How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez

 

“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!”

"Que no?" - Manuel challenges.

“No! “Fifi asserts.

One by one we three sisters exit, cheering Fifi on under our 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 Wollstonecraft. 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 Tía 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 Manuel’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 gringas? 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 moon-light 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 chaperona, 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.

“He thinks it might cause impotence,” Fifi says, smiling sweetly, cherishing his cute male ignorance.

“Jesus, Fifi!” Sandi sighs. “Tell him that not using one most surely can cause pregnancy.” A pregnant Fifi would have to do what is always done in such cases on the Island—marry immediately and brace herself for the gossip when her “premature baby” comes out fat and fully grown.

We keep warning her and worrying over her until she promises us—on pain of our betrayal: “We’ll tell on you, we will!”—that she won’t have sex with Manuel unless she gets some contraception first. Which is highly unlikely. Where can she go for it on this fishbowl island?

But her word doesn’t count for much after what happens one night.

We’re sitting around at Capri’s that night, bored. Fifi and Manuel have already taken off, and we’ve got a couple of hours to kill before they get back and we can return to the compound. We start brainstorming what to do: we can drive to Embassy Beach and go skinny-dipping. We can try to find our cousin of a cousin, Jorge, who often has a couple of joints and knows a voodoo priest who will tell us our futures after performing a scary animal sacrifice.

Our official escort Mundín vetoes both ideas. He’s got a better one. We pile into his car, his three American cousins and his sister Lucinda, nagging him about what he’s got in mind. He grins wickedly and drives us a little ways out of town to Motel Los Encantos, “motel” being the Island euphemism for a whore house. He pulls right in like he knows the place, honks the horn, asks the gatekeeper for a cabin, then heads for the one he’s assigned. The garage door is opened by a waiting yardboy. Once we are out of the car, the yardboy pulls the garage door down and hands Mundín the key to the connected cabin.

“That way no one can tell who’s here,” Mundín explains in English. “This is the high-class motel, la crème de la crème, not to get too gross. Everyone would know everyone else’s cars here.” Mundín unlocks the door to the cabin and stands aside to let the ladies in. An unabashed king-size bed made up with a flowered bedspread stands in the dead center of the room. There are a couple of rolled pillows with tassels at the head of the bed. Covered with the same wishy-washy flowered material as the spread, the pillows evoke an Arab engineer more than a lord and master of the harem.

“Is this all?” we say, disappointed.

“What’d ya expect?” Mundín is nonplussed at our lack of proper titillation. After all, he has risked getting into a lot of trouble to show us the naughty face of the Island. Nice girls at a whore house! His mother would kill him!

Sandi puts her arm around Mundín and bumps hips. She is doing her Mae West imitation just as the yardboy comes in with a tray of rum and Cokes. He keeps his eyes on the tile floor as he goes from one to the other, proffering refreshments, as if to reassure us there will be no witnesses. As soon as he exits, we laugh. “I wonder what he thinks?” Carla shakes her head, just imagining it. Mundín wiggles his eyebrows. “How many taboos can we break here? Let’s see.” He enumerates: incest, group sex, lesbian sex, virgin sex—

“Virgin sex? Who’re you talking about?” his sister Lucinda challenges with a hand on her hip.

“Yeah,” we concur, hands on our hips, facing him, a line-up of feminists.

Mundín’s eyes do a double blink. For all his liberal education in the States, and all his sleeping around there and here, and all his eager laughter when his Americanized cousins recount their misadventures, his own sister has to be pure. “Let’s go.” He hurries us after we finish our rum and Cokes. As we’re backing out of our garage, a pickup passes behind us on the motel drive.

“Hey!” Yoyo cries out. “Is that Fifi and Manuel?”

Mundín chuckles. “Hey, hey! Way to go.”

“Way to go, way to schmo,” Sandi snaps. “That’s our baby sister going in there with a guy who thinks condoms cause impotence.”

“Go back in there after them!” Carla orders Mundín.

“She’s got her rights too.” Mundín laughs pointedly as he drives through the gate, which the boy is already closing on our taillights.

“This isn’t funny,” Carla warns as we consult in the bathroom back at Capri’s. “She’s not going to come back home on her own, she’s brainwashed.”

Sandi concurs. “I mean, they wouldn’t need a motel room if they weren’t sleeping together.”

“After she promised,” Carla says, nodding, aggrieved.

There, among the pink vanities with baskets of little towels and talcum powder and brushes, we come up with our plot. We reach out our hands and seal our pact. Yoyo rallies us with “¡Que viva la revolutión!” On top of our motel rum and Cokes, we’ve had a few of Capri’s famous frozen daiquiris. The young maid who has been listening to our English gibberish offers us a pink perfumed hand towel, which Sandi accepts and waves like the flag for our side.

Our last Saturday night on the Island, the compound folks sit on Tía Carmen’s patio, reminiscing. Periodically, family stops by to say goodbye to our parents and deliver the packets of letters and bills they want mailed in the States. Now that Tío Mundo is in government, there are always other cabinet members and old friends coming over to shoptalk politics and ask for favors. The patio is sex segregated—the men sit to one side, smoking their cigars and tinkling their rum drinks. The women lounge on wicker armchairs by the wall lamps, exclaiming over whatever there is to be exclaimed about.

The young people take off for the Avenida, promising to be home early. Tonight, it’s the regulars, Lucinda, Mundín, and Fifi and Manuel, of course, and the three of us. Carla does the usual chaperone duty in the pickup and then gets dropped off at Capri’s. “They’re having some big fight,” she confesses when she joins us.

“What now?” Sandi asks.

“Same old thing,” Carla sighs. “Fifi spent too much time talking to Jorge and her skirt is too short and her jersey too tight, blah, blah, blah.”

“Rmm, rmm,” Sandi and Yoyo rev.

Mundín laughs. “Serves you girls right.”

We narrow our eyes at him. When he’s in the States, where he went to prep school and is now in college, he’s one of us, our buddy. But back on the Island, he struts and turns macho, needling us with the unfair advantage being male here gives him.

As usual, we’re to wait for the lovers at Capri’s. Twenty minutes before our curfew, they’ll pick up Carla, and we’ll all head home again like one big happy group of virgin cousins. But tonight, as we’ve agreed, we’re staging a coup on the same Avenida where a decade ago the dictator was cornered and wounded on his way to a tryst with his mistress. It was a plot our father helped devise but did not carry through, since by then we had fled to the States. Tonight, we are blowing the lovers’ cover. First step is to get Mundín to drive us home. Male loyalty is what keeps the macho system going, so Mundín will want to protect Manuel.

Lucinda works a version of her Kotex custom officer trick. She complains to her brother that she’s just gotten her period and needs to go home. “I’ve got terrible cramps,” Lucinda moans.

“Can’t you take something for it?” Mundín asks, inconvenienced and awed by the mysteries of the female body.

Lucinda nods. “It’s at home, though.”

Mundín shakes his head at his sister. Nevertheless, he is her protector. Ever since her quip at the motel, he’s been watching her closely. “Okay, okay, I’ll take you.” He turns to us, his cousins. “You guys have to stay here and cover for Manuel.”

“We can’t stay here without you,” we remind him. Rule númeio uno: Girls are not left unescorted in public. “We’ll get in trouble, Mundín.”

Mundín scowls. This is unexpected prissiness from us. “Well, I’ll tell them I left you here with some cousins who showed. Then, I’ll come back for you. By then Fifi and Manuel should be done.”

Should be done. A cannon shot across the bow. No time for further delay. We smile three churlish Che Guevara smiles. “We’re going with you.”

“But what about Fifi and Manuel?” Mundín is flabbergasted. If everyone except Fifi and Manuel shows up at the compound, the lovers will be in deep trouble. Rule número dos: Girls are not to be left unchaperoned with their novios.

“We came with you, we stay with you. We don’t want to get into trouble.” Our good-girl voices don’t quite convince our cousin.

“I won’t do it!” Mundín folds his hands on the table.

We remind him of last night’s outing to the motel. Should we mention that to his father? We know what sword of Damocles hangs over his head—an electric razor for the military school crewcut Mundín would have to get. For just as we, his American cousins, are threatened with Island confinement, military school is what’s in store for Mundín should he step out of line.

He looks us straight in the eyes. “What are you girls up to?” he fires at us. We meet his look with bulletproof smiles, stone faces on which, with his myopic macho vision, he can’t make out the writing on the walls.

The compound driveway looks like a Mercedes Benz car lot. A Jeep and two Japanese cars say some of the younger generation are also here. Lucinda spots Tía Fidelina and Tío Orlando’s pale salmon Mercedes. “This is going to be muy interesting,” she whispers.

The patio is packed with relatives. Mundín hurries over to the men’s side, knowing the first bomb will explode among the women. We sisters go on our rounds, kissing all the aunts. Tía Fidelina’s milky dark eyes are almost totally sightless. “And which one is the novia?” she asks, squinting at her nieces.

“Yes,” Mami agrees. “Where is Fifi?”

“With Manuel,” Sandi offers smoothly. Her tone implies we have no problem with that.

“Where are they?” Mami asks more emphatically.

Carla shrugs. “How should she know?”

There is an embarrassed silence in which the words her reputation are as palpable as if someone had hung a wedding dress in the air. Tía Carmen sighs. Tía Fidelina unfolds her fan of overly-gorgeous roses. Tía Flor smiles wildly at the rest of us and asks us if we had a nice time. Mami looks past the crowd at Papi, over there happily exchanging dictatorship stories with the other men.

Steely-faced, she stands up and nods for us to follow her. The three of us single-file behind Mami into Tía Carmen’s bedroom again, the scene of Mami’s courtroom. Tía comes along, counseling patience.

Once the door is closed, Mami loses her temper. First, she berates Carla, who as the oldest was in charge and had orders to stick with Mundín and Fifi as their in-car chaperone. Then, we get chapter and verse on being bad daughters. Finally, she swears, in front of our aunt, that Fifi is going back with us. “If your father should find out!” Our mother shakes her head, reviewing the consequences. Rather anticlimactically, she adds, “A disgrace to the family.”

“Ya, ya.” Tía Carmen lifts her hand for her sister-in-law to stop. “These girls have lived so long away, they have gotten American ways.”

“American ways!” Mami cries. “Fifi’s been living here for six months. That’s no excuse.”

“There must be an explanation.” Tía Carmen changes course. “Let’s not anticipate where the coconut will fall when the hurricane hasn’t hit yet,” she advises.

Mami shakes her head conclusively. “If she can’t behave her-self here, she goes back with us, period! I’m not going to send them anymore to cause trouble!”

Tía Carmen puts her arms around us. “Don’t forget, these are my girls, too. And they’re good girls, no trouble at all. What would I do”—she looks up at us—“if I didn’t get to have them with me every year?”

We look at each other, and then, drop our gaze to hide our confusion. We are free at last, but here, just at the moment the gate swings open, and we can fly the coop, Tía Carmen’s love revives our old homesickness. It’s like this monkey experiment Carla read about in her clinical psych class. These baby monkeys were kept in a cage so long, they wouldn’t come out when the doors were finally left open. Instead, they stayed inside and poked their arms through the bars for their food, just out of reach.

It is close to midnight when we hear the pickup laboring up the driveway. Out on the patio, the visiting relatives have left, and only the compound folks remain, talking in low, preoccupied voices. In our bedroom, we have been defending ourselves to each other. We all know Fifi was headed for trouble with M.G. “She’s only sixteen,” we keep exclaiming. She thought she could be all Island. We know better.

But still, we feel rotten when a pale Fifi marches into our bedroom awhile later after a grueling interrogation in Tía Carmen’s bedroom.

She says nothing to us but opens the closet and begins packing all her clothes. For a moment we panic. Is she going to elope with Manuel?

“What are you doing, Fifi?” Yoyo asks.

Fifi continues to pack from a pile of clothes she has emptied out of her drawers onto the floor. Silence.

“Fifi?” Carla touches her shoulder. “What happened?” She means, of course, out in the patio or even—since the dull, absent look on Fifi’s face implies more—before.

Fifi turns to us, her eyes are red and weepy. “Traitors,” she says. The sound of her suitcase latching closed gives the accusation an eerie finality. At the door, she raises her chin proudly, and then we hear her steps echoing down the hall to our cousin Carmencita’s room.

We look at each other as if to say, “She’ll get over it.” Meaning Manuel, meaning her fury at us, meaning her fear of her own life. Like ours, it lies ahead of her like a wilderness just before the first explorer sets foot on the virgin sand.