How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  Before sleep, for a few minutes, I try to accustom my flesh to the burial that is coming. I reach up for the lid and I pull it down, closing myself in. In that hot and tight darkness be-fore I lift the lid back up for air, I shut my eyes and lie so still that the blood I hear pounding and the heart I hear knocking could be something that I have forgotten to turn off in the deserted house.

  The Human Body

  Yoyo

  Back then, we all lived side by side in adjoining houses on a piece of property which belonged to my grandparents. Every kid in the family was paired up with a best friend cousin. My older sister, Carla, and my cousin Lucinda, the two oldest cousins, had a giggly, gossipy girlfriendship that made everyone else feel left out. Sandi had Gisela, whose pretty ballerina name we all envied. Baby sister Fifi and my sweet-natured cousin Carmencita were everyone’s favorites, a helpful little pair, good for errands, turning jump ropes, and being captured when the large communal yard we played in was trans-formed into the old West by cowboy Mundín and cowgirl me. We were the only boy-girl pair, and as we grew older, Mami and Mundín’s mother, Tia Carmen, encouraged a separation between us.

  But that was hard to effect. In our family compound, there was no keeping anyone from anyone else. When one cousin caught the measles or mumps, we were all quarantined together so as to get that childhood illness over and done with. We lived in each other’s houses, staying for meals at whatever table we were closest to when dinner was put out, heading home only to take our baths and go to bed (or to get punished, like the time the report reached our mothers’ ears that Yoyo and Mundín had shattered Tia Mimi’s crystal-ball garden deco-ration with their slingshots. “That’s a lie,” we defended our-selves. “We broke it with the rake, trying to knock down some guavas!” Or the time that Yoyo and Mundín had used Lucinda’s and Carla’s nail polish to paint blood on their wounds. Or that time Yoyo and Mundín tied up Fifi and tiny Carmencita to the water tower near the back of the property and forgot them there).

  Beyond those shacks, through a guava orchard Tia Mimi had planted, lived my grandparents, in a great big house we went to for Sunday dinners whenever they were home. Mostly, they were far away in New York City, where my grandfather had some position in the United Nations. A kindly, educated old man with a big white Panama hat who worried mostly about his digestion, my grandfather entertained no political ambitions. But the tyrant who had seized power was jealous of anyone with education and money, and so Papito was often sent out of the country on a bogus diplomatic post. When Papito returned home, the property would be overrun by the guardia in “routine searches for your own protection.” Always after those searches, the family would miss silverware, cigarettes, small change, cuff links, and earrings left lying about. “Better that than our lives,” my grandfather would console my grand-mother, who wanted to leave the country again immediately.

  But what did we kids know of all that back in those days? The height of violence for us was on the weekly television Western imported from Hollywood and dubbed clumsily in Spanish. Rin Tin Tin barked in sync, but the cowboys kept talking long after their mouths were closed. When the gun re-ports sounded, the villains already lay in a puddle of blood. Mundín and I craned our necks forward, wanting to make sure that the bad guys were really dead. As for the violence around us, the guards’ periodic raids, the uncles whose faces no longer appeared at the yearly holiday gatherings, we believed the slogan at station identification—“God and Trujillo are taking care of you.”

  When the U.N. post was first conferred on him, my grand-father balked: he wanted no part of the corrupt regime. But, my grandmother’s tyrannical constitution brought its own kind of pressure to bear on him; as she grew older, she was always ill: aches, migraines, moodiness that only expensive specialists in the States would know how to cure. The illnesses—so the underground family gossip went—were caused by the fact that Mamita had been a very beautiful young woman, and she had never fully recovered from losing her looks. My grandfather, whom everyone called a saint, pampered her in everything and tolerated her willfulness, so that the saying among the family was that Papito was so good, “he pees holy water.” Mamita, furious at hearing her husband canonized at her expense, took her revenge. She brought home a large jar of holy water from the cathedral. One Sunday during the weekly family dinner, my mother caught her preparing my grandfather’s whiskey and-water with holy water from the jar. “Damn it!” my grand-mother gloated. “You all say he pees holy water, well he’s been peeing it all right!”

  In New York, my grandfather developed stomach ailments, and from then on all the foods in the world were divided into those that agreed and those that did not agree with Papito. My grandmother supervised his menu religiously, feeling guilty perhaps about earlier things she had run through his system.

  When they did return from their New York City trips, Mamita brought back duffle bags full of toys for her grandchildren. Once she brought me a noisy drum and once a watercolor set and paintbrushes of different thicknesses for expressing the grand and fine things in the world. My American cowgirl outfit was an exact duplicate—except for the skirt—of Mundín’s cowboy one.

  My mother disapproved. The outfit would only encourage my playing with Mundín and the boy cousins. It was high time I got over my tomboy phase and started acting like a young lady seņorita. “But it is for girls,” I pointed out. “Boys don’t wear skirts.” Mamita threw her head back and laughed. “This one is no fool. She’s as smart as Mimi even if she doesn’t get it from books.”

  On her latest trip to New York City, my grandmother had taken her unmarried daughter, Mimi, along. Mimi was known as “the genius in the family” because she read books and knew Latin and had attended an American college for two years be-fore my grandparents pulled her out because too much education might spoil her for marriage. The two years seemed to have done sufficient harm, for at twenty-eight, Mimi was an “old maid.”

  “The day Tia Mimi marries, cows will fly,” we cousins teased. I did not think any less of my aunt for being single. In fact, as a tomboy, I had every intention of following in her foot-steps. But Tia Mimi used her free time so poorly, she might as well have been married. She read and read, and for breaks, she tended an incredible Eden of a garden, then read some more.

  “She reads tons and tons of books!” My mother rolled her eyes, for her sister’s accomplishments could only be measured by weight, not specifics. Poor old maid Tia Mimi. I hoped soon she’d be able to rope someone into marrying her. I was not in the least bit interested in acquiring a new uncle or in wearing a dress for the occasion, but it would be worth putting up with both inconveniences to see a cow fly.

  As we cousins feared, Mamita came back from this latest trip with Tia Mimi’s idea of fun. Instead of the usual oversized, cheap, gaudy, noise-making, spoiling-your-clothes, wasting-your-mind toys, that duffle bag was lined with school supplies and flashcards and workbooks and puzzle-size boxes whose covers announced: MASTERING ARABIC NUMERALS, THE WONDERS OF NATURE, A B C OF READING, MORE SOUNDS TO SAY. Mundín and I exchanged a grim biting-the-bullet look as our gifts were handed to us.

  I got a book of stories in English I could barely read but with interesting pictures of a girl in a bra and long slip with a little cap on her head that had a tassel dangling down. Mundín fared much better, I thought, with a see-through doll whose top half lifted off. Inside were blue and pink and light brown tubes and coils and odd-shaped pellets which all fit together like a puzzle. Tia Mimi explained the toy was called The Human Body. She had picked it out for Mundín because recently, in one of those after-dinner sessions in which aunts and uncles polled the children on what they were planning to do with themselves when they grew up, Mundín had expressed an interest in the medical profession. Everyone thought that was very good of him and proved he had a good heart after all, but Mundín had confided in me later that he was mostly interested in giving needles and cutting people open on the operating table.

  We examined The Human
Body doll while Tia Mimi read out loud from a little booklet that came with it about the different organs and what each was good for. After we’d learned to put them together so the heart wasn’t tangled in the intestines and the lungs didn’t face the spine, Mundín commenced grumbling. “A doll, why’d she get me a stupid doll?”

  I disliked them too, but this doll was better than a reading book, and you could own it with self-respect, seeing as it was a boy with guts. But I was surprised that along with his other organs, this boy didn’t have what in those days I called “a peeer.” I’d seen them on little naked beggar boys at the market and once on my grandfather, who peed holy water, when I walked in on him in the bathroom ministering to his need. But this doll was as smooth between his legs as a baby girl.

  Mamita, who yearned for her youth again, must have remembered what it was like to be young and dumb and fun-loving. She had snuck back for us—when Mimi’s back was turned—little nonsense presents. I got a paddle with a little ball attached on an elastic string, which I whacked and whammed as if it were my reading book, and Mundín got a big packet of bright pink modeling clay.

  At first, neither of us knew what the packet was. My cousin’s eyes flashed like bright coins. “Bubble gum!” he cried out. But my grandmother explained that no, this was a new kind of modeling clay that was easy to work with. She demonstrated. Pulling off a handful, she molded a ball, bunched little ears side by side, dotted two eyes with a bobby pin she took out of her hair and finished it off with a tiny ball of a tail. She held her hand out to me.

  “Ah,” I cried, for in her palm was the likeness of a tiny rabbit. But Mundín was not impressed. Bunny or not, he still could not blow bubbles with it.

  All morning, I tagged behind Mundín, begging him to trade me that packet of clay. But he was not in the least bit tempted by my reading book, though he did linger a moment over the pictures of the girl in her underwear before handing the book back. My paddle ball was no good to him either. He was liable to ruin his batting swing by striking at a little jacks ball. “A girl’s ball,” he called it.

  At that, I drew myself up with wounded pride and strode off to “our” side of the property. Mundín followed me through a path in the hedges and then lingered by my side as I sat on a patio lawn chair pretending great interest in my book. He paced by me several times, tossing his big ball of clay from hand to hand like a baseball. “What nice clay” he observed. “Very nice clay,” I kept my eyes on my book.

  A strange thing began to happen. I actually became interested in those dark, dense paragraphs of print. The story was not half bad: Once upon a time a sultan was killing all the girls in his kingdom, decapitating them, running swords through them, hanging them. But then, the girl pictured in bra and slip, the girl with a name that looked like a misprint—Sche-hera-zade, I sounded it out—this girl and her sister were captured by the sultan. They figured out a way to trick him. Just as he was about to cut off their heads, the sister asked him if they couldn’t just hear one more of Scheherazade’s wonderful stories before they died. The sultan agreed and gave Scheherazade until dawn. But when the sun rose, Scheherazade hadn’t yet finished her fascinating story. “I guess it’s time to die,” she interrupted herself. “Too bad. The ending is really good.”

  “By Allah,” the sultan swore. “You’re not dying until I hear the rest of the story.”

  A shadow fell across the page I was reading. I glanced up, keeping my place in the text with an index finger. I would have given my cousin a dirty look and gone on with my reading if it hadn’t been for the magnificent creature he had created. He must have rolled all of the clay into one long pink coil and looped it once, twice around his shoulders like a circus performer’s boa. Raising his chin, he passed within inches of me, through the hedges to his side of the yard. I knew he was ready to negotiate. I set my book face down on the chair and followed after him.

  But beyond the hedge, Mundín had run into a captive audience. Fifi and Carmencita watched while Mundín unwrapped the snake from around his neck and poked one end at his little sister. Carmencita screamed and fled indoors. In a minute, we could hear Mundín’s mother calling out in a punishment voice, “Edmundo Alejandro de la Torre Rodríguez!”

  Now, Fifi, who could not be long without her other half, headed towards the house. “I’m telling,” she announced. Mundín blocked her path. He tried to bribe her with a handful of his clay.

  “No fair!” I hurried towards him, pushing little Fifi aside. He wouldn’t even trade with me, his best buddy, and here he was giving it away to a little sister for nothing.

  “Okay, okay.” He motioned for me to lower my voice. He held the snake out to me. “Trade you.”

  My heart soared. Here was my desire, within reach. I made a desperate offer. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  Mundín considered for a moment. A sly little smile spread across his lips. It was like a liquid spilling and staining some-thing it mustn’t. He lowered his voice. “Show me you’re a girl.”

  Stalling, I looked around. My eyes fell on Fifi, who was following the transaction closely. “Here?”

  He jerked his head, indicating the old coal shed at the back of the property where Mamita’s gardener, Florentino, kept his tools. Since this part of our property adjoined thepalacio of the dictator’s daughter and son-in-law, my grandfather had been reluctant to erect a high wall lest it be considered a snub. Tia Mimi’s hedge of bright red ginger shielded us somewhat from the sight of the eyesore palace and of the dictator strolling of a Sunday afternoon with his three-year-old grandson in a minuscule general’s uniform. We children were forbidden to wander this coal shed area ever since the time Mundín and I had set off a firecracker just as the miniature general paraded by with his nursemaids. Papito had to spend the night down at the SIM headquarters explaining that his seven-year-old grandson had meant no harm. Perhaps because it was out of bounds, the coal shed was Mundín’s and my favorite place to scout for Indians. Behind a sack of fertilizer, we once discovered a magazine with pictures of naked women with sly looks on their faces, as if they had just been caught stealing nail polish or tying people up to water towers.

  I followed Mundín into the shed, turning every so often and glowering at Fifi, who trailed behind us. At the door I gave her a little push to go away.

  “Let her in,” Mundín argued, “or she’ll go tell.”

  “I’ll tell,” Fifi agreed.

  It was dark and damp inside. A faint light fell through the dirty wire-mesh windows. The air smelled of the black soil brought down from the mountains to make Tia Mimi’s giant ferns grow tall. In a corner, hoses lay coiled like a family of dormant snakes.

  Fifi and I lined up against a far wall. Mundín faced us, his hands nervously working the snake into a rounder and rounder ball. “Go on,” he said. “Take them down.”

  Immediately, Fifi pulled down her pants and panties in one wad to her hips, revealing what she thought was in question, her bellybutton.

  But I was older and knew better. In religious instruction classes, Sor Juana had told how God clothed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they had sinned. “Your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost.” At home, the aunts had drawn the older girls aside and warned us that soon we would be senoritas who must guard our bodies like hidden treasure and not let anyone take advantage. It was around this time that strong pressure was put on me to stop playing with Mundín and to join the other young-lady cousins in their grownup beautician games and boy gossip inside the house.

  “Go on,” Mundín ordered impatiently. Fifi had caught on and lowered her pants and panties to her ankles. I gave my cousin a defiant look as I lifted up my cowboy skirt, tucked it under my chin, and yanked my panties down. I steeled myself against his intrusive glances. But all Mundín did was shrug his shoulders with disappointment. “You’re just like dolls,” he observed, and divided his ball of clay equally between Fifi and me.

  I was dressed in seconds and lighting into him. “You promis
ed me the clay!” I cried. “You let her come along, but you didn’t say she’d be part of the deal.”

  “Edmundo Alejandro de la Torre Rodríguez!” We heard Mundín’s mother calling from the back patio of the house. Mundín tried hushing my angry yelling. He reached over to take back Fifi’s half, but she too started bawling. “Mundo Alejandro!” The voice had grown louder and was definitely heading in our direction. Now it was Mundín’s face that was naked with worry. “Come on, please,” he pleaded with me. “Please. I’ll let you have my Human Body doll, okay?”

  I tortured him with a long slow moment of consideration, then nodded. He fled out of the shed in search of his toy.

  Fifi sniffled as she patted her half into a small clay ball. She looked over at the half in my hands and asked, “How much you got?”

  I was beyond fury at this little creature, who had spoiled my chances at amassing a fortune of pink clay. I glared at her. She was still standing in a puddle of fabric at her ankles. She had a smear of breakfast egg on her chin and the blurry eyes of someone who has just stopped crying. I reached over and pulled her pants back up. She swayed with the force of my lifting. “How much you got?” she persisted. In her eyes was a gleam of material interest I hadn’t noticed before.

  I held up my half to hers. “Same as you, silly.”

  When the door creaked open, we were sure it was Mundín coming back with The Human Body. But two adult-sized bodies loomed before us: the gardener’s lean, boney figure, his dusky face topped by a busted sombrero, and beside him, Mundín’s mother, a short, broad-shouldered woman, peering into the darkness of the shed.