How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  I met them only once right before spring break and ironically at the very close of my relationship with Rudy. What happened was the night before break started, Rudy and I had another one of our showdowns in his bed. Rudy turned on the light and sat up on his mattress, his back against the wall. He was nude—I, in my old long-sleeved flannel nightgown Rudy called a nungown. From the moonlight and streetlight coming in through the window, I saw his body beautifully sculpted by light and shadows. I did yearn for him, but I yearned for so much more along with that body, which I must have sensed Rudy would never give me. He was worn down with frustration, he said. I was cruel. I didn’t understand that unlike a girl, it was physically painful for guys not to have sex. He thought it was time to call it quits. I was tearful and pleading: I wanted to feel we were serious about each other before we made love. “Serious!” He made a face. “How about fun? Fun, you know?” What did that have to do with this momentous rending of the veil, I wondered. “You mean you don’t think sex is fun?” Rudy faced me as if he were finally seeing the root of the problem. “Sure,” I lied. “It’s fun if it’s right.” But he shook his head. He had seen through me. “You know,” he said, “I thought you’d be hot-blooded, being Spanish and all, and that under all the Catholic bullshit, you’d be really free, instead of all hung up like these cotillion chicks from prep schools. But Jesus, you’re worse than a fucking Puritan.” I felt stung to the quick. I got up and threw my coat over my nightgown, packed up my clothes, and left the room, half hoping he’d come after me and say he really did love me, he’d wait as long as I needed to after all.

  But he didn’t slip into my room and under my sheets and hold me tight against the empty, endless night. I hardly slept. I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in this country. I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles. Had I been raised with the tradition of stuffed animals, I would have hugged my bear or stuffed dog or rabbit, salting the ragged fur with my tears all night. Instead, I did some-thing that even as a lapsed Catholic I still did for good luck on nights before exams. I opened my drawer and took out the crucifix I kept hidden under my clothes, and I put it under my pillow for the night. This large crucifix had been a “security blanket” I took to bed with me for years after coming to this country. I had slept with it so many nights that finally Jesus had come unglued, and I had to fasten him back on his cross with a rubber band.

  Rudy did not come calling the next day. I bumped into him as he was leaving with his parents and I was exiting my dorm to take the taxi to the bus to my parents’ in New York. I was sleepy and weepy and did not look back when I felt Rudy’s eyes on me. His parents did most of the chatting, talking too slowly to me as if I wouldn’t understand native speakers; they complimented me on my “accentless” English and observed that my parents must be so proud of me. When we said goodbye, I did glance up at Rudy, and though I was out in the cold, he was still in the bedroom with the look in his eyes.

  After break, I didn’t see much of Rudy. He didn’t sit by me in class; his workshop poems became unaccountably straight forward and affectionate, out and out love poems. Was he trying to say he really had fallen in love with me? Then why didn’t he stop by my room anymore? I started making excuses for him in my head. He had been there, but I wasn’t in, and then he was too afraid to leave a note. He was too shy to come sit by me in class. Afraid, shy! Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third! How we lie to ourselves when we’ve fallen in love with the wrong man.

  Of course, I could have sought him out and told him how I felt about him. How I was frightened of sex with a man who called it getting laid. But I was still in the mode where the guy did all the courting and seeking out. I kept aloof, I waited, I fantasized, misleading myself. The copies of my poems Rudy handed back had on them brief, inane remarks I read and reread for double meaning. “Good,” or “I don’t get this line” or “Nice details.” My copies of his poems went back to him with long, complimentary comments. I became more and more of a recluse, avoiding our old haunts for fear of running into him. But we rarely bumped into each other, and when we did, he always flashed me his cool, ironic smile and greeted me with an offhand, “How you doing?” I, on the other hand, was bristling with so much feeling, I pretended not to have seen him.

  Spring dance approached. I don’t know why I still thought Rudy would certainly end up going with me. This was the culminating romantic event of the school year on campus, and it seemed to me in my fantasy mode to be the perfect vehicle for our reconciliation. I played it out in my head. We would dance all night. We would talk and confess how much we had missed each other. I would go back to his dorm room with him. We would make love, my first time, and then, almost as if they were the different positions Rudy had told me about, we would screw and fuck and ball and get laid—all the synonyms Rudy preferred for referring to his sex.

  In real life, the day approached, and then the night, and I was still hoping. The dance was in the lounge between the two dorms, and so, when I heard the band start up, I wandered down the stairs to a landing where I could watch, unobserved, the partiers. They were a motley group: the conservative frat guy types in tuxedos and their dates in fancy prom dresses, the new hippies in Indian paisleys, jeans and sneakers, and maybe for flare, an incongruous bow tie. I saw the figures dancing luridly, the lights flashing, the band going. They all seemed so caught up in a rhythm I didn’t feel a part of. Then I saw Rudy come into the room, a glass in one hand, no doubt full of something spiked with alcohol or acid. My heart would have fluttered if there had been any time between the initial glimpse of his familiar figure and the sight of another figure clinging to him. I could hardly tell what she looked like, who she was, but by the way they were holding on to each other, leaning into each other’s bodies, I knew, first off that she was the beloved of his poems, and second of all the beloved of his bed. Within weeks of breaking up with me! I was crushed. For the second time in our relationship, as a kind of closing frame to our first meeting which had ended in my flight out of the classroom, I fled up the stairs.

  There’s more to the story. There always is to a true story. About five years later, I was in grad school in upstate New York. I was a poet, a bohemian, et cetera. I’d had a couple of lovers. I was on birth control. I guessed I’d resolved the soul and sin thing by lapsing from my heavy-duty Catholic back-ground, giving up my immortal soul for a blues kind of soul. Funky and low-down, the kind inspired by reading too much Carlos Castaneda and Rilke and Robert Bly and dropping acid with a guy who claimed to be my cosmic mate from a past life. I got this call one night from Rudy. His parents lived just down the road, and he had read that I was at the neighboring university in the Alumni Bulletin. Could he come over to see me? Sure, I said. When? Tonight, he said. Tonight was already about nine-thirty. Up to his same old tricks. But I was taken with the guy’s persistence. Sure, I said, come on over.

  He came on over. Brought an expensive bottle of wine. At the door, I gave him a friendly hug, but he held on for longer. I got nervous and gabby. His bad boy always drove me to my vivacious good girl. I sat him down in my one chair and started to quiz him on his five years since graduation. He sighed a lot, stretched his legs, cracked his knuckles. Finally, he cut me off, said, Hey, Jesus Christ, I’ve waited five years, and you look like you’ve gotten past all your hang-ups. Let’s just fuck. I threw him out. It still offended me that he didn’t want to do any-thing but screw me, get that over with. Catholic or not, I still thought it a sin for a guy to just barge in five years later with a bottle of expensive wine and assume you’d drink out of his hand. A guy who had ditched me, who had haunted my sexual awakening with a nightmare of self-doubt. For a moment as I watched him get in his car and drive away, I felt a flash of that old self-doubt.

  On the counter, he had left behind the bottle of wine. I had one of those unserious, cheap, grad school corkscrews. Those days we bought gallon jugs of Gallo with pull-out corks or screwed-o
n lids. I worked the corkscrew in as far as it would go. I wasn’t very good at this. Each time I yanked the screw out, I got a spurt of cork, but the stub remained snug in the bottleneck. Finally, I worked it in so I could see the sharp point of the spiral through the glass neck at the bottom of the cork. I put the bottle between my legs and pulled so hard that not only did I jerk the crumbled cork out but I sprayed myself with ex-pensive Bordeaux. “Shit,” I thought, “this is not going to wash out.” I held the bottle up to my mouth and drew a long messy swallow, as if I were some decadent wild woman who had just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover.

  II

  1970—1960

  A Regular Revolution

  Carla, Sandi, Yoyo, Fifi

  For three-going-on-f our years Mami and Papi were on green cards, and the four of us shifted from foot to foot, waiting to go home. Then Papi went down for a trial visit, and a revolution broke out, a minor one, but still.

  He came back to New York reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and saying, “I am given up, Mami! It is no hope for the Island. I will become un dominican-york.” So, Papi raised his right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, and we were here to stay.

  You can believe we sisters wailed and paled, whining to go home. We didn’t feel we had the best the United States had to offer. We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one red-neck Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavy lines. Cooped up in those little suburban houses, the rules were as strict as for Island girls, but there was no island to make up the difference. Then a few weird things happened. Carla met a pervert. At school, epithets (“spic,” “greaseballs”) were hurled our way. Some girlfriend of Sandi’s got her to try a Tampax, and Mami found out. Stuff like that, and soon she was writing away to preparatory schools (all-girls ones) where we would meet and mix with the “right kind” of Americans.

  We ended up at school with the cream of the American crop, the Hoover girl and the Hanes twins and the Scott girls and the Reese kid who got incredible care packages once a week. You wouldn’t be as gauche as to ask, “Hey, are you related to the guy who makes vacuum cleaners?” (You could see all those attachments just by the way Madeline Hoover turned her nose up at you.) Anyhow, we met the right kind of Americans all right, but they didn’t exactly mix with us.

  We had our own kind of fame, based mostly on the rich girls’ supposition and our own silence. García de la Torre didn’t mean a thing to them, but those brand-named beauties simply assumed that, like all third world foreign students in boarding schools, we were filthy rich and related to some dictator or other. Our privilege smacked of evil and mystery whereas theirs came in recognizable panty hose packages and candy wrappers and vacuum cleaner bags and Kleenex boxes.

  But hey, we might be fish out of water, but at least we had escaped the horns of our dilemma to a silver lining, as Mami might say. It was a long train ride up to our prep school in Boston, and there were guys on that train. We learned to forge Mami’s signature and went just about everywhere, to dance weekends and football weekends and snow sculpture weekends. We could kiss and not get pregnant. We could smoke and no great aunt would smell us and croak. We began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life, and soon, Island was old hat, man. Island was the hair-and-nails crowd, chaperones, and icky boys with all their macho strutting and unbuttoned shirts and hairy chests with gold chains and teensy gold crucifixes. By the end of a couple of years away from home, we had more than adjusted.

  And of course, as soon as we had, Mami and Papi got all worried they were going to lose their girls to America. Things had calmed down on the Island and Papi had started making real money in his office up in the Bronx. The next decision was obvious: we four girls would be sent summers to the Island so we wouldn’t lose touch with la familia. The hidden agenda was marriage to homeland boys, since everyone knew that once a girl married an American, those grandbabies came out jabbering in English and thinking of the Island as a place to go get a suntan.

  The summer plan met with annual resistance from all four of us. We didn’t mind a couple of weeks, but a whole summer? “Have you got anything better to do?” Mami questioned. Like yes, like yes we did, if she and Papi would only let us do it. But working was off-limits. (A boss hiring a young girl was after one thing only. Never mind if his name was Hoover.) Summer time was family time. Big time family time, a whole island of family, here a cousin, there a cousin, everywhere we turned a kissing cousin was puckering up at us.

  Winters whenever one of us got out of line, Mami and Papi would march out the old “Maybe what you need right now is some time back home to help set you straight.” We’d shape up pretty quick, or pretend to. Sometimes the parents upped the ante. It wouldn’t be just the bad daughter who’d be shipped back, but all four girls.

  By the time the three oldest were in college—we all started out at the same all-girls one, of course—we had devised as sophisticated and complicated a code and underground system as Papi had when he and his group plotted against the dictator. The parents’ habit was to call us on Friday or Saturday nights around ten right before the switchboard closed. We took turns “on duty” to catch those calls. But Mami and Papi were like psychic. They always directed the first call to the missing daughter, and when she wasn’t in, they’d asked to talk to another missing daughter. The third, on-duty daughter would get the third call, in which the first question would be, “Where are your sisters?” At the library studying or in so-and-so’s room getting tutored on her calculus. We kept most things from the old people, but sometimes they caught on and then we rotated the hot seat.

  Fifi was on for smoking in the bathroom. (She always ran the shower, as if smoking were a noisy activity whose hullabaloo she had to drown out.)

  Carla was on for experimenting with hair removal cream. (Mami threw a fit, saying that once you got started on that road, there was no stopping—the hairs would grow back thicker, uglier each time. She made it sound like drinking or drugs.)

  Yoyo was on for bringing a book into the house, Our Bodies, Our Selves. (Mami couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was that bothered her about the book. I mean, there were no men in it. The pictures all celebrated women and their bodies, so it wasn’t technically about sex as she had understood it up to then. But there were women exploring “what their bodies were all about” and a whole chapter on lesbians. Things, Mami said, examining the pictures, to be ashamed of.)

  Sandi was on when a visiting aunt and uncle dropped in for a visit at college early Sunday morning. (She wasn’t back yet from her Saturday night calculus tutorial.)

  It was a regular revolution: constant skirmishes. Until the time we took open aim and won, and our summers—if not our lives—became our own.

  That last summer we were shipped home began like all the others. The night before the trip, we sisters stayed up late packing and gabbing. Sandi called her boyfriend long distance and, with her back turned to us, whispered things like “Me too.” We got pretty punchy, imitating aunts and uncles and cousins we would be seeing the next day. Maybe it was a way of getting even with people who would have power over us all summer. We played with their names, translating them into literal English so they sounded ridiculous. Tía Concha became Aunt Conchshell, and Tía Asunción, Aunt Ascension; Tío Mundo was Uncle World; Paloma, our model cousin, turned into Pigeon, and for spite we surnamed her, accurately, Toed.

  Around midnight, Mami came fussing down the hall to our bedrooms in those fuzzy slippers of hers with the bobby-socks and a roller cap on her head. “That’s enough, girls,” she said. “You have all morning tomorrow. You need your beauty dreams.”

  We turned our faces glum to reaffirm the forced nature of this trip.

  And she gave us the little pep talk on family and how important roots were. Finally she went back to bed, and to sleep, or so we thought. We turned the volume down but stayed up talking.

  Fifi held up a Baggy with
dregs of greenish brown weed in-side. “Okay, vote time,” she said. “Do I or don’t I take it.”

  “Don’t do it,” Carla said. Her nightwear was the antithesis of Mami’s: in fact, Carla looked almost dressed up in her prim cotton nightgown. A yellow ribbon held her hair back from her face. “If we’re caught at Customs we’re in a shitload of trouble. And remember, now that Uncle World’s in government, it would be all over the newspapers.”

  “Carla, you’re such a priss,” Sandi taunted her. “For one thing, now that Tío is a V.I.P., we won’t have to go through Customs. Security will whisk us off, the Misses Garcías de la Torres.” She waved her hand with a flourish as if she were introducing us to King Arthur’s court.

  “You could try the Kotex trick,” Yoyo suggested, thinking it would be nice to have a little pot to smoke when things on the Island got dull. Pile a layer of Kotex above whatever you were trying to hide, the Island cousins once advised her, and the officers would shy from probing.

  “Who uses Kotex anymore?” Fifi asked. “Would Tampax work?”

  “Those guys probably wouldn’t know what it was.” Sandi slid one out of the box she was taking. She pantomined an investigation, ripping off the paper envelope and trying to bite off the end like our uncles did their cigars.