How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (7 page)

The mother looked up, thinking the poetry reading had begun. The lover waved the voice away. He wanted to hear the story.

"We went up to New York, Lolo and I.

He had a convention there, and we decided to make a vacation of it. We hadn't had a vacation since the first baby was bom. We were very poor." The mother lowered her voice. "Words can't describe how poor we were. But we were starting to see better days."

"Really?" the lover said. He had fixed on that word as one that gave the appropriate amount of encouragement but did not interrupt the flow of the mother's story.

"We left the girls back home, but that one"-the mother pointed again to the daughter, who widened her eyes at her lover-"that one was losing all her hair. We took her with us so she could see a specialist.

Turned out to be just nerves."

The lover knew Yolanda would not have wanted him to know about this indelicacy of her body. She did not even like to pluck her eyebrows in his presence. An immediate bathrobe after her bath. Lights out when they made love. Other times, she carried on about the Great Mother and the holiness of the body and sexual energy being eternal delight. Sometimes, he complained he felt caught between the woman's libber and the Catholic senorita. "You sound like my ex," she accused him.

"We got on this crowded bus one afternoon." The mother Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

shook her head remembering how crowded the bus had been. "I couldn't begin to tell you how crowded it was. It was more sardines in a can than you could shake sticks at."

"Really?"

"You don't believe me?" the mother accused him. The lover nodded his head to show he was convinced. "But let me tell you, that bus was so crowded, Lolo and I got our wires totally mixed up. I was sure Lolo had her, and Lolo was sure she was with me.

Anyhow, to make it a short story, we got off at our stop, and we looked at each other.

Where's Yot

we asked at the same time. Meanwhile, that bus was roaring away from us.

"Well, I'll tell you, we broke into a run like two crazy people! It was rush hour. Everyone was turning around to look at us like we were running from the police or something." The mother's voice was breathless remembering that run. The lover waited for her to catch up with the bus in her memory.

"Testing?" a garbled voice asked without much conviction.

"After about two blocks, we flagged the driver down and climbed aboard. And you won't believe what we found?"

The lover knew better than to take a guess.

"We found that one surrounded by a crowd like Jesus and the elders."

"Really?" The lover smiled, admiring the daughter from a distance. Yolanda was one of the more popular instructors at the college where he chaired the Comp Lit Department.

"She hadn't even realized we were gone. She had a circle of people around her, listening to her reciting a poem! As a matter of fact, it was a poem I'd taught her. Maybe you've heard of it? It's by that guy who wrote that poem about the blackbird."

"Stevens?" the lover guessed.

SO

The mother cocked her head. "I'm not sure.

Anyhow," she

continued, "imagine! Three years old and already drawing

crowds. Of course, she became a poet." "You don't mean Poe, do you? Edgar Allan Poe?"

"Yes, that's him! That's him!" the mother cried out.

"The

poem was about a princess who lived by the sea or something.

Let's see." She began to recite: Many many years ago, something... something, In a ... something by the sea...

A princess there lived whom you may remember By the name of Annabel Lee...

The mother looked up and realized that the hushed audience was staring at her. She blushed. The lover chuckled and squeezed her arm. At the podium, the poet had been introduced and was waiting for the white-haired woman hi the first row to finish talking.

"For Clive," Yolanda said, introducing her first poem, was "Bedroom Sestina."" Clive smiled sheepishly at the mother, who smiled proudly at her daughter.

The mother does not tell a favorite story about Sandra anymore. She says she would like to forget the past, but it is really only a small part of the recent past she would like to forget. However, the mother knows people listen to absolute statements, so she says in a tired voice, "I want to forget the past."

The last story the mother told about her second oldest was not in celebration but in explanation to Dr.

Tandlemann, senior staff psychiatrist at Mount Hope. The mother explained why she and her husband were committing their daughter to a private mental hospital.

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

"It started with that crazy diet," the mother began. She folded and refolded her Kleenex into smaller and smaller squares. Dr. Tandlemann watched her and took notes. The father sat by the window quietly and followed the movements of a gardener, who was mowing first one, then another, darkening swath across the lawn.

"Can you imagine starving herself to death?" The mother pinched little bits off her Kleenex. "No wonder she went

crazy."

"She's had a breakdown." Dr. Tandlemann looked at the father. "Your daughter is not clinically crazy."

"What does that mean, clinically crazy?" The mother scowled. "I don't understand all that psychology talk."

"It means that," Dr. Tandlemann began, looking down at his folder to check the name, "it means that Sandra is not psychotic or schizophrenic, she's just had a small breakdown."

"A small breakdown," the father murmured to himself.

In the middle of a row, the gardener stopped, machine roaring. He spat and shrugged his shoulder across his lips, wiping his mouth, then he continued his progress across the lawn. Grass bits spewed into a white sack ballooning behind the motor. The father felt he should say something pleasant. "Nice place you got here, beautiful grounds."

"Ay,

Lolo," the mother said sadly. She made a fist of what was left of her Kleenex.

Dr. Tandlemann waited for a moment in case the husband wanted to respond to his wife. Then he asked the mother, "You say it started with that diet she went on?"

"It started with that crazy diet," the mother said again as if she had just found her place in a book she had been reading. "Sandi wanted to look like those twiggy models. She was a

looker, that one, and I guess it went to her head.

There are four girls, you know."

Dr. Tandlemann wrote down

four girls

although the father had already told him this when he asked,

"No sons?" Out loud, he noted, noncommittally, "Four girls."

The mother hesitated, then glanced over at her husband as if unsure how much they should disclose to this stranger. "We've had trouble with all of them-was She rolled her eyes to indicate the kind of trouble she meant.

"You mean other daughters have also had breakdowns?"

"Bad men is what they've had!" The mother scowled at the doctor as if he were one of her ex sons-in-law. "Anyhow, that makes sense, heartbreak, breakdown. This is different, this is crazy." The doctor's hand lifted in protest.

But the mother ignored the gesture and went on with her story.

"The others aren't bad looking, don't get me wrong. But Sandi, Sandi got the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!" The mother spread her arms in all directions to show how pretty and pale and blue-eyed the girl was. Bits of her Kleenex fell to the floor, and she picked off the specks from the carpet.

"My great-grandfather married a Swedish girl, you know? So the family has light-colored blood, and that Sandi got it all. But imagine, spirit of contradiction, she wanted to be darker complected like her sisters."

"That's understandable," Dr. Tandlemann said.

"It's crazy, that's what it is," the mother said angrily. "Anyhow, this diet took over.

When her sister got married, Sandi wouldn't even taste the wedding cake, taste!"

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandia, Sofia

"Did they get along?" Dr. Tandlemann glanced up

right-brace

his hand had a life of its own and kept writing.

"Who?" The mother blinked in disapproval. The man asked too many questions.

"The siblings," Dr. Tandlemann said. "Were they close? Was there a lot of rivalry between them?"

"Siblings?" The mother frowned at all this crazy psychology talk. "They're sisters," she said by way of explanation.

"Sometimes they fought," the father added. Although he was looking out the window, he did not miss a word the doctor and his wife were saying.

"Sometimes they fought," the mother raced on. She wanted to get to the end of this story. "So Sandi kept losing weight. At first, she looked good. She had let herself get a little plump, and with her fine bones Sandi can't carry extra weight. So losing a few pounds was okay. Then, she went away to a graduate program, so we didn't see her for awhile. Every time we talked to her over the phone, her voice seemed further and further away. And it wasn't because it was long distance either. I can't explain it," the mother said. "A mother just knows.

"So one day we get this call. The dean. She says she doesn't want to alarm us, but could we come down immediately. Our daughter is in the hospital, too weak to do anything. All she does is read."

The father was timing the gardener's treks across the rolling lawns. When the man did not stop to spit or wipe his forehead, each row took him approximately two minutes.

The mother tried to open the Kleenex in her lap, but it was too ragged to spread out. "We took the next plane, and when

we got there, I didn't recognize my own daughter." The mother held up her little finger. "Sandi was a toothpick. And that's not the least of it, she wouldn't put a book down, read, read, read.

That's all she did."

At the window the father's view of the lawn was blurring.

The mother looked over at her husband and wondered what he was thinking about. "She had lists and lists of books to read. We found them in her journal. After she finished one, she crossed it off the list. Finally, she told us why she couldn't stop reading. She didn't have much time left. She had to read all the great works of man because soon"-the mother got up her courage to say it-"soon she wouldn't be human."

In the ensuing silence the mother heard the drone of a distant lawnmower.

"She told us that she was being turned out of the human race. She was becoming a monkey." The mother's voice broke. "A monkey, my baby!

"Already the other organs inside her body were a monkey's. Only her brain was left, and she could feel it going."

Dr. Tandlemann stopped writing. He weighed his pen in his hand. "I understood you committed her only because of the weight loss. This is news to me."

"Small breakdown," the father murmured quietly so Dr. Tandlemann wouldn't hear him.

The mother was in control of her voice again. "If she read all the great books, maybe she'd remember something important from having been human. So she read and read. But she was afraid she'd go before she got to some of the big thinkers."

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

"Freud," the doctor said, listing names on his pad. "Darwin, Nietsche, Erikson."

"Dante," the father mused. "Homer, Cervantes, Calder6n de la Barca."

"I told her to stop reading and start eating. I told her those books were driving her crazy. I made her everything she liked: rice and beans, lasagna, chicken and la king. I made her favorite red snapper with tomato sauce. She said she didn't want to eat animals. In her own time, she said, she would be that chicken. She would be that red snapper. Evolution had reached its peak and was going backwards. Something like that." The mother waved the very idea away. "It was crazy talk, I tell you.

"One morning, I go in her room to wake her up, and I find her lying in bed and looking up at her hands." The mother held up her hands and re-enacted the scene. "I call her name, Sandi!, and she keeps turning her hands, this way, that, and staring at them. I scream at her to answer me, and she doesn't even look at me. Nothing. And she's making these awful sounds like she's a zoo." The mother clucked and grunted to show the doctor what the animals had sounded like.

Suddenly, the father leaned forward. He had caught sight of something important.

"And my Sandi holds up her hands to me," the mother continued. She turned her hands towards Dr.

Tandlemann and then towards her husband, whose face was pressed up to the window. "And she screams, Monkey hands, monkey hands."

The father shot up from his chair. Outside, a fair, willowy girl and a heavy-set woman in white were walking across the

lawn. The woman was pointing out the flowers and the leaves of the bushes in order to cajole the girl forward towards the building. At one end of the lawn, the gardener wiped his forehead, turned the mower around and began a new row. A dark wake spread behind him.

The girl looked up, wildly searching the empty sky for the airplane she was hearing. The nurse followed her distracted movements with alarm. Finally, the girl saw a man coming at her with a roaring animal on a leash, its baglike stomach swelling up as it devoured the grasses between them. The girl screamed and broke into a panicked run towards the building where her father, whom she could not see, stood at the window, waving.

At the hospital, the mother leans on the glass with one hand and taps with the other. She makes a monkey face. The cradle has been turned towards her, but the tiny, wrinkled baby is not looking at the grandmother. Instead the baby's eyes roll about as if she hasn't quite figured out how to work them yet. Her lips pucker and stretch, pucker and stretch. The grandmother is sure the baby is smiling at her.

"Look at that," the grandmother says to the young man at her side, who is looking at the baby in the neighboring cradle.

The young man looks at the stranger's baby.

"She's smiling already," the grandmother brags.

The young man nods and smiles.

"Yours is asleepst" the grandmother says in a slightly critical voice.

"Babies sleep a lot," the young man explains.