How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  Her face fell. “Come on now! Use your head.” One more wrong guess, and she’d show Yoyo, pointing with her pencil to the different highlights of this incredible new wonder. “Remember that time we took the car to Bear Mountain, and we re-ah-lized that we had forgotten to pack an opener with our pick-a-nick?” (Her daughters kept correcting her, but she insisted this was how it should be said.) “When we were ready to eat we didn’t have any way to open the refreshments cans?” (This before fliptop lids, which she claimed had crossed her mind.) “You know what this is now?” Yoyo shook her head. “Is a car bumper, but see this part is a removable can opener. So simple and yet so necessary, eh?”

  “Yeah, Mami. You should patent it.” Yoyo shrugged as her mother tore off the scratch paper and folded it, carefully, corner to corner, as if she were going to save it. But then, she tossed it in the wastebasket on her way out of the room and gave a little laugh like a disclaimer. “It’s half of one or two dozen of another.”

  None of her daughters was very encouraging. They resented her spending time on those dumb inventions. Here they were trying to fit in America among Americans; they needed help figuring out who they were, why the Irish kids whose grand-parents had been micks were calling them spies. Why had they come to this country in the first place? Important, crucial, final things, and here was their own mother, who didn’t have a second to help them puzzle any of this out, inventing gadgets to make life easier for the American Moms.

  Sometimes Yoyo challenged her. “Why, Mami? Why do it? You’re never going to make money. The Americans have al-ready thought of everything, you know that.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something they’ve missed that’s important. With patience and calm, even a burro can climb a palm.” This last was one of her many Dominican sayings she had imported into her scrambled English.

  “But what’s the point?” Yoyo persisted.

  “Point, point, does everything need a point? Why do you write poems?”

  Yoyo had to admit it was her mother who had the point there. Still, in the hierarchy of things, a poem seemed much more important than a potty that played music when a toilet-training toddler went in its bowl.

  They talked about it among themselves, the four girls, as they often did now about the many puzzling things in this new country.

  “Better she reinvents the wheel than be on our cases all the time,” the oldest, Carla, observed. In the close quarters of an American nuclear family, their mother’s prodigious energy was becoming a real drain on their self-determination. Let her have a project. What harm could she do, and besides, she needed that acknowledgement. It had come to her automatically in the old country from being a de la Torre. “García de la Torre,” Laura would enunciate carefully, giving her maiden as well as married name when they first arrived. But the blank smiles had never heard of her name. She would show them. She would prove to these Americans what a smart woman could do with a pencil and pad.

  She had a near miss once. Every night, she liked to read The New York Times in bed before turning off her light, to see what the Americans were up to. One night, she let out a yelp to wake up her husband beside her. He sat bolt upright, reaching for his glasses which in his haste, he knocked across the room. “¡Qué pasa! ¡Qué pasa!” What is wrong? There was terror in his voice, the same fear she’d heard in the Dominican Republic before they left. They had been watched there; he was followed. They could not talk, of course, though they had whispered to each other in fear at night in the dark bed. Now in America, he was safe, a success even; his Centro de Medicina in the Bronx was thronged with the sick and the homesick yearning to go home again. But in dreams, he went back to those awful days and long nights, and his wife’s screams confirmed his secret fear: they had not gotten away after all; the SIM had come for them at last.

  “Ay, Cuco! Remember how I showed you that suitcase with little wheels so we should not have to carry those heavy bags when we traveled? Someone stole my idea and made a million!” She shook the paper in his face. “See, see! This man was no bobo! He didn’t put all his pokers on a back burner. I kept telling you, one of these days my ship would pass me by in the night!” She wagged her finger at her husband and daughters, laughing all the while, one of those eerie laughs crazy people in movies laugh. The four girls had congregated in her room. They eyed their mother and each other. Perhaps they were all thinking the same thing, wouldn’t it be weird and sad if Mami did end up in Bellevue?

  “¡Ya, ya!” She waved them out of her room at last. “There is no use trying to drink spilt milk, that’s for sure.”

  It was the suitcase rollers that stopped Laura’s hand; she had weathervaned a minor brainstorm. And yet, this plagiarist had gotten all the credit, and the money. What use was it trying to compete with the Americans: they would always have the head start. It was their country, after all. Best stick close to home. She cast her sights about—her daughters ducked—and found her husband’s office in need. Several days a week, dressed professionally in a white smock with a little name tag pinned on the lapel, a shopping bag full of cleaning materials and rags, she rode with her husband in his car to the Bronx. On the way, she organized the glove compartment or took off the ad-dress stickers from the magazines for the waiting room because she had read somewhere how by means of these stickers drug addict patients found out where doctors lived and burglarized their homes looking for syringes. At night, she did the books, filling in columns with how much money they had made that day. Who had time to be inventing silly things!

  She did take up her pencil and pad one last time. But it was to help one of her daughters out. In ninth grade, Yoyo was chosen by her English teacher, Sister Mary Joseph, to deliver the Teacher’s Day address at the school assembly. Back in the Dominican Republic growing up, Yoyo had been a terrible student. No one could ever get her to sit down to a book. But in New York, she needed to settle somewhere, and since the natives were unfriendly, and the country inhospitable, she took root in the language. By high school, the nuns were reading her stories and compositions out loud in English class.

  But the spectre of delivering a speech brown-nosing the teachers jammed her imagination. At first she didn’t want to and then she couldn’t seem to write that speech. She should have thought of it as “a great honor,” as her father called it. But she was mortified. She still had a slight accent, and she did not like to speak in public, subjecting herself to her classmates’ ridicule. It also took no great figuring to see that to deliver a eulogy for a convent full of crazy, old, overweight nuns was no way to endear herself to her peers.

  But she didn’t know how to get out of it. Night after night, she sat at her desk, hoping to polish off some quick, noncommittal little speech. But she couldn’t get anything down.

  The weekend before the assembly Monday morning Yoyo went into a panic. Her mother would just have to call in tomorrow and say Yoyo was in the hospital, in a coma.

  Laura tried to calm her down. “Just remember how Mister Lincoln couldn’t think of anything to say at the Gettysburg, but then, bang! Four score and once upon a time ago,” she began reciting. “Something is going to come if you just relax. You’ll see, like the Americans say, Necessity is the daughter of invention. I’ll help you.”

  That weekend, her mother turned all her energy towards helping Yoyo write her speech. “Please, Mami, just leave me alone, please,” Yoyo pleaded with her. But Yoyo would get rid of the goose only to have to contend with the gander. Her father kept poking his head in the door just to see if Yoyo had “fulfilled your obligations,” a phrase he had used when the girls were younger and he’d check to see whether they had gone to the bathroom before a car trip. Several times that weekend around the supper table, he recited his own high school valedictorian speech. He gave Yoyo pointers on delivery, notes on the great orators and their tricks. (Humbleness and praise and falling silent with great emotion were his favorites.)

  Laura sat across the table, the only one who seemed to be list
ening to him. Yoyo and her sisters were forgetting a lot of their Spanish, and their father’s formal, florid diction was hard to understand. But Laura smiled softly to herself, and turned the lazy Susan at the center of the table around and around as if it were the prime mover, the first gear of her attention.

  That Sunday evening, Yoyo was reading some poetry to get herself inspired: Whitman’s poems in an old book with an engraved cover her father had picked up in a thrift shop next to his office. I celebrate myself and sing myself. … He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. The poet’s words shocked and thrilled her. She had gotten used to the nuns, a literature of appropriate sentiments, poems with a message, expurgated texts. But here was a flesh and blood man, belching and laughing and sweating in poems. Who touches this book touches a man.

  That night, at last, she started to write, recklessly, three, five pages, looking up once only to see her father passing by the hall on tiptoe. When Yoyo was done, she read over her words, and her eyes filled. She finally sounded like herself in English!

  As soon as she had finished that first draft, she called her mother to her room. Laura listened attentively while Yoyo read the speech out loud, and in the end, her eyes were glistening too. Her face was soft and warm and proud. “Ay, Yoyo, you are going to be the one to bring our name to the headlights in this country! That is a beautiful, beautiful speech I want for your father to hear it before he goes to sleep. Then I will type it for you, all right?”

  Down the hall they went, mother and daughter, faces flushed with accomplishment. Into the master bedroom where Carlos was propped up on his pillows, still awake, reading the Dominican papers, already days old. Now that the dictatorship had been toppled, he had become interested in his country’s fate again. The interim government was going to hold the first free elections in thirty years. History was in the making, freedom and hope were in the air again! There was still some question in his mind whether or not he might move his family back. But Laura had gotten used to the life here. She did not want to go back to the old country where, de la Torre or not, she was only a wife and a mother (and a failed one at that, since she had never provided the required son). Better an independent nobody than a high-class houseslave. She did not come straight out and disagree with her husband’s plans. Instead, she fussed with him about reading the papers in bed, soiling their sheets with those poorly printed, foreign tabloids. “The Times is not that bad!” she’d claim if her husband tried to humor her by saying they shared the same dirty habit.

  The minute Carlos saw his wife and daughter filing in, he put his paper down, and his face brightened as if at long last his wife had delivered the son, and that was the news she was bringing him. His teeth were already grinning from the glass of water next to his bedside lamp, so he lisped when he said, “Eh-speech, eh-speech!”

  “It is so beautiful, Cuco,” Laura coached him, turning the sound on his TV off. She sat down at the foot of the bed. Yoyo stood before both of them, blocking their view of the soldiers in helicopters landing amid silenced gun reports and explosions. A few weeks ago it had been the shores of the Dominican Republic. Now it was the jungles of Southeast Asia they were saving. Her mother gave her the nod to begin reading.

  Yoyo didn’t need much encouragement. She put her nose to the fire, as her mother would have said, and read from start to finish without looking up. When she concluded, she was a little embarrassed at the pride she took in her own words. She pretended to quibble with a phrase or two, then looked questioningly to her mother. Laura’s face was radiant. Yoyo turned to share her pride with her father.

  The expression on his face shocked both mother and daughter. Carlos’s toothless mouth had collapsed into a dark zero. His eyes bored into Yoyo, then shifted to Laura. In barely audible Spanish, as if secret microphones or informers were all about, he whispered to his wife, “You will permit her to read that!”

  Laura’s eyebrows shot up, her mouth fell open. In the old country, any whisper of a challenge to authority could bring the secret police in their black V.W.’s. But this was America. People could say what they thought. “What is wrong with her speech?” Laura questioned him.

  “What ees wrrrong with her eh-speech?” Carlos wagged his head at her. His anger was always more frightening in his broken English. As if he had mutilated the language in his fury—and now there was nothing to stand between them and his raw, dumb anger. “What is wrong? I will tell you what is wrong. It show no gratitude. It is boastful. I celebrate myself! The best student learns to destroy the teacher!” He mocked Yoyo’s plagiarized words. “That is insubordinate. It is improper. It is disrespecting of her teachers—” In his anger he had forgotten his fear of lurking spies: each wrong he voiced was a decibel higher than the last outrage. Finally, he shouted at Yoyo, “As your father, I forbid you to make that eh-speech!”

  Laura leapt to her feet, a sign that she was about to deliver her own speech. She was a small woman, and she spoke all her pronouncements standing up, either for more projection or as a carry-over from her girlhood in convent schools where one asked for, and literally, took the floor in order to speak. She stood by Yoyo’s side, shoulder to shoulder. They looked down at Carlos. “That is no tone of voice—” she began.

  But now, Carlos was truly furious. It was bad enough that his daughter was rebelling, but here was his own wife joining forces with her. Soon he would be surrounded by a houseful of independent American women. He too leapt from the bed, throwing off his covers. The Spanish newspapers flew across the room. He snatched the speech out of Yoyo’s hands, held it before the girl’s wide eyes, a vengeful, mad look in his own, and then once, twice, three, four, countless times, he tore the speech into shreds.

  “Are you crazy?” Laura lunged at him. “Have you gone mad? That is her speech for tomorrow you have torn up!”

  “Have you gone mad?” He shook her away. “You were going to let her read that … that insult to her teachers?”

  “Insult to her teachers!” Laura’s face had crumpled up like a piece of paper. On it was written a love note to her husband, an unhappy, haunted man. “This is America, Papi, America! You are not in a savage country anymore!”

  Meanwhile, Yoyo was on her knees, weeping wildly, collecting all the little pieces of her speech, hoping that she could put it back together before the assembly tomorrow morning. But not even a sibyl could have made sense of those tiny scraps of paper. All hope was lost. “He broke it, he broke it,” Yoyo moaned as she picked up a handful of pieces.

  Probably, if she had thought a moment about it, she would not have done what she did next. She would have realized her father had lost brothers and friends to the dictator Trujillo. For the rest of his life, he would be haunted by blood in the streets and late night disappearances. Even after all these years, he cringed if a black Volkswagen passed him on the street. He feared anyone in uniform: the meter maid giving out parking tickets, a museum guard approaching to tell him not to get too close to his favorite Goya.

  On her knees, Yoyo thought of the worst thing she could say to her father. She gathered a handful of scraps, stood up, and hurled them in his face. In a low, ugly whisper, she pronounced Trujillo’s hated nickname: “Chapita! You’re just another Chapita!”

  It took Yoyo’s father only a moment to register the loath-some nickname before he came after her. Down the halls they raced, but Yoyo was quicker than he and made it into her room just in time to lock the door as her father threw his weight against it. He called down curses on her head, ordered her on his authority as her father to open that door! He throttled that doorknob, but all to no avail. Her mother’s love of gadgets saved Yoyo’s hide that night. Laura had hired a locksmith to install good locks on all the bedroom doors after the house had been broken into once while they were away. Now if burglars broke in again, and the family were at home, there would be a second round of locks for the thieves to contend with.

  “Lolo,” she said, trying to calm him down. “Don’t you rui
n my new locks.”

  Finally he did calm down, his anger spent. Yoyo heard their footsteps retreating down the hall. Their door clicked shut. Then, muffled voices, her mother’s rising in anger, in persuasion, her father’s deeper murmurs of explanation and self-defense. The house fell silent a moment, before Yoyo heard, far off, the gun blasts and explosions, the serious, self-important voices of newscasters reporting their TV war.

  A little while later, there was a quiet knock at Yoyo’s door, followed by a tentative attempt at the door knob. “Cuquita?” her mother whispered. “Open up, Cuquita.”

  “Go away,” Yoyo wailed, but they both knew she was glad her mother was there, and needed only a moment’s protest to save face.

  Together they concocted a speech: two brief pages of stale compliments and the polite commonplaces on teachers, a speech wrought by necessity and without much invention by mother and daughter late into the night on one of the pads of paper Laura had once used for her own inventions. After it was drafted, Laura typed it up while Yoyo stood by, correcting her mother’s misnomers and mis-sayings.

  Yoyo came home the next day with the success story of the assembly. The nuns had been flattered, the audience had stood up and given “our devoted teachers a standing ovation,” what Laura had suggested they do at the end of the speech.

  She clapped her hands together as Yoyo recreated the moment. “I stole that from your father’s speech, remember? Remember how he put that in at the end?” She quoted him in Spanish, then translated for Yoyo into English.