How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (8 page)

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

"Some do," the grandmother says. "I had four girls, and they never slept."

"Four girls, no boys?"

The mother shakes her head. "I guess it's in the blood. This one is a girl too. Aren't you, Cuquita?" the grandmother asks her granddaughter.

The young man smiles at his daughter. "Mine is a girl too."

The grandmother congratulates him. "Good bulls sire cows, you know."

"Huh?"

"It's a saying my husband used to tell me after I had one of the girls.

Good bulls sire cows.

I remember the night Fifi was bom." The grandmother looks down at her granddaughter and explains,

"Your mother."

The young man studies his baby daughter as he listens to the old woman's story.

"That girl gave me more trouble getting born than any of the others. And the funny thing was she was the last and smallest of the four. Twenty-four hours in labor." The grandmother's eyebrows lift for punctuation.

The young man whistles. "Twenty-four hours is a long labor for a small fourth child. Any complications?"

The mother studies the young man a moment. Is he a doctor, she wonders, to know so much about babies?

"Twenty-four hours..." The young man is shaking his head, musing. "Ours lasted only three and a half."

The grandmother stares up at the young man.

Ours!

Men! Now they're going to claim having the babies too.

"But I'll tell you, that Fifi, we didn't name her wrong! Sofia, that's her real name. My daughter, the poet, says Sofia was the goddess in charge of wisdom long ago. We Catholics don't believe in that stuff. But still, she's the smart one, all right. And I don't mean books either! I mean smart." The grandmother taps her temple, and then repeats the gesture on the glass. "Smart, smart," the grandmother tells the baby. She shakes her head, musing to herself. "That Fifi, she might look like she's headed for trouble, but it always turns out to be her luck.

"That night she was finally born, her father came in, and I knew he was a little disappointed, especially after such a long wait. And I said, I can't help it, Lolo, they come out girls, and all he said was,

Good bulls sire cows,

like it was a credit to him. He was almost falling over with exhaustion. So I sent

him

home to bed."

The young man yawns and laughs.

"He was so dead tired, he didn't hear the burglars when they broke in. They stole us blind.

They even stole my shoes and my under-was The grandmother remembers it is indelicate to say so. "Every last article of clothing," she adds coyly.

The young man pretends to be alarmed.

"But this is what I mean about luck-they caught the burglars, and we got every last stitch back." The grandmother taps the glass. "Cuquita," she coos at the baby.

"Lucky," she says to the young man. "That Fifi has always been the lucky one. Not to mention her luck with"-the grandmother lowers her voice-"with Otto."

The young man looks over his shoulder. Otto?

Who would name a poor kid Otto?

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandia, Sofia

"Imagine," the grandmother continues. "Fifi drops out of college and goes off on a church trip to Peru, chaperoned, of course, otherwise we wouldn't have let her go. We don't believe in all this freedom." The grandmother frowns as she looks out over the nursery. Beyond the glass, between the slender white bars of their cribs, half a dozen babies are fast asleep.

"Anyhow she meets this German man Otto in a Peruvian market, who can't speak a word of Spanish but is trying to buy a poncho. She bargains for him, and he gets his poncho for practically nothing. Well, just like that, they fell for each other, corresponded, and here they are, parents!

Tell me that isn't lucky?"

"That's lucky," the young man says.

"And you're going to be a lucky one too, aren't you?" The grandmother clucks at her granddaughter, then confides to the young man, "She's going to look just like an angel, pink and blond."

"You never can tell when they're this young," the father says, smiling at his daughter.

"I

can," the grandmother claims. "I had four of them."

"Mami picks up like these really gorgeous men,"

Sandi laughs. She is sitting cross-legged on Fifi's living room floor. The new mother sits in Otto's recliner, the baby asleep on her shoulder. Carla is sprawled on the sofa.

At her feet, Yolanda is knitting furiously at a tiny blanket, pink and baby blue and pastel yellow squares with a white border. It is early morning. The family has gathered at Fifi's house for Christinas, which falls a week after the baby's birth. Husbands and grandparents are still asleep in the bedrooms. The four girls lounge in their nightgowns and tell each other the true story of how their lives are going.

Sandi explains that she and the mother were in the waiting room, and the mother disappeared. "I find her at the nursery window talking to this piece of beefcake-was

"That's offensive," Yolanda says. "Just call him a man."

"Lay off me, will you?" Sandi is close to tears. Since her release from Mt. Hope a month ago, she cries so easily she has to carry Kleenex with her anti-depressants in her purse. She , looks around the room for her bag.

"Miz Poet is so goddamn sensitive to language."

"I don't write poetry anymore,"

Yolanda says in a wounded voice.

"Goddamn it, you guys," Carla says, refereeing this one. "It's Christmas."

The new mother turns to the second oldest sister and runs her fingers through her hair. This is the first time the family has gathered together in a year, and she wants them all to get along. She changes the subject.

"That was really nice of you to come see me at the hospital. I know how you just love hospitals,"

she adds.

Sandi looks down at the rug and picks at it.

"I just want to forget the past, you know?"

"That's understandable," Carla says.

Vblanda lays aside the baby blanket. She has the same scowl on her face her sister wore a moment ago, a family sign of approaching tears. "I'm sorry," she says to Sandi. "It's been the worst week."

Cada, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

Sandi touches her hand. She looks at her other sisters. Clive, they all know, has gone back to his wife again. "He's such a turd. How many times has he done this now, Yo?"

"Yolanda," Carla corrects her. "She wants to be called Yolandanow."

"What do you mean,

wants to be called Yolanda now right-brace That's my name, you know?"

"Why are you so angry?" Carla's calmness is professional.

Yolanda rolls her eyes. "Spare me the nickel and dime therapy, thank you."

Trouble brewing again, Fifi changes the subject. She touches the evolving blanket.

"It's really beautiful. And the poem you wrote the baby made me cry."

"So you

are

writing!" Carla says. "I know, I know, you don't want to hear about it." Carla makes a peace offering of compliments. "You're so good, Yolanda, really. I've saved all your poems.

Every time I read something in a magazine, I think, God, Yo's so much better than this! Give yourself credit. You're so hard on yourself."

Yolanda keeps her mouth shut. She is working on a thought about her bossy older sister: Carla has a tendency to lace all her compliments with calls to self-improvement.

Give yourself credit, Believe in yourself, Be good to yourself.

Somehow this makes her praise sound like their mother's old "constructive" criticism.

Carla turns to Sandi. "Mami says you're seeing someone." The eldest weighs her words carefully. "Is it true?"

"What of it?" Sandi looks up defensively, and then, realizing her sister means a man, not a therapist, she adds, "He's a nice guy, but, I don't know-was She shrugs. "He was in at the same time I was."

What was

he

in for? hangs in the air-a question that none of her sisters would dare ask.

"So, tell us about this cute guy at the nursery," Fifi pleads. Each time her sisters seem on the verge of loaded talk, the new mother changes the subject to her favorite topic, her newborn daughter. Every little detail of the baby's being-what she eats, what she poops-seems an evolutionary leap. Surely, not all newboms smile at their mothers? "You met this guy at the nursery?"

"Me?" Sandi laughs. "You mean Mami. She picks this guy up and invites him for lunch at the hospital coffee shop."

"Mami is so fresh," Yolanda says.

She notices she has made a mistake and begins unraveling a lopsided yellow row.

Fifi pats her baby's back. "And she complains about us!"

"So we all have lunch together," Sandi continues,

"and Mami can't shut up about how God brought you and Otto together from opposite ends of the earth in Peru."

"God?" Carla screws up her face.

"Peru?" Fifi's face mirrors her sister's scowl. "I've never been to Peru. We met in Colombia."

"In Mami's version of the story, you met in Peru," Sandi says. "And you fell in love at first sight."

"And made love the first night," Carla teases.

The four girls laugh. "Except that part isn't in Mami's version."

"I've heard so many versions of that story," Sandi says, "I don't know which one is true anymore."

"Neither do I," Fifi says, laughing. "Otto says we probably

Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

met in a New Jersey Greyhound

Station, but we've heard all these exciting stories about how we met in Brazil or Colombia or Peru that we got to believing them."

"So was it the first night?" Yolanda asks, her needles poised midair.

"I heard the first night," Carla says.

Sandi narrows her eyes. "I heard it was a week or so after you guys met."

The baby burps. The four girls look at each other and laugh. "Actually"-Fifi calculates by lifting her fingers one by one from the baby's back, then patting them down-"it was the fourth night. But I knew the minute I saw him."

"That you loved him?" Yolanda asks. Fifi nods. Since Clive left, Yolanda is addicted to love stories with happy endings, as if there were a stitch she missed, a mistake she made way back when she fell in love with her first man, and if only she could find it, maybe she could undo it, unravel John, Brad, Steven, Rudy, and start over.

In the pause before someone picks up the thread of conversation, they all listen to the baby's soft breathing.

"Anyhow, Mami tells this guy about your long correspondence." Sandi helps Yolanda wind the unraveled yam into a ball, stopping now and then to enjoy her story of the mother.

"For months and months after they met in Pew, they were separated, months and months."

Sandi rolls her eyes like her mother. She is a remarkably good mimic. Her three sisters laugh.

"Otto was doing his research in Germany, but he wrote to her every day."

"Every day!" Fifi laughs. "I wish it had been every day. Sometimes I had to wait weeks between letters."

"But then," Yolanda says in the ominous voice of a radio melodrama, "then Papi found the letters."

"Mami didn't mention the letters," Sandi says.

"The story was short and sweet: He wrote to her every day. Then she went

to see him last Christmas, then be proposed, and they married this spring, and here they are, parents!"

"One, two, three, four," Carla says, beginning a countdown.

Fifi grins. "Stop it," she says. "The baby was born exactly nine months and ten days after the wedding."

"Thank God for the ten days," Carla says.

"I like Mami's version of the story," Fifi laughs. "So she didn't bring up the letters?"

Sandi shakes her head. "Maybe she forgot. You know how she keeps saying she wants to forget the past."

"Mami remembers everything," Carla disagrees.

"Well, Papi had no business going through my personal mail." Fifi's voice grows testy.

The baby stirs on her shoulder. "He claims he was looking for his nailclippers, or something. In my drawers, right?"

Yolanda mimics their father opening an envelope.

Her eyes widen in burlesque horror. She clutches her throat. She even puts on a Count Dracula accent to make the moment more dramatic.

She is not a good mimic.

"What does this man mean, 'Have you gotten your period yett""

Sandi choruses:

"What business is it of Otto's if you've gotten your period or not"

The baby begins to cry. "Oh honey, it's just a story." Fifi rocks her.

"We disown you!"

Sandi mimics their father. "You have dis-Carlo, Yolaada, Sandza, Sofia

graced the family name. Out of this house!"

"Out of ouz sight!"

Yolanda points to the door. Sandi ducks the flailing needles. A ball of white yam rolls across the floor. The two sisters bend over, trying to contain their hilarity.

"You guys are really getting into this." Fifi stands to walk her wailing baby to sleep. "Nothing like a story to take the sting out of things," she adds cooly.

"It's not like things are any better between us, you know."

Her three sisters lift their eyebrows at each other. Their father has not uttered a word since he arrived two days ago. He still has not forgiven Fifi for "going behind the palm trees." When they were younger, the sisters used to joke that they would likelier be virgins than find a palm tree in their neck of the woods.

"It's hard, I know." As the therapist in the family, Carla likes to be the one who understands.

"But really, give yourself credit. You've won them over, Fifi, you have. Mami's eating out of your hand with this baby, and Papi's going to come around in time, you'll see. Look, he came, didn't he?"

"You mean, Mami dragged him here." Fifi looks down fondly at her baby and recovers her good mood. "Well, the baby is beautiful and well, and that's what counts."

Beautiful and well, Yolanda muses, that's what she had wanted with Clive, all things beautiful and well, instead of their obsessive, consuming passion that left her-each time Clive left her-exhausted and distraught. "I don't understand why he does it,"