How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (13 page)

Could he come over to see me? Sure, I said.

When? Tonight, he said. Tonight was already about nine-thirty.

Up to his same old tricks. But I was taken with the guy's persistence. Sure, I said, come on over.

He came on over. Brought an expensive bottle of wine. At

the door, I gave him a friendly hug, but he held on for longer. I got nervous and gabby. His bad boy always drove me to my vivacious good girl.

I sat him down in my one chair and started to quiz him on his five years since graduation. He sighed a lot, stretched his legs, cracked his knuckles.

Finally, he cut me off, said, Hey, Jesus Christ, I've waited five years, and you look like you've gotten past all your hang-ups.

Let's just fuck. I threw him out. It still offended me that he didn't want to do anything but screw me, get that over with. Catholic or not, I still thought it a sin for a guy to just barge in five years later with a bottle of expensive wine and assume you'd drink out of his hand. A guy who had ditched me, who had haunted my sexual awakening with a nightmare of self-doubt. For a moment as I watched him get in his car and drive away, I felt a flash of that old self-doubt.

On the counter, he had left behind the bottle of wine. I had one of those unserious, cheap, grad school corkscrews. Those days we bought gallon jugs of Gallo with pull-out corks or screwed-on lids. I worked the corkscrew in as far as it would go. I wasn't very good at this. Each time I yanked the screw out, I got a spurt of cork, but the stiKnowledge remained snug in the bottleneck. Finally, I worked it in so I could see the sharp point of the spiral through the glass neck at the bottom of the cork. I put the bottle between my legs and pulled so hard that not only did I jerk the crumbled cork out but I sprayed myself with expensive Bordeaux. "Shit," I thought, "this is not going to wash out." I held the bottle up to my mouth and drew a long messy swallow, as if I were some decadent wild woman who had just dismissed an unsatisfactory lover.

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II

A Regular Revolution

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Carlo, Sandi, Yoyo, Fifi

F

or three-going-on-four years Mami and Papi were on green cards, and the four of us shifted from foot to foot, waiting to go home. Then Papi went down for a trial visit, and a revolution broke out, a minor one, but still.

He came back to New York reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and saying, "I am given up, Mami! It is no hope for the Island. I will become

un dominican-york."

So, Papi raised his right hand and swore to defend the Constitution of the United States, and we were here to stay.

You can believe we sisters wailed and paled, whining to go home. We didn't feel we had the best the United States had to offer. We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavy lines. Cooped up in those little suburban houses, the rules were as strict as for Island girls, but there was no island to make up the difference.

Then a few weird things happened. Carla met a pervert. At school, epithets ("spic,"

"greaseballs") were hurled our way.

Some girlfriend of Sandi's got her to try a Tampax, and Mami found out. Stuff like that, and soon she was writing away to preparatory schools (all-girls ones) where we would meet and mix with the

"right kind" of Americans.

We ended up at school with the cream of the American crop, the Hoover girl and the Hanes twins and the Scott girls and the Reese kid who got incredible care packages once a week. You wouldn't be as gauche as to ask, "Hey, are you related to the guy who makes vacuum cleaners?"

(you could see all those attachments just by the way Madeline Hoover turned her nose up at you.) Anyhow, we met the right kind of Americans all right, but they didn't exactly mix with us.

We had our own kind of fame, based mostly on the rich girls' supposition and our own silence.

Garcia de la Torre didn't mean a thing to them, but those brand-named beauties simply assumed that, like all third world foreign students in boarding schools, we were filthy rich and related to some dictator or other. Our privilege smacked of evil and mystery whereas theirs came in recognizable panty hose packages and candy wrappers and vacuum cleaner bags and Kleenex boxes.

But hey, we might be fish out of water, but at least we had escaped the horns of our dilemma to a silver lining, as Mami might say. It was a long train ride up to our prep school in Boston, and there

were

guys on that train. We learned to forge Mami's signature and went just about everywhere, to dance weekends and football weekends and snow sculpture weekends. We could kiss and not get pregnant.

We could smoke and no great aunt would smell us and croak. We began to develop a taste for the American teenage good life, and soon, Island was old hat, man. Island was the haix-and-nails crowd, chaperones, and icky boys with all their macho strutting and unbuttoned shirts and hairy chests with gold chains and teensy gold crucifixes. By the end of a couple of years away from home, we had

more

than adjusted.

And of course, as soon as we had, Mami and Papi got all worried they were going to lose their girls to America. Things had calmed down on the Island and Papi had started making real money in his office up in the Bronx. The next decision was obvious: we four girls would be sent summers to the Island so we wouldn't lose touch with

la familia.

The hidden agenda was marriage to homeland boys, since everyone knew that once a girl married an American, those grandbabies came out jabbering in English and thinking of the Island as a place to go get a suntan.

The summer plan met with annual resistance from all four of us. We didn't mind a couple of weeks, but a

whole

summer? "Have you got anything better to do?" Mami questioned. Like yes, like

yes

we did, if she and Papi would only let us do it.

But working was off-limits. (a boss hiring a young girl was after one thing only. Never mind if his name was Hoover.) Summer time was family time. Big time family time, a whole island of family, here a cousin, there a cousin, everywhere we turned a kissing cousin was puckering up at us.

Winters whenever one of us got out of line, Mami and Papi would march out the old "Maybe what you need right now

is some time back home to help set you straight."

We'd shape up pretty quick, or pretend to.

Sometimes the parents upped the ante. It wouldn't be just the bad daughter who'd be shipped back, but all four girls.

By "the time the three oldest were in college-we all started

no

out at the same all-girls one, of course-we had devised as sophisticated and complicated a code and underground system as Papi had when he and his group plotted against the dictator. The parents"

habit was to call us on Friday or Saturday nights around ten right before the switchboard closed.

We took turns "on duty" to catch those calls.

But Mami and Papi were like

psychic.

They

always

directed the first call to the missing daughter, and when she wasn't in, they'd asked to talk to another missing daughter. The third, on-duty daughter would get the third call, in which the first question would be, "Where are your sisters?" At the library studying or in so-and-so's room getting tutored on her calculus. We kept most things from the old people, but sometimes they caught on and then we rotated the hot seat.

Fifi was on for smoking in the bathroom. (she always ran the shower, as if smoking were a noisy activity whose hullabaloo she had to drown out.) Carla was on for experimenting with hair removal cream. (mami threw a fit, saying that once you got started on that road, there was no stopping-the hairs would grow back thicker, uglier each time.

She made it sound like drinking or drugs.) Yoyo was on for bringing a book into the house, Our Bodies,

Our

Selves.

(mami couldn't quite put her finger on what it was that bothered her about the book. I mean, there were no men in it. The pictures all celebrated women and their bodies, so it wasn't technically about sex as she had understood it up to then. But there were women exploring

"what their bodies were all about" and a whole chapter on lesbians. Things, Mami said, examining the pictures, to be ashamed of.)

in

Sandi was on when a visiting aunt and uncle dropped in for a visit at college early Sunday morning. (she wasn't back yet from her Saturday night calculus tutorial.) It was a regular revolution: constant skirmishes. Until the time we took open aim and won, and our summers-if not our lives-became our own.

That last summer we were shipped home began like all the others. The night before the trip, we sisters stayed up late packing and gabbing. Sandi called her boyfriend long distance and, with her back turned to us, whispered things like "Me too." We got pretty punchy, imitating aunts and uncles and cousins we would be seeing the next day. Maybe it was a way of getting even with people who would have power over us all summer. We played with their names, translating them into literal English so they sounded ridiculous.

Tia Concha became Aunt Conchshell, and Tia Asunci6n, Aunt Ascension; Tio Mundo was Uncle World; Paloma, our model cousin, turned into Pigeon, and for spite we surnamed her, accurately, Toed.

Around midnight, Mami came fussing down the hall to our bedrooms in those fuzzy slippers of hers with the bobby-socks and a roller cap on her head. "That's enough, girls," she said. "You have all morning tomorrow. You need your beauty dreams."

We turned our faces glum to reaffirm the forced nature of this trip.

And she gave us the little pep talk on family and how important roots were. Finally she went back to bed, and to sleep,

or so we thought. We turned the volume down but stayed up talking.

Fifi held up a Baggy with dregs of greenish brown weed inside. "Okay, vote time,"

she said. "Do I or don't I take it."

"Don't do it," Carla said. Her nightwear was the antithesis of Mami's: in fact, Carla looked almost dressed up in her prim cotton nightgown. A yellow ribbon held her hair back from her face. "If we're caught at Customs-we're in a shitload of trouble. And remember, now that Uncle World's in government, it would be all over the newspapers."

"Carla, you're such a prissst" Sandi taunted her. "For one thing, now that Tio is a V.i.p., we won't have to go through Customs. Security will whisk us off, the Misses Garcias de la Torres." She waved her hand with a flourish as if she were introducing us to King Arthur's court.

"You could try the Kotex trick," Yoyo suggested,

thinking

it would be nice to have a little pot to smoke when things on the Island got dull. Pile a layer of Kotex above whatever you were trying to hide, the Island cousins once advised her, and the officers would shy from probing.

"Who uses Kotex anymore?" Fifi asked.

"Would Tampax work?"

"Those guys probably wouldn't know what it was." Sandi slid one out of the box she was taking.

She pantomined an investigation, ripping off the paper envelope and trying to bite off the end like our uncles did their cigars.

We burst out in the loud laughter we'd kept at bay since Mami exited. Soon enough, there were footsteps down the hall. Just before the door swung open, Fifi, who was still holding the Baggy of grass, tossed it behind a bookcase, where it lay forgotten in the haste of our final packing next morning before our noon plane.

Not three weeks on the Island had gone by when Mami called. Tf a Carmen came padding out to the pool to tell us our mother was on her way from New York and that she intended to have a long

talk with us. Tia admitted that yes, something was amiss, but she had promised our mother not to say what.

Tia was superreligious, and we knew we wouldn't get it out of her if she'd given her word. By way of consolation, she counseled us to "examine your consciences."

We reviewed our recent sins with our girl cousins until late that night.

"All I can think of," Yoyo offered,

"was they opened our mail."

"Or maybe our grades came?" Fifi suggested.

"Or the phone bill," Sandi added. Her boyfriend lived in Palo Alto.

"I think it's really unfair to leave us hanging." Carla's head was fretted with clips and bobbypins as if she were wired up for an experiment.

Her hair turned frizzy on the Island, and every night she ironed it, then rolled it in a "tubie,"

using her head as large roller.

"Examine your consciences," Sandi said in a boogeyman voice.

"I have, I have," Fifi joked, "and the problem isn't I can't find anything to worry about but that I find so much." We spent the rest of the evening confessing to our giggly, over-chaperoned

girl cousins the naughtinesses we had committed up in the home of the brave and the land of the free.

That almost-empty Baggy of grass behind the bureau never crossed our minds. Mami had a maid from the Island who lived with us in the States. She, Primitiva, had found the stash. Primi herself used Baggies in her practice of layman's sante-ria,

concocting powders and potions to make this ache or that rival woman go away. But why the girls would have a Baggy of oregano in their room was un misterio

she deferred to her mistress to solve.

As we later reconstructed it from what Primi said, Mami's first reaction was anger that we had broken her rule against eating in our bedrooms.

(oregano qualified as food?) But when she opened the Baggy and took a sniff and poked her finger in and tasted a pinch and had Primitiva do the same, they were flabbergasted. The dreaded and illegal marijuana that was lately so much in the news! Mami was sure of it. And here she'd been, worried sick about protecting our virginity since we'd hit puberty in this land of wild and loose Americans, and vice had entered through an unguarded orifice at the other end.