How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (4 page)

by her gibberish. Only when she mentions the name Miranda do their eyes light up with respect. She is saved!

Yolanda makes the motions of pumping. The darker man looks at his companion, who shrugs, baffled as well. Yolanda waves for them to follow her. And as if after dragging up roots, she has finally managed to yank them free of the soil they have clung to, she finds she can move her own feet toward the car.

The small group stands staring at the sagging tire a moment, the two men kicking at it as if punishing it for having failed the senorita. They squat by the passenger's side, conversing in low tones.

Yolanda leads the men to the rear of the car, where they lift the spare out of its sunken nest-then set to work fitting the interlocking pieces of the jack, unpacking the tools from the deeper hollows of the trunk. They lay their machetes down on the side of the road, out of the way. Above them, the sky is purple with twilight. The sun breaks on the hilltops, spilling its crimson yolk.

Once the flat has been replaced with the spare, the two men lift the deflated tire into the trunk and put away the tools. They hand Yolanda her keys.

"I'd like to give you something," she begins, but the English words are hollow on her tongue. She rummages in her purse and draws out a sheaf of bills, rolls them up and offers them to the men.

The shorter man holds up his hand. Yolanda can see where he has scraped his hand on the pavement and blood has dried dark streaks on his palm.

"No,

no, senorita. Nuestro placer."

Yolanda turns to the taller one. "Please," she says, urging the bills on him. But he too looks down at the ground-Iluminada's gesture, Jos6's gesture. Quickly, she stuffs the bills in his pocket.

The two men pick up their machetes and raise them to their shoulders like soldiers their guns. The tall man motions towards the big house.

"Directo,

Mirandas." He enunciates the words carefully.

Yolanda looks in the direction of his hand. In the faint light of what is left of day, she can barely make out the road ahead. It is as if the guava grove has grown into the road and woven its matt of branches tightly in all directions.

She reaches for each man's hand to shake. The shorter man holds his back at first, as if not wanting to dirty her hand, but finally, after wiping it on the side of his pants, he gives it to Yolanda. The skin feels rough and dry like the bark of trees.

Yolanda climbs into the car while the two men wait a moment on the shoulder to see if the tire will hold.

She eases out onto the pavement and makes her way slowly down the road. When she looks for them in her rearview mirror, they have disappeared into the darkness of the guava grove.

Ahead, her lights catch the figure of a small boy. Yolanda leans over and opens the door for him.

The overhead light comes on; the boy's face is working back tears. He is cradling an arm. "The

guardia

hit me. He said I was telling stories. No dominicana

with a car would be out at this hour getting guayabas."

"Don't you worry, Jose." Yolanda pats the boy. She can feel the bony shoulder through the thin fabric of his shirt. "You can still have your dollar. You did your part."

But his shame seems to obscure any pleasure he might feel

in her offer. Yolanda tries to distract him by asking what he will buy with his money, what he most craves, thinking that on a subsequent visit, she might bring him his own little

an-

tosto. But Jose Duarte, Sanchez y Mella says nothing, except a mumbled

gracias

when she lets him off at the cantina with several more than his promised dollar.

In the glow of the headlights, Yolanda makes out the figure of the old woman in the black square of her doorway, waving goodbye. And above the picnic table on a near post, the Palmolive woman's skin gleams a rich white; her head is still thrown back, her mouth still opened as if she is calling someone over a great distance.

The Kiss

TAYAYATATATATATATAYAYATATATATATATIIITA yat

Sofia

E

ven after they'd been married and had their own families and often couldn't make it for other occasions, the four daughters always came home for their father's birthday.

They would gather together, without husbands, would-be husbands, or bring-home work. For this too was part of the tradition: the daughters came home alone. The apartment was too small for everyone, the father argued.

Surely their husbands could spare them for one overnight?

The husbands would just as soon have not gone to their in-laws, but they felt annoyed at the father's strutting. "When's he going to realize you've grown up? You sleep with us!"

"He's almost seventy, for God's sake!" the daughters said, defending the father. They were passionate women, but their devotions were like roots; they were sunk into the past towards the old man.

So for one night every November the daughters turned back into their father's girls. In the cramped living room, surrounded by the dark oversized furniture from the old house they grew up in, they were children again in a smaller, simpler version of the world. There was the prodigal scene at the door. The father opened his arms wide and welcomed them in his broken English: "This is your homeland never you should forget it." Inside, the mother fussed at them-their sloppy clothes; their long, loose hair; their looking tired, too skinny, too made up, and so on.

After a few glasses of wine, the father started in on what should be done if he did not live to see his next birthday. "Come on, Papi," his daughters coaxed him, as if it were a modesty of his, to perish, and they had to talk

him

into staying alive. After his cake and candles, the father distributed bulky envelopes that felt as if they were padded, and they were, no less than several hundreds in bills, tens and twenties and fives, all arranged to face the same way, the top one signed with the father's name, branding them his. Why not checks? the daughters would wonder later, gossiping together in the bedroom, counting their money to make sure the father wasn't playing favorites.

Was there some illegality that the father stashed such sums away? Was he-none of the daughters really believed this, but to contemplate it was a wonderful little explosion in their heads- was he maybe dealing drugs or doing abortions in bis office?

At the table there was always the pretense of trying to give the envelopes back. "No, no, Papi, it's your birthday, after all."

The father told them there was plenty more where that had come from. The revolution in the old country had failed.

Most of his comrades had been killed or bought off.

He had escaped to this country. And now it was every man for himself, so what he made was for his girls. The father never gave his daughters

money when their husbands were around. "They might receive the wrong idea," the father once said, and although none of the daughters knew specifically what the father meant, they all understood what he was saying to them: Don't bring the men home for my birthday.

But this year, for his seventieth birthday, the youngest daughter, Sofia, wanted the celebration at her house. Her son had been born that summer, and she did not want to be traveling in November with a four-month-old and her little girl. And yet, she, of all the daughters, did not want to be the absent one because for the first time since she'd run off with her husband six years ago, she and her father were on speaking terms. In fact, the old man had been out to see her-or really to see his grandson-twice. It was a big deal that Sofia had had a son. He was the first male bom into the family in two generations. In fact, the baby was to be named for the grandfather-Carlos-and his middle name was to be Sofia's maiden name, and so, what the old man had never hoped forwith his "harem of four girls," as he liked to joke, his own name was to be kept going in this new country!

During his two visits, the grandfather had stood guard by the crib all day, speaking to little Carlos.

"Charles the Fifth; Charles Dickens; Prince Charles." He enumerated the names of famous Charleses in order to stir up genetic ambition in the boy. "Charlemagne," he cooed at him also, for the baby was large and big-boned with blond fuzz on his pale pink skin, and blue eyes just like his German father's. All the grandfather's Caribbean fondness for a male heir and for fair Nordic looks

had surfaced. There was now good blood in the family against a future bad choice by one of its women.

"You can be president, you were born here," the grandfather crooned. "You can go to the moon, maybe even to Mars by the time you are of my age."

His macho babytalk brought back Sofia's old antagonism towards her father. How obnoxious for him to go on and on like that while beside him stood his little granddaughter, wide-eyed and sad at all the things her baby brother, no bigger than one of her dolls, was going to be able to do just because he was a boy.

"Make him stop, pleasest" Sofia asked her husband. Otto was considered the jolly, good-natured one among the brothers-in-law. "The camp counselor," his sisters-in-law teased. Otto approached the grandfather. Both men looked fondly down at the new Viking.

"You can be as great a man as your father," the grandfather said. This was the fust compliment the father-in-law had ever paid any son-in-law in the family. There was no way Otto was going to mess with the old man now.

"He is a good boy, is he not, Papi?"

Otto's German accent thickened with affection. He clapped his hand on his father-in-law's shoulders. They were friends now.

But though the father had made up with his son-in-law, there was still a strain with his own daughter. When he had come to visit, she embraced him at the door, but he stiffened and politely shrugged her off. "Let me put down these heavy bags, Sofia." He had never called her by her family pet name, Fifi, even when she lived at home. He had always had problems with his maverick youngest, and her running off hadn't helped. "I don't want loose women in my family," he had cautioned all his daughters.

Warnings were delivered communally, for even though there was usually the offending daughter of the moment, every woman's character could use extra scolding.

His daughters had had to put up with this kind of attitude in an unsympathetic era. They grew up in the late sixties. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered political acts against the military-industrial complex. But standing up to their father was a different matter altogether. Even as grown women, they lowered their voices in their father's earshot when alluding to their bodies'

pleasure. Professional women, too, all three of them, with degrees on the wall!

Sofia was the one without the degrees. She had always gone her own way, though she downplayed her choices, calling them accidents. Among the four sisters, she was considered the plain one, with her tall, big-boned body and large-featured face. And yet, she was the one with "non-stop boyfriends," her sisters joked, not without wonder and a little envy. They admired her and were always asking her advice about men.

The third daughter had shared a room with Sofia growing up. She liked to watch her sister move about their room, getting ready for bed, brushing and arranging her hair in a clip before easing herself under the sheets as if someone were waiting for her there. In the dark, Fifi gave off a fresh, wholesome smell of clean flesh. It gave solace to the third daughter, who was always so tentative and terrified and had such troubles with men. Her sister's breathing in the dark room was like having a powerful, tamed animal at the foot of her bed ready to protect her.

The youngest daughter had been the first to leave home.

She had dropped out of college, in love. She had taken a job as a secretary and was living at home because her father had threatened to disown her if she moved out on her own. On her vacation she went to Colombia because her current boyfriend was going, and since she couldn't spend an overnight with him in New York, she had to travel thousands of miles to sleep with him. In Bogota, they discovered that once they could enjoy the forbidden fruit, they lost their appetite. They broke up. She met a tourist on the street, some guy from Germany, just like that. The woman had not been without a boyfriend for more than a few days of her adult life. They fell in love.

On her way home, she tossed her diaphragm in the first bin at Kennedy Airport. She was taking no chances. But the father could tell. For months, he kept an eye out. First chance he got, he Went through her drawers "looking for my nail clippers,"

and there he found her packet of love letters. The German man's small, correct handwriting mentioned unmentionable things-bed conversations were recreated on the thin blue sheets of aerogramme letters.

"What is the meaning of this?" The father shook the letters in her face. They had been sitting around the table, the four sisters, gabbing, and the father had come in, beating the packet against his leg like a whip, the satin hair ribbon unraveling where he had untied it, and then wrapped it round and round in a mad effort to contain his youngest daughter's misbehavior.

"Give me those!" she cried, lunging at him.

The father raised his hand with the letters above both their heads like the Statue of Liberty with her freedom torch, but he had forgotten this was the daughter who was as tall as he was. She clawed his arm down and clutched the letters to herself as if they were her baby he'd plucked from her breast. It seemed a biological rather than a romantic fury.

After his initial shock, the father regained his own fury. "Has he deflowered you? That's what I want to know. Have you gone behind the palm trees? Are you dragging my good name through the dirt, that is what I would like to know!" The father was screaming crazily in the youngest daughter's face, question after question, not giving the daughter a chance to answer. His face grew red with fury, but hers was more terrible in its impassivity, a pale ivory moon, pulling and pulling at the tide of his anger, until it seemed he might drown in his own outpouring of fury.