How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  When I went away to college, my vivaciousness ultimately worked against me. I’d meet someone, conversation would flow, they’d come calling, but pretty soon afterwards, just as my heart was beginning to throw out little tendrils of attachment, they’d leave. I couldn’t keep them interested. Why I couldn’t keep them interested was pretty simple: I wouldn’t sleep with them. By the time I went to college, it was the late sixties, and everyone was sleeping around as a matter of principle. By then, I was a lapsed Catholic; my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn’t have a good excuse. Why I didn’t just sleep with someone as persistent as Rudy Elmenhurst is a mystery I’m exploring here by picking it apart the way we learned to do to each other’s poems and stories in the English class where I met Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third.

  Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, didn’t show up until ten minutes or so into the class. I, on the other hand, had been the first to arrive, selecting a place around the seminar table close to the door, but unfortunately since the table was round, equally exposed. Others strolled in, the English jocks at the school. I knew they were special from their jeans and T-shirts, their knowing, ironic looks when obscure works of literature were referred to. The girls didn’t all knit during class like education and socio majors. I’d already been writing on my own for a while, but this was my first English class since I’d talked my parents into letting me transfer to this co-ed college last fall.

  At my place around the seminar table I unpacked my note-book and every one of the required and recommended texts which I had already bought, stacking them in front of me like my credentials. Most of the other students were too cool to have done anything hasty like purchase the books for the course. The professor walked in, a young guy in a turtleneck and jacket, the uniform of the with it professors of the day; he had that edge of the untenured, too eager, too many hand-outs, too many please feel frees on his syllabus, a home number as well as an office number. He called roll, acknowledging most of the other students with nicknames and jokes and re-marks, stumbling over my name and smiling falsely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on “foreign students” to show them the natives were friendly. I felt profoundly out of place. The only person I seemed to have anything in common with was the absent Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, who also had an odd name and who was out of it because he wasn’t there.

  We were into the logistics of how to make copies for work-shops when a young man walked in, late. He was one of those guys who has just come through a bout of adolescent acne into a scarred, masculine, bad-boy face. A guy to be passed over by the beauties in our class looking for sweethearts. He had an ironic smile on his lips, and—a phrase I haven’t heard in a while—bedroom eyes. A guy who would break your heart. But you wouldn’t know all this if you went by the sound of his name—which I did, an immigrant’s failing, literalism. I assumed he was late because he’d just whizzed in from his small barony somewhere in Austria.

  The professor stopped the class. “Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, I presume?” Everybody laughed, this guy too. I admired that from the start, to be able to make such an en-trance without blushing and stumbling and arraying the floor with your books and the contents of your pocketbook. He could take a joke, and put on such an ironic self-assured face no one felt bad laughing. The guy looked around and there was a space next to the territory I’d carved out for myself on the table with my pile of books. He came and sat down. I could tell he was looking me over, probably wondering who the hell I was, this intruder upon the sanctuary of English majors.

  Class resumed. The professor started explaining again about what all he expected from us in the course. Later, he asked us to write down a response to a little poem he passed around. This guy with a name like a title leaned over and asked if I could lend him a piece of paper and a pen. I felt honored to be the one asked. I tore some pages out of my notebook, then rummaged in my pocketbook for another pen. I looked up with a sorry-eyed expression. “I don’t have an extra pen” I whispered, complete sentences for whispers, that’s what tells you I was still a greenhorn in this culture. This guy looked at me as if he didn’t give a damn about a pen, and I was a fool to think so. It was such an intense look, I felt myself coloring. “That’s okay,” he mouthed, without really using his voice so I had to lip-read, his full lips puckering as if he were throwing little kisses at me. If I’d known what sexy feelings felt like I would have identified the shiver going down my spine and into my legs. He turned to his other neighbor, who didn’t have a pen either. The word went round. Anyone have an extra pen? No one. There was a dearth of pens that day in class.

  I sunk my hand back into my pocketbook. I was the proverbially overprepared student; I had to have a standby writing utensil. I felt something promising at the bottom of my purse and pulled it out: it was a teensy pencil from a monogrammed set my mother had given me for Christmas: a box of pencils “my color,” red, and inscribed with my so-called name in gold letters: Jolinda. (My mother had tried for my own name Yolanda, but the company had substituted the Americanized, southernized Jolinda.) jolinda, that’s what this pencil used to say. In fact, it was so worn down, only the hook of the / was left. We didn’t throw things away in my family. I used both sides of a piece of paper. I handed my find over to this guy. He took it and held it up as if to say, “What have we here?” His buddies around us chuckled. I felt shabby for having saved a pencil through so many sharpenings. At the end of class, I fled before he could turn around and give it back to me.

  That night there was a knock on my door. I was in my night-gown already, doing our assignment, a love poem in the form of a sonnet. I’d been reading it out loud pretty dramatically, trying to get the accents right, so I felt embarrassed to be caught. I asked who it was. I didn’t recognize the name. Rudy? “The guy who borrowed your pencil,” the voice said through the closed door. Strange, I thought, ten-thirty at night. I hadn’t caught on yet to some of the strategies. “Did I wake you up?” he wanted to know when I opened the door. “No, no,” I said, laughing apologetically. This guy I had sworn never to talk to after he had embarrassed me in class, but my politeness-training ran on automatic. I excused myself for not asking him in. “I’m doing my homework.” That wasn’t an excuse in the circles he ran in. We stood at the door a long moment, he looking over my shoulder into my room for an invitation. “I just came to return your pencil.” He held it out, a small red stub in his palm. “Just to return that?” I said, calling his bluff. He grinned, dimples making parenthesis at the corners of his lips as if his smile were a secret between us. “Yeah,” he said, and again he had that intent look in his eye, and again he looked over my shoulder. I picked the pencil out of his palm and was glad it had been sharpened to a stub so he couldn’t see my name in gold letters inscribed on the side. “Thank you,” I said, shifting my weight on my feet and touching the door knob, little moves, polite preliminaries to closing the door.

  He spoke up. “Can we have lunch sometime?”

  “Sure, we can have lunch, sometime.” The way I emphasized sometime it was hopeless. I didn’t trust this guy, I didn’t know how to read him. I had nothing in my vocabulary of human behavior to explain him. Ten minutes late to the first meeting of a class. I knock myself out to get him a pencil and he makes fun. Ten-thirty, he shows up at my door to return it, and asks me to have lunch with him.

  “How about tomorrow before class,” Rudy said.

  “We don’t have class tomorrow.”

  “That gives us time for a long lunch,” he answered, real quick on his feet. I couldn’t help being impressed. “Okay,” I said, shaking my head. “Tomorrow, lunch.”

  We had lunch the next day, talked until supper, and then had supper. That’s the way I remember relationships starting in college—those obsessive marathon beginnings. It was hard to go back to your little dorm room and do your homework after having been so absorbed in someone
else. But that’s just what I did, I went back and worked on my sonnet. It was a fourteen-line treatise on the nature of love, but the whole time I was writing down my abstractions, I was thinking about how Rudy listened, looking at my mouth, so that it was hard for me to pay attention to what I was saying. How he puckered his lips as if he were kissing each word goodbye. How his hand had touched the small of my back to steer me through a crowd of rowdy frat guys in the dining room. If we admire some people for their originality with words, others for their quirky interesting minds, then Rudy had to be admired for his sexy, instinctive way with his body. He was the kind of guy who could kiss you behind your ear and make you feel like you’d just had kinky sex.

  The next day Rudy didn’t turn in his sonnet. After class, while I packed up my luggage of schoolbooks, I heard him talking to the professor how he’d gotten stuck and couldn’t think of anything. The professor was likable, it was the sixties, not having your creative juices flowing was understandable. Rudy could have until Monday to turn in his sonnet. We spent most of the weekend together, writing it, actually me writing down lines and crossing them off when they didn’t scan or rhyme, and Rudy coming up with the ideas. It was the first pornographic poem I’d ever co-written; of course I didn’t know it was pornographic until Rudy explained to me all the word plays and double meanings. “The coming of the spring upon the boughs,” was the last line. That meant spring was ejaculating green leaves on the trees; the new crocuses were standing stiff on the lawn on account of they were turned on. I was shocked by all of this. I was a virgin; I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure how sex worked. That anyone should put all of this into a poem, a place I’d reserved for deep feelings and lofty sentiments! I wonder now how much of Rudy’s gutsiness was a veiled flirtation with me, who was obviously much taken with words and their meanings. I can’t say; like I said, I hadn’t learned yet some of the strategies one went through. But I was catching on.

  I remember the close of each of those weekend nights as a prolonged farewell. It would start by my noting the time, mid-night, one, one-thirty, and saying, “Well, I’m going to bed.” Rudy would concur, “Me too,” but then, he wouldn’t move from his place at the foot of my bed next to my desk where I sat writing. It was a teensy dorm room. If you stood up to open the closet, you’d have to negotiate the desk so you wouldn’t end up piled on the bed. “Me too.” He smiled that ironic smile of his that always made me feel so foolish. Finally, I would just blurt out, “You’ve got to go, Rudy.” He wouldn’t say yes or no, or sorry to have stayed too long. He would just look at me with those bedroom eyes, and stand, as if he wasn’t going out the door but coming—in both the old sense of the word and the new I had just learned—coming in from the cold outside for a night of lovemaking with his lady-lay. We stood at the door. Then he leaned over and kissed me behind the ear for goodbye.

  It was that weekend too at one of our lingering departure scenes that I learned where he’d gotten his odd, ornate name. He’d had this crusty old grandfather he’d never met, from Germany, who’d left his unborn grandchild a trust fund with the proviso that he be named after the old man. “What if you’d been a girl?” I wondered.

  “I wouldn’t be having so much fun,” Rudy said. By this time the kisses had migrated from behind my ear to my neck. I shivered when he put a necklace of them around me before departing.

  Our next workshop, no one understood what my sublimated love sonnet was all about, but Rudy’s brought down the house. Suddenly, it seemed to me, not only that the world was full of English majors, but of people with a lot more experience than I had. For the hundredth time, I cursed my immigrant origins. If only I too had been born in Connecticut or Virginia, I too would understand the jokes everyone was making on the last two digits of the year, 1969; I too would be having sex and smoking dope; I too would have suntanned parents who took me skiing in Colorado over Christmas break, and I would say things like “no shit,” without feeling like I was imitating someone else.

  Rudy and I began seeing each other regularly that spring. Be-sides class, we ate all our meals together, and on weekends, he’d asked me over to his dormitory for parties in his hall. His dorm was next to mine, the two buildings connected by an underground lounge which would fill weekends with good-natured, clean parties, much monitored by security. The real parties went on in the men’s dorms. Mostly guys migrated from one room to another, smoking a little dope, drinking a lot. There were the heavy rooms for dropping acid or taking mushrooms. Candles flickered, incense burned in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the pungent smell of marijuana. The Beatles or Bob Dylan or The Mamas and the Papas blasted from stereos. It was a decadent atmosphere for me whose previous experience of dating had been mixers and parlor calls from boys at prep school. I’d go over to Rudy’s, but I would drink only a sip or two of the Dixie cup he offered, and I wouldn’t dare touch the drugs. I was less afraid of what they would do to my mind than I was of what Rudy might do to my body while I was under the influence.

  He pooh-poohed my fears. For one thing, he said, without my consent, he couldn’t do anything. “What about rape?” I asked, I wasn’t a total bumpkin. “Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head, disbelieving what he’d let himself in for with me. “I’m not going to fucking rape you!” I was hurt. I’d never been spoken to that way. If my father had heard a man use such obscenities before his daughters, he would have asked him to step outside where he would have defended my honor. Of course, I would have had to do a lot of explaining afterwards about what I was up to at midnight on a Saturday night in a man’s dormitory with a cigarette in one hand and a Dixie cup of cheap wine in the other.

  After some time in his buddies’ rooms sitting in clusters, guys and their dates, Rudy and I migrated to his room. His bed was a mattress on the floor, the American flag draped over it for a coverlet, which even as a non-native, I thought most dis-respectful. We would lie down under it, side by side, cuddling and kissing, Rudy’s hand exploring down my blouse. But if he wandered any lower, I’d pull away. “No,” I’d say, “don’t.” “Why not?” he’d challenge, or ironically or seductively or exasperatedly, depending on how much he’d imbibed, smoked, dropped. My own answers varied, depending on my current hangups, that’s what Rudy called my refusals, hangups. Mostly I was afraid I’d get pregnant. “From getting felt up?” Rudy said with sarcasm. “Ay, Rudy,” I’d plead, “don’t say it that way.”

  “What do you mean, don’t say it that way? A spade’s a spade. This isn’t a goddamn poetry class.”

  Perhaps if Rudy had acted a little more as if lovemaking were a workshop of sorts, things might have moved more swiftly toward his desired conclusion. But the guy had no sense of connotation in bed. His vocabulary turned me off even as I was beginning to acknowledge my body’s pleasure. If Rudy had said, Sweet lady, lay across my big, soft bed and let me touch your dear, exquisite body, I might have felt up to being felt up. But I didn’t want to just be in the sack, screwed, balled, laid, and fucked my first time around with a man.

  Rudy did have a honeymoon of patience with me at the start. He must have realized from his having had to explain to me so many references in his sonnet that I didn’t know, as he put it, worth shit. To me, vagina, cervix, ovary were synonyms. Via diagrams he introduced me to my anatomy; he drew the little egg going down its hour glass into the sticky pocket of the uterus. He calculated when I’d last had my period, when I’d probably ovulated, whether a certain night was a safe time of the month. “You’re not going to get pregnant”—all his les-sons ended with the same point. But still I didn’t want to sleep with him.

  “Why? What’s wrong with you, are you frigid or something?” Now there was a worry. I’d just gotten over worrying I’d get pregnant from proximity, or damned by God should I die at that moment, and now I started wondering if maybe my upbringing had disconnected some vital nerves. “I just don’t think it’s right yet,” I said.

  “Jesus, we’ve been going out a month,” Rudy said. “When’s it
going to be all right?”

  “Soon,” I promised, as if I knew.

  But soon didn’t happen soon enough. We had progressed to where I stayed the night, waking up early in the morning, not daring to move for fear I’d wake Rudy up in an amorous mood and end up in an early morning discussion of why not now. I scanned the room, as small as mine. Beside his bed I could see the pad with the hourglass shapes. I touched my belly to make sure I was still intact. On the cinderblock wall opposite the bed, Rudy had put up a bulletin board. There were pennants from his ski teams and photos of his family, all lined up on skis on top of a mountain. His parents looked so young and casual—like classmates. My own old world parents were still an embarrassment at parents’ weekend, my father with his thick mustache and three-piece suit and fedora hat, my mother in one of her outfits she bought especially to visit us at school, everything overly matched, patent leather purse and pumps that would go back, once she was home, to plastic storage bags in her closet. I marveled at his youthful parents. No wonder Rudy didn’t have hangups, no wonder his high school acne hadn’t left him riddled with self-doubt, his name hadn’t cowed him. They encouraged him, his parents, to have experiences with girls but to be careful. He had told them he was seeing “a Spanish girl,” and he reported they said that should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son. But I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain even to myself what annoyed me about their remark.