How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez

Part II : 1970—1960

A Regular Revolution

 

Carla, Sandi, Yoyo, Fifi

For three-going-on-f our 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 red-neck 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. García 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 hair-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 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.)

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. Tía Concha became Aunt Conchshell, and Tía Asunción, Aunt Ascension; Tío 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 in-side. “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 priss,” Sandi taunted her. “For one thing, now that Tío is a V.I.P., we won’t have to go through Customs. Security will whisk us off, the Misses Garcías 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. Tía 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. Tía admitted that yes, something was amiss, but she had promised our mother not to say what. Tía 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 santeria, 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.

Immediately, she contacted Tío Pedro, a psychiatrist “uncle by affection” with a practice in Jackson Heights. Tío 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 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 Tío 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. Fifi was given the choice of either staying on the Island for a year at Tía 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.

Fifi 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.

“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 Fifi’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, Fifi,” we say in greeting, looking her over.

“Where’s the party?” Sandi teases.

“If you can’t say something nice—” 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,” Fifi 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, Tío Orlando, who has a half dozen children from una mujer del campo, a woman from the countryside around one of his ranches. Of course, Tía Fidelina, our uncle’s wife, who is sweet and dedicated to La Virgen, “knows nothing” about Tío 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? Tía 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,” Tía 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.