How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (15 page)

"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 pur cousin of a cousin, Jorge, who often has a couple of jqints and knows a voodoo priest who will tell us our futures after performing a scary animal sacrifice.

Our official escort Mundin 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 yard-boy. Once we are out of the car, the yardboy pulls the garage door down and hands Mundin the key to the connected cabin.

"That way no one can tell who's here," Mundin explains in English. "This is the high-class motel,

la czeme de la atone,

not to get too gross. Everyone would know everyone else's cars here." Mundin unlocks the door to the cabin and stands aside to let the ladies in. An unabashed king-size bed made up with a flowered bedspread stands in the dead center of the room. There are a couple of rolled pillows with tassels at the head of the bed. Covered with the same wishy-washy flowered material as the spread, the pillows evoke an Arab engineer more than a lord and master of the harem.

"Is this all?" we say, disappointed.

"What'd ya expect?" Mundin is nonplussed at our lack of proper titillation.

After all, he has risked getting into a lot of trouble to show us the naughty face of the Island. Nice girls at a whore house! His mother would kill him!

Sandi puts her arm around Mundin and bumps hips. She is doing her Mae West imitation just as the yardboy comes in with a tray of rum and Cokes. He keeps his eyes on the tile floor as he goes from one to the other, proffering refreshments, as if to reassure us there will be no witnesses. As soon as he exits, we laugh.

"I wonder what he thinks?" Carla shakes her head, just imagining it. Mundin wiggles his eyebrows. "How many taboos can we break here?

Let's see." He enumerates: incest, group sex, lesbian sex, virgin sex-

"Virgin sex? Who're you talking about?" his sister Lucinda challenges with a hand on her hip.

"Yeah," we concur, hands on our hips, facing him, a line-up of feminists.

Mundin's eyes do a double blink. For all his liberal education in the States, and all his sleeping around there and here, and all his eager laughter when his Americanized cousins recount their misadventures, his own sister has to be pure. "Let's go." He hurries us after we finish our rum and Cokes. As we're backing out of our garage, a pickup passes behind us on the motel drive.

"Hey!" Yoyo cries out. "Is that Fifi and Manuel?"

Mundin chuckles. "Hey, hey! Way to go."

"Way to go, way to schmo," Sandi snaps.

"That's our baby sister going in there with a guy who thinks condoms cause impotence."

"Go back in there after them!" Carla orders Mundin.

"She's got her rights too." Mundin laughs pointedly as he drives through the gate, which the boy is already closing on our taillights.

"This isn't funny," Carla warns as we consult in the bathroom back at Capri's.

"She's not going to come back home on her own, she's brainwashed."

Sandi concurs. "I mean, they wouldn't need a motel room if they weren't sleeping together."

"After she promised," Carla says, nodding, aggrieved.

There, among the pink vanities with baskets of little towels and talcum powder and brushes, we come up with our plot. We reach out our hands and seal our pact. Yoyo rallies us with

"iQue viva la revolucidn!"

On top of our motel rum and Cokes, we've had a few of Capri's famous frozen daiquiris. The young maid who has been listening to our English gibberish offers us a pink perfumed hand towel, which Sandi accepts and waves like the flag for our side.

Our last Saturday night on the Island, the compound folks sit on Tia Carmen's patio, reminiscing. Periodically, family stops by to say goodbye to our parents and deliver the packets of letters and bills they want mailed in the States. Now that Tio Mundo is in government, there are always other cabinet members and old friends coming over to shoptalk politics and ask for favors. The patio is sex segregated-the men sit to one side, smoking their cigars and tinkling their rum drinks. The women lounge on wicker armchairs by the wall lamps, Yoyo,

Fifi

exclaiming over whatever there is to be exclaimed about.

The young people take off for the Avenida, promising to be home early. Tonight, it's the regulars, Lucinda, Mundin, and Fifi and Manuel, of course, and the three of us. Carla does the usual chaperone duty in the pickup and then gets dropped off at Capri's. "They're having some big fight," she confesses when she joins us.

"What now?" Sandi asks.

"Same old thing," Carla sighs. "Fifi spent too much time talking to Jorge and her skirt is too short and her jersey too tight, blah, blah, blah."

"Rmm, rmm," Sandi and Yoyo rev.

Mundin laughs. "Serves you girls right."

We narrow our eyes at

him.

When he's in the States, where he went to prep school and is now in college, he's one of us, our buddy. But back on the Island, he struts and turns macho, needling us with the unfair advantage being male here gives him.

As usual, we're to wait for the lovers at Capri's. Twenty minutes before our curfew, they'll pick up Carla, and we'll all head home again like one big happy group of virgin cousins. But tonight, as we've agreed, we're staging a coup on the same Avenida where a decade ago the dictator was cornered and wounded on his way to a tryst with his mistress. It was a plot our father helped devise but did not carry through, since by then we had fled to the States. Tonight, we are blowing the lovers" cover. First step is to get Mundin to drive us home. Male loyalty is what keeps the macho system going, so Mundin will want to protect Manuel.

Lucinda works a version of her Kotex custom officer trick.

She complains to her brother that she's just gotten her period and needs to go home. "I've got terrible cramps," Lucinda moans.

"Can't you take something for it?" Mundin asks, inconvenienced and awed by the mysteries of the female body.

Lucinda nods. "It's at home, though."

Mundin shakes his head at his sister. Nevertheless, he is her protector. Ever since her quip at the motel, he's been watching her closely.

"Okay, okay, I'll take you." He turns to us, his cousins. "You guys have to stay here and cover for Manuel."

"We can't stay here without you," we remind him.

Rule

nu-meio uno:

Girls are not left unescorted in public.

"We'll get in trouble, Mundin."

Mundin scowls. This is unexpected prissiness from us. "Well, I'll tell them I left you here with some cousins who showed. Then, I'll come back for you. By then Fifi and Manuel should be done."

Should be done.

A cannon shot across the bow. No time for further delay. We smile three churlish Che Guevara smiles. "We're going with you."

"But what about Fifi and Manuel?" Mundin is flabbergasted. If everyone except Fifi and Manuel shows up at the compound, the lovers will be in deep trouble. Rule

numeio dos:

Girls are not to be left unchaperoned with their novios.

"We came with you, we stay with you.

We

don't want to get into trouble." Our good-girl voices don't quite convince, our cousin.

"I won't do it!" Mundin folds his hands on the table.

We remind him of last night's outing to the motel. Should we

mention that to his father? We know what sword of Damocles hangs over his head-an electric razor for the military school crewcut Mundin would have to get. For just as we, his American cousins, are threatened with Island confinement, military school is what's in store for Mundin should he step out of line. He looks us straight in the eyes.

"What are you girls up to?" he fires at us.

We meet his look with bulletproof smiles, stone faces on which, with his myopic macho vision, he can't make out the writing on the walls.

The compound driveway looks like a Mercedes Benz car lot. A Jeep and two Japanese cars say some of the younger generation are also here. Lucinda spots Tia Fidelina and Tio Orlando's pale salmon Mercedes. "This is going to be muy

interesting," she whispers.

The patio is packed with relatives. Mundin hurries over to the men's side, knowing the first bomb will explode among the women. We sisters go on our rounds, kissing all the aunts. Tia Fidelina's milky dark eyes are almost totally sightless. "And which one is the no via?" she asks, squinting at her nieces.

"Yes," Mami agrees. "Where is Fifi?"

"With Manuel," Sandi offers smoothly. Her tone implies we have no problem with that.

"Where

are they?" Mami asks more emphatically.

Carla shrugs. "How should we know?"

There is an embarrassed silence in which the words her reputation

are as palpable as if someone had hung a wedding dress in the air. Tia Carmen sighs. Tia Fidelina unfolds her fan of overly-gorgeous roses. Tia Flor smiles wildly at the rest of us

and asks us if we had a nice time. Mami looks past the crowd at Papi, over there happily exchanging dictatorship stories with the other men.

Steely-faced, she stands up and nods for us to follow her. The three of us single-file behind Mami into Tfa Carmen's bedroom again, the scene of Mami's courtroom. Tia comes along, counseling patience.

Once the door is closed, Mami loses her temper. First, she berates Carla, who as the oldest was in charge and had orders to stick with Manuel and Fifi as their in-car chaperone. Then, we get chapter and verse on being bad daughters.

Finally, she swears, in front of our aunt, that Fifi is going back with us. "If your father should find out!" Our mother shakes her head, reviewing the consequences. Rather anticlimactically, she adds,

"A disgrace to the family."

"Ya, ya."

Tia Carmen lifts her hand for her sister-in-law to stop. "These girls have lived so long away, they have gotten American ways."

"American ways!" Mami cries. "Fifi's been living here for six months. That's no excuse."

"There must be an explanation." Tia Carmen changes course. "Let's not anticipate where the coconut will fall when the hurricane hasn't hit yet," she advises.

Mami shakes her head conclusively. "If she can't behave herself here, she goes back with us, period! I'm not going to send them anymore to cause trouble!"

Tia Carmen puts her arms around us. "Don't forget, these are my girls, too. And they're good girls, no trouble at all. What

Yoyo,

Fift

would I do"-she looks up at us-"if I didn't get to have them with me every year?"

"We look at each other, and then, drop our gaze to hide our confusion. We are free at last, but here, just at the moment the gate swings open, and we can fly the coop, Tfa Carmen's love revives our old homesickness. It's like this monkey experiment Carla read about in her clinical psych class. These baby monkeys were kept in a cage so long, they wouldn't come out when the doors were finally left open. Instead, they stayed inside and poked their arms through the bars for their food, just out of reach.

It is close to midnight when we hear the pickup laboring up the driveway. Out on the patio, the visiting relatives have left, and only the compound folks remain, talking in low, preoccupied voices. In our bedroom, we have been defending ourselves to each other. We all know Fifi was headed for trouble with M.g. "She's only sixteen," we keep exclaiming. She thought she could be all Island. We know better.

But still, we feel rotten when a pale Fifi marches into our bedroom awhile later after a grueling interrogation in Tia Carmen's bedroom.

She says nothing to us but opens the closet and begins packing all her clothes. For a moment we panic. Is she going to elope with Manuel?

"What are you doing, Fifi?" Yoyo asks.

Fifi continues to pack from a pile of clothes she has emptied out of her drawers onto the floor.

Silence.

"FiHave?" Carla touches her shoulder. "What happened?" She means, of course, out in the patio or even-since the dull, absent look on Fifi's face implies more-before.

Fifl turns to us, her eyes are red and weepy.

"Traitors," she says. The sound of her suitcase latching closed gives the accusation an eerie finality. At the door, she raises her chin proudly, and then we hear her steps echoing down the hall to our cousin Carmencita's room.

We look at each other as if to say, "She'll get over it." Meaning Manuel, meaning her fury at us, meaning her fear of her own life. Like ours, it lies ahead of her like a wilderness just before the fust explorer sets foot on the virgin sand.

Daughter of Invention

YAYAYATATAYATAVATAYATAYATAYATATATIIITA yat

Mcani, Papi,

Yoyo

F

or a period after they arrived in this country, Laura Garcia tried to invent something. Her ideas always came after the sightseeing visits she took with her daughters to department stores to see the wonders of this new country. On his free Sundays, Carlos carted the girls off to the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge or Rockefeller Center, but as far as Laura was concerned, these were men's wonders. Down in housewares were the true treasures women were after.