded his head to show he was convinced. “But let me tell you, that bus was so crowded, Lolo and I got our wires totally mixed up. I was sure Lolo had her, and Lolo was sure she was with me. Anyhow, to make it a short story, we got off at our stop, and we looked at each other. Where’s Yo! we asked at the same time. Meanwhile, that bus was roaring away from us.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, we broke into a run like two crazy people! It was rush hour. Everyone was turning around to look at us like we were running from the police or something.” The mother’s voice was breathless remembering that run. The lover waited for her to catch up with the bus in her memory.