How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  We burst out in the loud laughter we’d kept at bay since Mami exited. Soon enough, there were footsteps down the hall. Just before the door swung open, Fifi, who was still holding the Baggy of grass, tossed it behind a bookcase, where it lay forgotten in the haste of our final packing next morning before our noon plane.

  Not three weeks on the Island had gone by when Mami called. Tía Carmen came padding out to the pool to tell us our mother was on her way from New York and that she intended to have a long talk with us. Tía admitted that yes, something was amiss, but she had promised our mother not to say what. Tía was superreligious, and we knew we wouldn’t get it out of her if she’d given her word. By way of consolation, she counseled us to “examine your consciences.”

  We reviewed our recent sins with our girl cousins until late that night.

  “All I can think of,” Yoyo offered, “was they opened our mail.”

  “Or maybe our grades came?” Fifi suggested.

  “Or the phone bill,” Sandi added. Her boyfriend lived in Palo Alto.

  “I think it’s really unfair to leave us hanging.” Carla’s head was fretted with clips and bobbypins as if she were wired up for an experiment. Her hair turned frizzy on the Island, and every night she ironed it, then rolled it in a “tubie,” using her head as large roller.

  “Examine your consciences,” Sandi said in a boogeyman voice.

  “I have, I have,” Fifi joked, “and the problem isn’t I can’t find anything to worry about but that I find so much.” We spent the rest of the evening confessing to our giggly, over-chaperoned girl cousins the naughtinesses we had committed up in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

  That almost-empty Baggy of grass behind the bureau never crossed our minds. Mami had a maid from the Island who lived with us in the States. She, Primitiva, had found the stash. Primi herself used Baggies in her practice of layman’s santeria, concocting powders and potions to make this ache or that rival woman go away. But why the girls would have a Baggy of oregano in their room was un misterio she deferred to her mistress to solve.

  As we later reconstructed it from what Primi said, Mami’s first reaction was anger that we had broken her rule against eating in our bedrooms. (Oregano qualified as food?) But when she opened the Baggy and took a sniff and poked her finger in and tasted a pinch and had Primitiva do the same, they were flabbergasted. The dreaded and illegal marijuana that was lately so much in the news! Mami was sure of it. And here she’d been, worried sick about protecting our virginity since we’d hit puberty in this land of wild and loose Americans, and vice had entered through an unguarded orifice at the other end.

  Immediately, she contacted Tío Pedro, a psychiatrist “uncle by affection” with a practice in Jackson Heights. Tío Pedro was always consulted when one or the other of us daughters got into trouble. He identified the oregano most surely as grass, and got Mami free-associating about what else we might be up to. By the time she touched down on the Island forty-eight hours after finding the Baggy, we were all addicts, fallen women with married lovers and illegitimate babies on the way. One teensy hope she held on to was that a workman or a house guest had left the pot there. She had come to find out the truth, shielding Papi from the news and the heart attack he would surely die of if he knew.

  Since we were caught by surprise, we didn’t have a plan. At first, Carla made a vague attempt to discredit Tío Pedro by revealing how he always ended our sessions with long hugs and a pat on the butt. “He’s a lech,” she accused. “And besides, what does Saint Peter know of grass?”

  “Grass?” Mami scowled. “This is marijuana.”

  Carla held her tongue.

  Before we could come up with a better approach, Fifi surprised us by admitting that the Baggy was hers. Instantly, we all rallied to her guilty side. “It’s mine too,” Yoyo claimed. “And mine,” Carla and Sandi chimed in.

  Mami’s eyes shifted from one to the other, each cry of Mine! confirming another bad daughter. She wore her tragic look of the Madonna with delinquent children. “All of you?” she asked in a low, shocked voice.

  Fifi stepped forward. “I tell you it was me who put it there, I did it, and they”—she pointed to us—“they had nothing to do with it.”

  Technically, she was right. It was her Baggy. The rest of us had had dope only when our boyfriends rolled a joint or when, in a party of friends, a cigarette made its rounds, everyone drawing a toke. Still, there was something untoward about Fifi taking all the blame since our habit had been to share the good and the bad that came our way. She gave Mami an impassioned apology and argument—her sisters should not be punished along with her. Oddly enough, Mami consented. She asked us, though, not to tell Papi unless we wanted wholesale Island confinement. It’s possible that Mami had her own little revolution brewing, and she didn’t want to blow the whistle on her girls and thus call attention to herself.

  Recently, she had begun spreading her wings, taking adult courses in real estate and international economics and business management, dreaming of a bigger-than-family-size life for herself. She still did lip service to the old ways, while herself nibbling away at forbidden fruit.

  Anyhow, she agreed that the three oldest of us could go back to our school at the end of the summer. Fifi was given the choice of either staying on the Island for a year at Tía Carmen’s or going back to the States, but not to her boarding school. She would have to live at home with Mami and Papi and attend the local Catholic school.

  Fifi opted to stay. Better one of a dozen chaperoned cousins, she figured, than home alone with Mami and Papi breathing down her neck and Peter Pan with his hand on her ass. “Besides, I wanna try it out here. Maybe I’ll like it,” Fifi said, defending her choice to us. As the youngest of the four, she had had the least chance to bond to the Island before our abrupt exile almost a decade before. “And besides, the States aren’t making me happy.”

  “You’re in the middle of your adolescence, for God’s sake!” Carla had decided to major in psych and had been giving all of us frequent free analysis. “You’re supposed to be unhappy and confused. It means you’re normal, well adjusted. This is just going to make it worse, I guarantee it!”

  “Maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll surprise you,” said Fifi.

  “You’ll be climbing these walls before the year is out,” Carla warned.

  We looked beyond the pool at the high stone wall. Down a ways one of the maids had draped her underclothes on the wall. In the cup of a brassiere, his little head hardly visible, a lizard was blowing out his throat as if he had just taken a toke and were holding it in until the small dazed cells of his brain zinged a hit.

  By Christmas, we are wild for news of Fifi’s exile. From Mami we hear that our sister is beautifully acclimated to life on the Island and taking classes in shorthand and typing at the Ford Foundation trade school. She’s also seeing someone nice.

  This, of course, is dangerous for the rest of us. With one successfully repatriated daughter, Papi might yank us all out of college and send us back. Not to mention that it’s out and out creepy that Fifi, the maverick, is so changed. Carla, in fact, says it’s a borderline schizoid response to traumatic cultural displacement.

  The minute we step off the plane, we see Mami has not exaggerated. Fifi, there to meet us at the airport, is a jangle of bangles and a cascade of beauty parlor curls held back on one side very smartly by a big gold barrette. She has darkened her lashes with black mascara so that her eyes stand out as if she were slightly startled at her good luck. Fifi—who used to wear her hair in her trademark, two Indian braids that she pinned up in the heat like an Austrian milkmaid. Fifi—who always made a point of not wearing makeup or fixing herself up. Now she looks like the after person in one of those before-after make-overs in magazines. “Elegante,” Mami has said of Fifi’s new style, but on our lips are other epithets. “She’s turned into a S.A.P.,” Yoyo mutters. A Spanish-American princess.

  “My God, Fifi,” we say in greeting, lookin
g her over.

  “Where’s the party?” Sandi teases.

  “If you can’t say something nice—” Fifi begins, defensively. Her little patent leather pocketbook plaintively matches her pumps.

  “Hey, hey!” We give her one of our huddle hugs. “Don’t lose your sense of humor on us, come on! You look great!”

  “Don’t muss my hair,” Fifi fusses, patting it down as if it were a hat. But she smiles. “Guess what, you guys?” She looks from one to the other of us.

  “You’re seeing someone nice,” we chorus.

  Fifi is taken aback, then laughs. “Ye Olde Grapevine, huh?” We nod. She goes on to explain that her someone nice is a cousin, Manuel Gustavo. “A nice cousin,” she is quick to add.

  “A cousin?” We know most of our cousins, and Manuel Gustavo is a new one on us.

  “A closet cousin,” Fifi says, searching her purse for a photo. “One of the illegitimates.”

  Right on! We sisters give each other the V for victory sign. It’s still a guerrilla revolution after all! We were afraid that Fifi was caving in to family pressure and regressing into some nice third-world girl. But no way. She’s still Ye Olde Fifi.

  Fifi tells us the full story of Manuel Gustavo. His father is our father’s brother, Tío Orlando, who has a half dozen children from una mujer del campo, a woman from the countryside around one of his ranches. Of course, Tía Fidelina, our uncle’s wife, who is sweet and dedicated to La Virgen, “knows nothing” about Tío Orlando’s infidelities. But now that Manuel Gustavo is at the manger door, so to speak, his father has to come up with some explanation just short of immaculate conception. Who is this young man who is seeing her niece? Tía Fidelina wants to know. Where does he come from? What’s his family name? Another uncle, Ignacio, offers to take Manuel Gustavo on as his own illegitimate son. He’s never married and is always getting ragged about being homosexual. So two men are off the hook with one bastard. According to Fifi, the alta sociedad, the high-class ladies of the oligarchy who form a kind of club, not unlike a country club, are delighted by this juicy bit of gossip.

  “They have nothing better to do,” she concludes, drawing up her chin, above it all.

  We take Manuel on as our own favorite cousin.

  He looks like a handsome young double for Papi, and a lot like us, the family eyebrows, the same high cheekbones, the full, generous mouth. In short, he could be the brother we never had. When he roars into the compound in his pickup, all four of us run down the driveway to greet him with kisses and hugs.

  “Girls,” Tía Carmen says, frowning, “that’s no way to greet a man.”

  “Yeah, you guys,” Fifi agrees. “Get off him, he’s mine!”

  We laugh, but we keep fussing over him, waiting on him as if we’ve never been to the States or read Simone de Beauvoir or planned lives of our own.

  But, as the days go by, Fifi grows withdrawn and watchful. Daily, there are little standoffs and pouts and cold shoulders because one of us has put her arm around Manuel or has gotten involved in a too-lengthy conversation with him about the production of sugar cane.

  To reassure her, we tone ourselves down and become more reserved with Manuel. From this new distance, we begin to get the long view, and it’s not so pretty. Lovable Manuel is quite the tyrant, a mini Papi and Mami rolled into one. Fifi can’t wear pants in public. Fifi can’t talk to another man. Fifi can’t leave the house without his permission. And what’s most disturbing is that Fifi, feisty, lively Fifi, is letting this man tell her what she can and cannot do.

  One day Fifi, who rarely reads anymore, becomes absorbed in one of the novels we brought along, and not a trashy one for once. Manuel Gustavo arrives, and when no one answers the door, comes in the back way. In the patio, all four of us are draped over lawn chairs reading. Fifi sees him and her face lights up. She is about to put aside her book, when Manuel Gustavo reaches down and lifts it out of her hands.

  “This,” Manuel Gustavo says, holding the book up like a dirty diaper, “is junk in your head. You have better things to do.” He tosses the book on the coffee table.

  Fifi pales, though her two blushed-on cheeks blush on. She stands quickly, hands on her hips, eyes narrowing, the Fifi we know and love. “You have no right to tell me what I can and can’t do!”

  “¡ Que no¡” Manuel challenges.

  “No! “Fifi asserts.

  One by one we three sisters exit, cheering Fifi on under our breaths. A few minutes later we hear the pickup roar down the driveway, and Fifi comes sobbing into the bedroom.

  “Fifi, he asked for it,” we say. “Don’t let him push you around. You’re a free spirit,” we remind her.

  But within the hour, Fifi is on the phone with Manuelito, pleading for forgiveness.

  We nickname him M.G., a make of car we consider slightly sleazy, a car one of our older cousins might get his Papi to buy him to impress the Island girls. We rev up imaginary motors at the mention of his name. He’s such a tyrant! Rrrrmm. He’s breaking Fifi’s spirit! Rrrrmm-rrrmm.

  A few days after the book episode, Manuel Gustavo arrives for the noon meal, and since Fifi is still at her Spanish class, we decide to have a little talk with him.

  Yoyo begins by asking him if he’s ever heard of Mary Wollstonecraft. How about Susan B. Anthony? Or Virginia Woolf? “Friends of yours?” he asks.

  For the benefit of an invisible sisterhood, since our aunts and girl cousins consider it very unfeminine for a woman to go around demonstrating for her rights, Yoyo sighs and all of us roll our eyes. We don’t even try anymore to raise consciousness here. It’d be like trying for cathedral ceilings in a tunnel, or something. Once, we did take on Tía Flor, who indicated her large house, the well-kept grounds, the stone Cupid who had been re-routed so it was his mouth that spouted water. “Look at me, I’m a queen,” she argued. “My husband has to go to work every day. I can sleep until noon, if I want. I’m going to protest for my rights?”

  Yoyo turns Manuel’s interview over to Carla, who’s good at befriending with small talk. Yoyo calls it her therapist “softening-them-up-for-the-spill” mode. “Manuel, why do you feel so upset when Fifi is on her own?” Carla’s manner is straight out of her Psych 101 textbook.

  “Women don’t do that here.” Manuel Gustavo’s foot, posed on his knee, shakes up and down. “Maybe you do things different in your United States of America.” His tone is somewhere between a tease and a taunt. “But where does it get those gringas? Most of them divorce or stay jamona, with nothing better to do than take drugs and sleep around.”

  Sandi revs, “Rrrmm, rrrmm.”

  “Manuel,” Carla pleads. “Women do have rights here too, you know. Even Dominican law grants that.”

  “Yes, women have rights,” Manuel Gustavo agrees. A wry smile spreads on his face: he is about to say something clever. “But men wear the pants.”

  The revolution is on. We have one week left to win the fight for our Fifi’s heart and mind.

  Nights on the Island we go out, the gang of cousins, to the Avenida. It’s the main drag, happily crowded with cars and horse-drawn buggies for tourists who want to ride in moon-light by the seashore. Hotels and night spots flood the sky with so much light, you can make out people’s faces as you cruise by. The gossip mill turns. Marianela was out on Utcho with Claudio. Margarita looks too pregnant for only two months since the wedding. Get a load of Pilar’s miniskirt with those huge legs of hers, you’d think some people would check their mirrors, geez.

  We distribute ourselves in several cars, driven by boy cousins. We don’t want stool pigeon chauffeurs along. We’re off to the movies or to Capri’s for an ice cream and just hanging out, the boys much exhorted to take care of the ladies. As the oldest, Carla must ride with Fifi in Manuel’s pickup, la chaperona, at least until we’re off compound grounds. Then she is dropped off at Capri’s to join the rest of us. Fifi and Manuel steal off for some private time from the watchful eyes of the extended family. On these drives, they usually end up parkin
g somewhere, only to neck and stuff, according to Fifi. She has admitted that the stuff is getting more and more to the point, and the problem is that she has no contraception. Anyone on the Island she might go to for pills or a diaphragm would know who she is and would surely rat on her to the family. And Manuel won’t wear a rubber.

  “He thinks it might cause impotence,” Fifi says, smiling sweetly, cherishing his cute male ignorance.

  “Jesus, Fifi!” Sandi sighs. “Tell him that not using one most surely can cause pregnancy.” A pregnant Fifi would have to do what is always done in such cases on the Island—marry immediately and brace herself for the gossip when her “premature baby” comes out fat and fully grown.

  We keep warning her and worrying over her until she promises us—on pain of our betrayal: “We’ll tell on you, we will!”—that she won’t have sex with Manuel unless she gets some contraception first. Which is highly unlikely. Where can she go for it on this fishbowl island?

  But her word doesn’t count for much after what happens one night.

  We’re sitting around at Capri’s that night, bored. Fifi and Manuel have already taken off, and we’ve got a couple of hours to kill before they get back and we can return to the compound. We start brainstorming what to do: we can drive to Embassy Beach and go skinny-dipping. We can try to find our cousin of a cousin, Jorge, who often has a couple of joints and knows a voodoo priest who will tell us our futures after performing a scary animal sacrifice.

  Our official escort Mundín vetoes both ideas. He’s got a better one. We pile into his car, his three American cousins and his sister Lucinda, nagging him about what he’s got in mind. He grins wickedly and drives us a little ways out of town to Motel Los Encantos, “motel” being the Island euphemism for a whore house. He pulls right in like he knows the place, honks the horn, asks the gatekeeper for a cabin, then heads for the one he’s assigned. The garage door is opened by a waiting yardboy. Once we are out of the car, the yardboy pulls the garage door down and hands Mundín the key to the connected cabin.