How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  Yolanda rolls her eyes. “Spare me the nickel and dime therapy, thank you.”

  Trouble brewing again, Fifi changes the subject. She touches the evolving blanket. “It’s really beautiful. And the poem you wrote the baby made me cry.”

  “So you are writing!” Carla says. “I know, I know, you don’t want to hear about it.” Carla makes a peace offering of compliments. “You’re so good, Yolanda, really. I’ve saved all your poems. Every time I read something in a magazine, I think, God, Yo’s so much better than this! Give yourself credit. You’re so hard on yourself.”

  Yolanda keeps her mouth shut. She is working on a thought about her bossy older sister: Carla has a tendency to lace all her compliments with calls to self-improvement. Give yourself credit, Believe in yourself, Be good to yourself. Somehow this makes her praise sound like their mother’s old “constructive” criticism.

  Carla turns to Sandi. “Mami says you’re seeing someone.” The eldest weighs her words carefully. “Is it true?”

  “What of it?” Sandi looks up defensively, and then, realizing her sister means a man, not a therapist, she adds, “He’s a nice guy, but, I don’t know—” She shrugs. “He was in at the same time I was.”

  What was he in for? hangs in the air—a question that none of her sisters would dare ask.

  “So, tell us about this cute guy at the nursery,” Fifi pleads. Each time her sisters seem on the verge of loaded talk, the new mother changes the subject to her favorite topic, her newborn daughter. Every little detail of the baby’s being—what she eats, what she poops—seems an evolutionary leap. Surely, not all newborns smile at their mothers? “You met this guy at the nursery?”

  “Me?” Sandi laughs. “You mean Mami. She picks this guy up and invites him for lunch at the hospital coffee shop.”

  “Mami is so fresh,” Yolanda says. She notices she has made a mistake and begins unraveling a lopsided yellow row.

  Fifi pats her baby’s back. “And she complains about us!”

  “So we all have lunch together,” Sandi continues, “and Mami can’t shut up about how God brought you and Otto together from opposite ends of the earth in Perú.”

  “God?” Carla screws up her face.

  “Perú?” Fifi’s face mirrors her sister’s scowl. “I’ve never been to Perú. We met in Colombia.”

  “In Mami’s version of the story, you met in Perú,” Sandi says.

  “And you fell in love at first sight.”

  “And made love the first night,” Carla teases. The four girls laugh. “Except that part isn’t in Mami’s version.”

  “I’ve heard so many versions of that story,” Sandi says, “I don’t know which one is true anymore.”

  “Neither do I,” Fifi says, laughing. “Otto says we probably met in a New Jersey Greyhound Station, but we’ve heard all these exciting stories about how we met in Brazil or Colombia or Perú that we got to believing them.”

  “So was it the first night?” Yolanda asks, her needles poised midair.

  “I heard the first night,” Carla says.

  Sandi narrows her eyes. “I heard it was a week or so after you guys met.”

  The baby burps. The four girls look at each other and laugh. “Actually”—Fifi calculates by lifting her fingers one by one from the baby’s back, then patting them down—“it was the fourth night. But I knew the minute I saw him.”

  “That you loved him?” Yolanda asks. Fifi nods. Since Clive left, Yolanda is addicted to love stories with happy endings, as if there were a stitch she missed, a mistake she made way back when she fell in love with her first man, and if only she could find it, maybe she could undo it, unravel John, Brad, Steven, Rudy, and start over.

  In the pause before someone picks up the thread of conversation, they all listen to the baby’s soft breathing.

  “Anyhow, Mami tells this guy about your long correspondence.” Sandi helps Yolanda wind the unraveled yarn into a ball, stopping now and then to enjoy her story of the mother. “For months and months after they met in Perú, they were separated, months and months.” Sandi rolls her eyes like her mother. She is a remarkably good mimic. Her three sisters laugh. “Otto was doing his research in Germany, but he wrote to her every day.“

  “Every day!” Fifi laughs. “I wish it had been every day. Sometimes I had to wait weeks between letters.”

  “But then,” Yolanda says in the ominous voice of a radio melodrama, “then Papi found the letters”

  “Mami didn’t mention the letters,” Sandi says. “The story was short and sweet: He wrote to her every day. Then she went to see him last Christmas, then he proposed, and they married this spring, and here they are, parents!”

  “One, two, three, four,” Carla says, beginning a countdown. Fifi grins. “Stop it,” she says. “The baby was born exactly nine months and ten days after the wedding.”

  “Thank God for the ten days,” Carla says.

  “I like Mami’s version of the story,” Fifi laughs. “So she didn’t bring up the letters?”

  Sandi shakes her head. “Maybe she forgot. You know how she keeps saying she wants to forget the past.”

  “Mami remembers everything,” Carla disagrees.

  “Well, Papi had no business going through my personal mail.” Fifi’s voice grows testy. The baby stirs on her shoulder. “He claims he was looking for his nailclippers, or something. In my drawers, right?”

  Yolanda mimics their father opening an envelope. Her eyes widen in burlesque horror. She clutches her throat. She even puts on a Count Dracula accent to make the moment more dramatic. She is not a good mimic. “What does this man mean, ‘Have you gotten your period yet¡’”

  Sandi choruses: “What business is it of Otto’s if you’ve gotten your period or no¡”

  The baby begins to cry. “Oh honey, it’s just a story.” Fifi rocks her.

  “We disown you!” Sandi mimics their father. “You have disgraced the family name. Out of this house!”

  “Out of our sight!” Yolanda points to the door. Sandi ducks the flailing needles. A ball of white yarn rolls across the floor. The two sisters bend over, trying to contain their hilarity.

  “You guys are really getting into this.” Fifi stands to walk her wailing baby to sleep. “Nothing like a story to take the sting out of things,” she adds cooly. “It’s not like things are any better between us, you know.”

  Her three sisters lift their eyebrows at each other. Their father has not uttered a word since he arrived two days ago. He still has not forgiven Fifi for “going behind the palm trees.” When they were younger, the sisters used to joke that they would likelier be virgins than find a palm tree in their neck of the woods.

  “It’s hard, I know.” As the therapist in the family, Carla likes to be the one who understands. “But really, give yourself credit. You’ve won them over, Fifi, you have. Mami’s eating out of your hand with this baby, and Papi’s going to come around in time, you’ll see. Look, he came, didn’t he?”

  “You mean, Mami dragged him here.” Fifi looks down fondly at her baby and recovers her good mood. “Well, the baby is beautiful and well, and that’s what counts.”

  Beautiful and well, Yolanda muses, that’s what she had wanted with Clive, all things beautiful and well, instead of their obsessive, consuming passion that left her—each time Clive left her—exhausted and distraught. “I don’t understand why he does it,” she tells her sisters out loud.

  “Old world stuff,” Carla says. “You know he got a heavier dose than Mami.”

  Sandi looks at Yolanda; she understood whom Yolandameant. She tries to lighten her sister’s dark mood. “Look, if beefcake’s not your thing, there’s a lot of fish out there,” she says. “I just wish that cute guy hadn’t been married.”

  “What cute guy?” Carla asks her.

  “What guy?” the mother asks. She is standing at the entrance to the living room, buttoning down a multicolored, flowered houserobe. It is a habit of hers from their childhood to b
uy rainbow clothes for herself so none of the girls can accuse her of playing favorites.

  “The guy you picked up at the hospital,” Sandi teases.

  “What do you mean, picked up¡ He was a nice young man, and it just so happens that he had a baby daughter born the same time as my little Cuquita.” The mother puts out her arms. “Come here, Cuca,” she croons, taking the baby from Fifi’s hands. She clucks into the blanket.

  Sandi shakes her head. “God! You sound like a goddamn zoo.”

  “Your language,” the mother scolds absently, and then, as if the words were an endearment, she coos them at her grand-daughter, “your language.”

  The men trail in slowly for breakfast. First, the father, who nods grimly at all the well-wishing. He is followed by Otto, who wishes everyone a merry Christmas. With his white-gold eyebrows and whiskers and beard, and plump, good-natured, reddish face, Otto looks very much like a young Santa Claus. The analyst shuffles in last. “Look at all those women,” he whistles.

  The mother is walking her granddaughter up and down the length of the room.

  “Just look at them.” Otto grins. “A vision! What the three kings saw!”

  “Four girls,” the father murmurs.

  “Five,” the analyst corrects, winking at the mother.

  “Six,” the mother corrects him, nodding towards the bundle in her arms. “Six of us,” she says to the baby. “And I was sure of it! Why, a week before you were born, I had the strangest dream. We were all living on a farm, and a bull…”

  The room is hushed with sleepiness. Everyone listens to the mother.

  Joe

  Yolanda

  Yolanda, nicknamed Yo in Spanish, misunderstood joe in English, doubled and pronounced like the toy, Yoyo—or when forced to select from a rack of personalized key chains, joey—stands at the third-story window watching a man walk across the lawn with a tennis racket. He touches the border of the shrubbery with the rim of his racket and sets one or two wild irises nodding.

  “Don’t,” Yo mumbles to herself at the window, outlining her hairline with a contemplative index finger. It is her secret pride: Her hair grows to a point on her forehead, arches up, semicircling her face, a perfect heart. “Don’t disturb the flowers, Doc.” She wags her finger at his thumb-sized back.

  The man stops. He throws an imaginary ball in the air and serves it to the horizon. The horizon misses. He walks on towards it and the tennis courts.

  He is dressed in white shorts and a white shirt, an outfit which makes him look like a boy … a good boy … the only son of monied, unloving tycoons. Both of them are tycoons, Yo posits. Daddy Coon is a Fruit of the Loom tycoon. The band on her underwear squeezes gently.

  Mama Coon is—Yo looks around the room—scarf, mirror, soap, umbrella—an umbrella tycoon. A dark cloud rolls lazily towards her in the sky. The ghost of the tennis ball is coming to haunt the man. Yo smiles, appreciating her charms.

  An umbrella tycoon will never do. One more turn around the room: typewriter, red satchel—nice sound to that. But he isn’t a red satchel tycoon. A breeze blows the white curtains in on either side of her, two ghostly arms embracing her. A room tycoon….

  The world is sweetly new and just created. The first man walks in the garden on his way to a tennis date. Yo stands at the third-story window and kisses her fingers and blows him the kiss. “Kiss, kiss,” she hisses from the window. She wishes: Let him rip off his white shirt, push back the two halves of his chest like Superman prying open a door and let the first woman out.

  Eve is lovely, a valentine hairline, white gossamer panties.

  “In the beginning,” Yo begins, inspired by perspective. Four floors down, her doctor, shrunk to child size, sits on the lawn. “In the beginning, Doc, I loved John.”

  She recognizes the unmistakable signs of a flashback: a woman at a window, a woman with a past, with memory and desire and wreckage in her heart. She will let herself have them today. She can’t help herself anyway.

  In the beginning, we were in love. Yo smiles. That was a good beginning. He came to my door. I opened it. My eyes asked, Would you like to come in out of the rest of the world! He answered, Thank you very much, just what I had on the tip of my tongue.

  It was at the beginning of time, and a river ran outside Yo’s window, bordered by cypresses, willows, great sweating ferns, thick stalks and palms. Huge creatures of the imagination scuttled across the muddy bottom of the river. At night as the lovers lay in bed and connected the stars into rams and crabs and twins, they heard the barks and howls of the happy mating beasts.

  “I love you,” John said, rejoicing, tricked by the barks and the howls.

  But Yolanda was afraid. Once they got started on words, there was no telling what they could say.

  “I love you,” John repeated, so she would follow suit.

  Yolanda kissed each eye closed, hoping that would do.

  “Do you love me, Joe? Do you?” he pleaded. He wanted words back; nothing else would do.

  Yo complied. “I love you too.”

  “I’ll always love you!” he said, splurging. “Marry me, marry me.”

  A beast howled from the river. The ram galloped away from the sky, startled by human sound.

  “One.” John bowed Yolanda’s thumb towards him. “Two.” He folded up the index finger. “Three.” He kissed the nail.

  “All you need is love,” the radio wailed, as if it were hungry.

  “Four,” she joined in, bending her fourth finger. “Five,” they chimed in unison.

  His hand met hers, palm to palm, as if they were sharing a prayer.

  “Love,” the song snarled, starved. “Love … love …”

  “John, John, you’re a pond!” Yolanda teased, straddling him by Merritt Pond.

  John was lying on his back; he had just said that when you look up at the sky, you realize nothing that you ever do really matters.

  “John’s a hon, lying by the pond, having lots of fun,” Yolanda punned, nuzzling the hollow of his shoulder.

  He stroked her back. “And you’re a little squirrel! You know that?”

  Yolanda sat up. “Squirrel doesn’t rhyme,” she explained. “The point’s to rhyme with my name.”

  “Joe-lan-dah?” He quibbled, “What rhymes with Joe-lan-dah?”

  “So use Joe. Doe, roe, buffalo,” she rhymed. “Okay, now, you try it.” She spoke in the voice she had learned from her mother when she wanted a second helping of the good things in life.

  “My dear Joe,” John began, but put on the spot, he was blocked for a rhyme. He hemmed, he hawed, he guffawed. Finally, he blahhed: “My dear, sweet little squirrel, you mean more to me than all the gold in the world.” He grinned at his inadvertent rhyme.

  Yo sat up again. “C minus!” She rolled away from him onto the grass. “Where’d you learn to talk Hallmark?”

  Hurt, John stood and brushed off his pants as if the grass spears were little annoying bits of Yo. “Not everyone can be as goddam poetic as you!”

  She nibbled all up his leg in playful apology.

  John pulled her up by the shoulders. “Squirrel.” He forgave her.

  She winced. Anything but a squirrel. Her shoulders felt furry. “Can I be something else?”

  “Sure!” He swept his hand across the earth as if he owned it all: “What do you want to be?”

  She turned away from him and scanned the horizon: trees, rocks, lake, grass, weeds, flowers, birds, sky….

  His hand came from behind her; it owned her shoulder.

  “Sky,” she tried. Then, the saying of it made it right: “Sky, I want to be the sky.”

  “That’s not allowed.” He turned her around to face him. His eyes, she noticed for the first time, were the same shade of blue as the sky. “Your own rules: you’ve got to rhyme with your name.”

  “I“—she pointed to herself—“rhymes with the sky!”

  “But not with Joe!” John wagged his finger at her. His eyes softened with desire. He placed
his mouth over her mouth and ohhed her lips open.

  “Yo rhymes with cielo in Spanish.” Yo’s words fell into the dark, mute cavern of John’s mouth. Cielo, cielo, the word echoed. And Yo was running, like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual John could not catch her, even if he tried.

  “What you need is a goddam shrink!” John’s words threw themselves off the tip of his tongue like suicides.

  She said what if she did, he didn’t have to call them shrinks.

  “Shrink,” he said. “Shrink, shrink.”

  She said that just because they were different, that was no reason to make her feel crazy for being her own person. He was just as crazy as she was if push came to shove. My God! she thought. I’m starting to talk like him! Push comes to shove! She laughed, still half in love with him. “Okay, okay,” she con-ceded. “We’re both crazy. So, let’s both go see a shrink.” She winced, taking on his language only to convince him.

  He shoved her peacemaking hand away. She was the one who was crazy, remember? No way he was going to go be shrunk.

  She kissed him in silent persuasion, but she could tell he wasn’t convinced.

  “I love you. Isn’t that enough?” he resisted. “I love you more than it’s good for me.”

  “See! You’re the one who’s crazy!” she teased.

  Already she had begun to mistrust him.

  Because his pencils were always sharpened, his clothes always folded before lovemaking. Because he put his knife between the tines of his fork between mouthfuls of the dishes she made that were always just this side of not tasting like they were supposed to—the lasagna like fried eggs, the pudding like frosting. Because he accused her of eating her own head by thinking so much about what people said. Because he believed in the Real World, more than words, more than he believed in her.

  But this time it was because he made for-and-against lists before doing anything, and she had discovered the for-and-against-slash-Joe-slash-wife list. Number one for was intelligent) number one against was too much for her own good. Number two for was exciting; number two against was crazy, question mark.