How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (14 page)

Immediately, she contacted Tf o Pedro, a psychiatrist "uncle by affection" with a practice in Jackson Heights. Tio Pedro was always consulted when one or the other of us daughters got into trouble. He identified the oregano most surely as grass, and got Mami

free-associating about what else we might be up to. By the time she touched down on the Island forty-eight hours after finding the Baggy, we were all addicts, fallen women with married lovers and illegitimate babies on the way. One teensy Yoyo,

Fifi

hope she held on to was that a workman or a house guest had left the pot there. She had come to find out the truth, shielding Papi from the news and the heart attack he would surely die of if he knew.

Since we were caught by surprise, we didn't have a plan. At first, Carla made a vague attempt to discredit Tio Pedro by revealing how he always ended our sessions with long hugs and a pat on the butt. "He's a lech," she accused. "And besides, what does Saint Peter know of grass?"

"Grass?" Mami scowled. "This is marijuana."

Carla held her tongue.

Before we could come up with a better approach, Fifi surprised us by admitting that the Baggy was hers. Instantly, we all rallied to her guilty side. "It's mine too," Yoyo claimed. "And mine," Carla and Sandi chimed in.

Mami's eyes shifted from one to the other, each cry of

Mine!

confirming another bad daughter. She wore her tragic look of the Madonna with delinquent children.

"All of you?" she asked in a low, shocked voice.

Fifi stepped forward. "I tell you it was me who put it there, I did it, and they"-she pointed to us-"they had nothing to do with it."

Technically, she was right. It was her Baggy. The rest of us had had dope only when our boyfriends rolled a joint or when, in a party of friends, a cigarette made its rounds, everyone drawing a toke. Still, there was something untoward about Fifi taking all the blame since our habit had been to share the good

and

the bad that came our way. She gave Mami an impassioned apology and argument-her sisters should not be punished along with her. Oddly enough, Mami consented. She asked us, though, not to tell Papi unless we wanted wholesale Island confinement.

It's possible that Mami had her own little revolution brewing, and she didn't want to blow the whistle on her girls and thus call attention to herself.

Recently, she had begun spreading her wings, taking adult courses in real estate and international economics and business management, dreaming of a bigger-than-family-size life for herself. She still did lip service to the old ways, while herself nibbling away at forbidden fruit.

Anyhow, she agreed that the three oldest of us could go back to our school at the end of the summer. Fifl was given the choice of either staying on the Island for a year at Tia Carmen's or going back to the States, but not to her boarding school. She would have to live at home with Mami and Papi and attend the local Catholic school.

Fifl opted to stay. Better one of a dozen chaperoned cousins, she figured, than home alone with Mami and Papi breathing down her neck and Peter Pan with his hand on her ass. "Besides, I wanna try it out here. Maybe I'll like it,"

Fifi said, defending her choice to us. As the youngest of the four, she had had the least chance to bond to the Island before our abrupt exile almost a decade before. "And besides, the States aren't making me happy."

"You're in the middle of your adolescence, for God's sake!" Carla had decided to major in psych and had been giving all of us frequent free analysis. "You're supposed to be unhappy and confused. It means you're normal, well adjusted. This is just going to make it worse, I guarantee it!"

"Maybe it won't, maybe I'll surprise you," said Fifi.

Yoyo,

Fifi

"You'll be climbing these walls before the year is out,"

Carla warned.

We looked beyond the pool at the high stone wall.

Down a ways one of the maids had draped her underclothes on the wall. In the cup of a brassiere, his little head hardly visible, a lizard was blowing out his throat as if he had just taken a toke and were holding it in until the small dazed cells of his brain zinged a hit.

By Christmas, we are wild for news of Fifl's exile. From Mami we hear that our sister is beautifully acclimated to life on the Island and taking classes in shorthand and typing at the Ford Foundation trade school. She's also seeing someone nice.

This, of course, is dangerous for the rest of us. With one successfully repatriated daughter, Papi might yank us all out of college and send us back. Not to mention that it's out and out creepy that Fifi, the maverick, is so changed. Carla, in fact, says it's a borderline schizoid response to traumatic cultural displacement.

The minute we step off the plane, we see Mami has not exaggerated. Fifi, there to meet us at the airport, is a jangle of bangles and a cascade of beauty parlor curls held back on one side very smartly by a big gold barrette.

She has darkened her lashes with black mascara so that her eyes stand out as if she were slightly startled at her good luck. Fifi-who used to wear her hair in her trademark, two Indian braids that she pinned up in the heat like an Austrian milkmaid.

Fifi-who always made a point of not wearing makeup or fixing herself up. Now she looks like the after

person in one of those

before-after

make-overs.in magazines.

"Elegante,"

Mami has said of Fifi's new

style, but on our lips are other epithets. "She's turned into a S.a.p.," Yoyo

mutters. A Spanish-American princess.

"My God, Fifl," we say in greeting, looking her over.

"Where's the party?" Sandi teases.

"If you can't say something nice-was Fifi begins, defensively. Her little patent leather pocketbook plaintively matches her pumps.

"Hey, hey!" We give her one of our huddle hugs. "Don't lose your sense of humor on us, come on! You look great!"

"Don't muss my hair," Fifl fusses, patting it down as if it were a hat. But she smiles. "Guess what, you guys?" She looks from one to the other of us.

"You're seeing someone nice," we chorus.

Fifi is taken aback, then laughs. "Ye Olde Grapevine, huh?" We nod. She goes on to explain that her someone nice is a cousin, Manuel Gustavo. "A

nice

cousin," she is quick to add.

"A cousin?" We know most of our cousins, and Manuel Gustavo is a new one on us.

"A closet cousin," Fifi says, searching her purse for a photo. "One of the illegitimates."

Right on! We sisters give each other the V for victory sign. It's still a guerrilla revolution after all! We were afraid that Fifi was caving in to family pressure and regressing into some nice third-world girl. But no way. She's still Ye Olde Fifi.

Fifi tells us the full story of Manuel Gustavo. His father is our father's brother, Tio Orlando, who has a half dozen children from una mujer del campo,

a woman from the countryside around one of his ranches.

Of course, Tia Fidelina, our uncle's wife, who is sweet and dedicated to La Viigen,

"knows noth-

Sandi, Yoyo, Fift

ing" about Tio Orlando's infidelities. But now that Manuel Gustavo is at the manger door, so to speak, his father has to come up with some explanation just short of immaculate conception. Who is this young man who is seeing her niece? Tfa Fidelina wants to know. Where does he come from? What's his family name? Another uncle, Ignacio, offers to take Manuel Gustavo on as his own illegitimate son. He's never married and is always getting ragged about being homosexual. So two men are off the hook with one bastard. According to Fifi, the

alta sociedad,

the high-class ladies of the oligarchy who form a kind of club, not unlike a country club, are delighted by this juicy bit of gossip.

"They have nothing better to do," she concludes, drawing up her chin, above it all.

We take Manuel on as our own favorite cousin.

He looks like a handsome young double for Papi, and a lot like us, the family eyebrows, the same high cheekbones, the full, generous mouth. In short, he could be the brother we never had. When he roars into the compound in his pickup, all four of us run down the driveway to greet him with kisses and hugs.

"Girls," Tfa Carmen says, frowning, "that's no way to greet a man."

"Yeah, you guys," Fifi agrees. "Get off him, he's mine!"

We laugh, but we keep fussing over him, waiting on him as if we've never been to the States or read Simone de Beauvoir or

planned lives of our own.

But, as the days go by, Fifi grows withdrawn and watchful.

Daily, there are little standoffs and pouts and cold shoulders because one of us has put her arm around Manuel or has gotten involved in a too-lengthy conversation with him about the production of sugar cane.

To reassure her, we tone ourselves down and become more reserved with Manuel. From this new distance, we begin to get the long view, and it's not so pretty.

Lovable Manuel is quite the tyrant, a mini Papi and Mami rolled into one. Fifi can't wear pants in public. Fifi can't talk to another man. Fifi can't leave the house without his permission. And what's most disturbing is that Fifi, feisty, lively Fifi, is letting this man tell her what she can and cannot do.

One day Fifi, who rarely reads anymore, becomes absorbed in one of the novels we brought along, and not a trashy one for once. Manuel Gustavo arrives, and when no one answers the door, comes in the back way. In the patio, all four of us are draped over lawn chairs reading.

Fifi sees him and her face lights up.

She is about to put aside her book, when Manuel Gustavo reaches down and lifts it out of her hands.

"This," Manuel Gustavo says, holding the book up like a dirty diaper, "is junk in your head. You have better things to do." He tosses the book on the coffee table.

Fifi pales, though her two blushed-on cheeks blush on. She stands quickly, hands on her hips, eyes narrowing, the Fifi we know and love. "You have no right to tell me what I can and can't do!"

"iQue no!"

Manuel challenges.

"No! "Fifi asserts.

One by one we three sisters exit, cheering Fifi on under our

Yoyo,

Fifi

breaths. A few minutes later we hear the pickup roar down the driveway, and Fifi comes sobbing into the bedroom.

"Fifi, he asked for it," we say. "Don't let him push you around. You're a free spirit," we remind her.

But within the hour, Fifi is on the phone with Manuelito, pleading for forgiveness.

We nickname him M.g., a make of car we consider slightly sleazy, a car one of our older cousins might get his Papi to buy him to impress the Island girls. We rev up imaginary motors at the mention of his name. He's such a tyrant!

Rrrrmm. He's breaking Fifi's spirit!

Rrrrmm-rrrmm.

A few days after the book episode, Manuel Gustavo arrives for the noon meal, and since Fifi is still at her Spanish class, we decide to have a little talk with him.

Yoyo begins by asking him if he's ever heard of Mary Woll-stonecraft. How about Susan B.

Anthony? Or Virginia Woolf? "Friends of yours?" he asks.

For the benefit of an invisible sisterhood, since our aunts and girl cousins consider it very unfeminine for a woman to go around demonstrating for her rights, Yoyo sighs and all of us roll our eyes. We don't even try anymore to raise consciousness here. It'd be like trying for cathedral ceilings in a tunnel, or something. Once, we did take on Tia Flor, who indicated her large house, the well-kept grounds, the stone Cupid who had been re-routed so it was his mouth that spouted water.

"Look at me, I'm a queen," she argued.

"My husband has to go to work every day. I can sleep until noon, if I want. I'm going to protest for my

rights!"

Yoyo turns Manual's interview over to Carla, who's good at befriending with small talk.

Yoyo calls it her therapist

"softening-them-up-for-the-spill" mode. "Manuel, why do you feel so upset when Fifi is on her own?" Carla's manner is straight out of her Psych 101 textbook.

"Women don't do that here." Manuel Gustavo's foot, posed on his knee, shakes up and down. "Maybe you do things different in your United States of America." His tone is somewhere between a tease and a taunt. "But where does it get those grin-gas? Most of them divorce or stay jamona,

with nothing better to do than take drugs and sleep around."

Sandi revs, "Rrrmm, rrrmm."

"Manuel," Carla pleads. "Women do have rights here too, you know. Even Dominican law grants that."

"Yes, women have rights," Manuel Gustavo agrees. A wry smile spreads on his face: he is about to say something clever. "But men wear the pants."

The revolution is on. We have one week left to win the fight for our Fifi's heart and mind.

Nights on the Island we go out, the gang of cousins, to the Avenida. It's the main drag, happily crowded with cars and horse-drawn buggies for tourists who want to ride in moonlight by the seashore. Hotels and night spots flood the sky with so much light, you can make out people's faces as you cruise by. The gossip mill turns.

Marianela was out on Utcho with Claudio.

Margarita looks too pregnant for only two months since the wedding. Get a load of Pilar's miniskirt with those huge legs of hers, you'd think some people would check their mirrors, geez.

We distribute ourselves in several cars, driven by boy cousins. We don't want stool pigeon chauffeurs along. We're off to the movies or to Capri's for an ice cream and just hanging out, the boys much exhorted to take care of the ladies. As the oldest, Carla must ride with Fifi in Manuel's pickup,

la chapezona,

at least until we're off compound grounds. Then she is dropped off at Capri's to join the rest of us.

Fifi and Manuel steal off for some private time from the watchful eyes of the extended family. On these drives, they usually end up parking somewhere, only to neck and stuff, according to Fifi. She has admitted that the stuff is getting more and more to the point, and the problem is that she has no contraception. Anyone on the Island she might go to for pills or a diaphragm would know who she is and would surely rat on her to the family. And Manuel won't wear a rubber.