How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (5 page)

Her worried sisters stood up, one at each arm, coaxing him like nurses, another touching the small of his back as if he were a feverish boy. "Come on, Papi, simmer down now. Take it easy.

Let's talk. We're a family, after all."

"Are you a whore?" the father interrogated his daughter. There was spit on the daughter's cheeks from the closeness of his mouth to her face.

"It's none of your fucking business!" she said in a low, ugly-sounding voice like the snarl of an animal who could hurt him. "You have no right, no right at all, to go through my stuff or read my mail!"

Tears spurted out of her eyes, her nostrils flared.

The father's mouth opened in a little zero of shock.

Quietly, Sofia drew herself up and left the room. Usually, in her growing-up tantrums, this daughter would storm out of the house and come back hours later, placated, the sweetness in her nature reasserted, bearing silly gifts for everyone in the family, refrigerator magnets, little stuffed hairballs with roll-around eyeballs.

But this time they could hear her upstairs, opening and closing her drawers, moving back and forth from the bed to the closet. Downstairs, the father prowled up and down the length of the rooms, his three daughters caging him while the other great power in the house, tidily-as if she had all the time in the world-buttoned and folded all her clothes, packed all her bags, and left the house forever. She got herself to Germany somehow and got the man to marry her. To throw in the face of the father who was so ambitious for presidents and geniuses in the family, the German nobody turned out to be a world-class chemist. But the daughter's was not a petty nature. What did she care what Otto did for a living when she had shown up at his door and offered herself to him.

"I can love you as much as anybody else," she said. "If you can do the same for me, let's get married."

"Come on in and let's talk," Otto had said, or so the story went.

"Yes or no," Sofia answered. Just like that on a snowy night someone at his door and a cold draft coming in. "I couldn't let her freeze," Otto boasted later.

"Like hell you couldn't!" Sofia planted a large hand on his shoulder, and anyone could see how it must be between them in the darkness of their love-making. On their honeymoon, they traveled to Greece, and Sofia sent her mother and father

and sisters postcards like any newlywed. "We're having a great time. Wish you were here."

But the father kept to his revenge. For months no one could mention the daughter's name in his presence, though he kept calling them all "Sofia" and quickly correcting himself. When the daughter's baby girl was born, his wife put her foot down. Let him carry his grudge to the grave,

she

was going out to Michigan (where Otto had relocated) to see her first grandchild!

Last minute, the father relented and went along, but he might as well have stayed away. He was grim and silent the whole visit, no matter how hard Sofia and her sisters tried to engage him

in conversation. Banishment was better than this cold shoulder. But Sofia tried again. On the old man's next birthday, she appeared at the apartment with her little girl. "Surprise!" There was a reconciliation of sorts. The father first tried to shake hands with her. Thwarted, he then embraced her stiffly before taking the baby in his arms under the watchful eye of his wife. Every year after that, the daughter came for her father's birthday, and in the way of women, soothed and stitched and patched over the hurt feelings. But there it was under the social fabric, the raw wound. The father refused to set foot in his daughter's house. They rarely spoke; the father said public things to her in the same tone of voice he used with his sons-in-law.

But how his seventieth birthday was coming up, and he had agreed to have the celebration at Sofia's house. The christening for little Carlos was scheduled for the morning, so the big event would be Papi Carlos's party that night. It was a coup for the youngest daughter to have gathered the scattered family in

the Midwest for a weekend. But the real coup was how Sofia had managed to have the husbands included this year. The husbands are coming, the husbands are coming, the sisters joked. Sofia passed the compliment off on little Carlos. The boy had opened the door for the other men in the family.

But the coup the youngest daughter most wanted was to reconcile with her father in a big way. She would throw the old man a party he wouldn't forget. For weeks she planned what they would eat, where they would all sleep, the entertainment. She kept calling up her sisters with every little thing to see what they thought.

Mostly, they agreed with her: a band, paper hats, balloons, buttons that broadcast the world's greatest dad. Everything overdone and silly and devoted the way they knew the father would like it. Sofia briefly considered a belly dancer or a girl who'd pop out of a cake. But the third daughter, who had become a feminist in the wake of her divorce, said she considered such locker-room entertainments offensive. A band with music was what she'd pitch in on,- her married sisters could split it three ways if they wanted to be sexists. With great patience, Sofia created a weekend that would offend no one. They were going to have a good time in her house for the old man's seventieth, if it killed her!

The night of the party, the family ate an early dinner before the band and the guests arrived. Each daughter toasted both Carloses. The sons-in-law called big Carlos, "Papi." Little Carlos, looking very much like a little girl in his long, white christening gown, bawled the whole time, and his poor mother had not a moment's peace between serving the dinner she'd prepared for the family and giving him his. The phone kept ringing, relatives from the old country calling with congratulations for the old man. The toasts the daughters had prepared kept getting interrupted.

Even so, their father's eyes glazed with tears more than once as the four girls went through their paces.

He looked old tonight, every single one of his seventy years was showing. Perhaps it was that top much wine had darkened his complexion, and his white hair and brows and mustache stood out unnaturally white. He perked up a little for his gifts, though, gadgets and books and desk trophies from his daughters, and cards with long notes penned inside "to the best, dearest Papi in the world," each one of which the old man wanted to read out loud. "No you don't, Papi, they're private!" his daughters chimed in, crowding around him, wanting to spare each other the embarrassment of having their gushing made public.

His wife gave him a gold watch. The third daughter teased that that's how companies retired their employees, but when her mother made angry eyes at her, she stopped. Then there were the men gifts-belts and credit card wallets from the sons-in-law.

"Things I really need." The father was gracious.

He stacked up the gift cards and put them away in his pocket to pore over later. The sons-in-law all knew that the father was watching them, jealously, for signs of indifference or self-interest. As for his girls, even after their toasts were given, the gifts opened, and the father had borne them out of the way with the help of his little granddaughter, even then, the daughters felt that there was something else he had been waiting for which they had not yet given him.

But there was still plenty of party left to make sure he got

whatever it was he needed for the long, lonely year ahead. The band arrived, three middle-aged men, each with a silver wave slicked back with too much hair cream. danny and his boys set up a placard with their name against the fireplace. There was one on an accordion, another on a fiddle, and a third was miscellaneous on maracas and triangle and drums when needed. They played movie themes, polkas, anything familiar you could hum along to; the corny songs were all dedicated to "Poppy"

or "his lovely lady." The father liked the band.

"Nice choice," he congratulated Otto. The youngest daughter's temper flared easily with all she'd had to drink and eat. She narrowed her eyes at her smiling husband and put a hand on her hip.

As if Otto had lifted a finger during her long months of planning!

The guests began to arrive, many with tales of how they'd gotten lost on the way; the suburbs were dark and intricate like mazes with their courts and cul-de-sacs. Otto's unmarried colleagues looked around the room, trying to single out the recently divorced sister they'd heard so much about.

But there was no one as beautiful and funny and talented as Sofia had boasted the third oldest would be.

Most of these friends were half in love with Sofia anyway, and it was she they sought out in the crowded room.

There was a big chocolate cake in the shape of a heart set out on the long buffet with seventy-one candles-one for good luck. The granddaughter and her aunts had counted them and planted them diagonally across the heart, joke candles that wouldn't blow out.

Later, they burned a flaming arrow that would not quit.

The bar was next to the heart and by midnight when the band broke out again with "Happy Birthday, Poppy," everyone had had too much to eat and drink.

They'd been playing party games on and off all night. The band obliged with musical chairs, but after two of the dining room chairs were broken, they left off playing. The third daughter, especially, had gotten out of hand, making musical chairs of every man's lap. The father sat without speaking. He gazed upon the scene disapprovingly.

In fact, the older the evening got, the more withdrawn the father had become. Surrounded by his daughters and their husbands and fancy, intelligent, high-talking friends, he seemed to be realizing that he was just an old man sitting in their houses, eating up their roast lamb, impinging upon their lives. The daughters could almost hear his thoughts inside their own heads. He, who had paid to straighten their teeth and smooth the accent out of their English in expensive schools, he was nothing to them now. Everyone in this room would survive him, even the silly men in the band who seemed like boys- imagine making a living out of playing birthday songs! How could they ever earn enough money to give their daughters pretty clothes and send them to Europe during the summers so they wouldn't get bored? Where were the world's men anymore? Every last one of his sons-in-law was a kid; he could see that clearly. Even Otto, the famous scientist, was a schoolboy with a pencil, doing his long division. The new son-in-law he even felt sorry for-he could see this husband would give out on his strong-willed second daughter. Already she had him giving her backrubs and going for cigarettes in the middle of the night. But he needn't worry about his girls. Or his wife, for

that matter. There she sat, pretty and slim as a girl, smiling coyly at everyone when a song was dedicated to her. Eight, maybe nine, months he gave her of widowhood, and then she'd find someone to grow old with on his life insurance.

The third daughter thought of a party game to draw her father out. She took one of the baby's soft receiving blankets, blindfolded her father, and led him to a chair at the center of the room. The women clapped. The men sat down. The father pretended he didn't understand what all his daughters were up to. "How does one play this game, Mami?"

"You're on your own, Dad," the mother said, laughing. She was the only one in the family who called him by his American name.

"Are you ready, Papi?" the oldest asked.

"I am perfect ready," he replied in his heavy accent.

"Okay, now, guess who this is," the oldest said. She always took charge. This is how they worked things among the daughters.

The father nodded, his eyebrows shot up. He held on to his chair, excited, a little scared, like a boy about to be asked a hard question he knows the answer to.

The oldest daughter motioned to the third daughter, who tiptoed into the circle the women had made around the old man. She gave him a daughterly peck on the cheek.

"Who was that, Papi?" the oldest asked.

He was giggling with pleasure and could not get the words out at first. He had had too much to drink. "That was Mami," he said in a coy little voice.

"No! Wrong!" all the women cried out.

"Carla?" he guessed the oldest. He was going down the line. "Wrong!" More shouts.

"Sandi? Yoyo?"

"You guessed it," his third oldest said.

The women clapped; some bent over in hilarious laughter. Everyone had had too much to drink. And the old man was having his good time too.

"Okay, here's another coming at you." The eldest took up the game again. She put her index finger to her lips, gave everyone a meaningful glance, quietly circled the old man, and kissed him from behind on top of his head. Then she tiptoed back to where she had been standing when she had first spoken.

"Who was that, Papi?" she asked, extra innocent.

"Mami?" His voice rode up, exposed and vulnerable. Then it sank back into its certainties.

"That was Mami."

"Count me out," his wife said from the couch where she'd finally given in to exhaustion.

The father never guessed any of the other women in the room. That would have been disrespectful. Besides, their strange-sounding American names were hard to remember and difficult to pronounce. Still he got the benefit of their kisses under cover of his daughters. Down the line, the father went each time:

"Carla?" "Sandi?" "Yoyo?" Sometimes, he altered the order, put the third daughter first or the oldest one second.

Sofia had been in the bedroom, tending to her son, who was wild with all the noise in the house tonight. She came back into the living room, buttoning her dress front, and happened upon the game. "Ooh."

She rolled her eyes. "It's getting raunchy in here, ha!" She worked her hips in a mock rotation, and the men

all laughed. She thrust her girlfriends into the circle and whispered to her little girl to plant the next kiss on her grandfather's nose. The women all pecked and puckered at the old man's face.

The second daughter sat briefly on his lap and clucked

him

tmder the chin. Every time the father took a wrong guess, the youngest daughter laughed loudly. But soon, she noticed that he never guessed her name. After all her hard work, she was not to be included in his daughter count. Damn him! She'd take her turn and make him know it was her!