How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  “Testing?” a garbled voice asked without much conviction.

  “After about two blocks, we flagged the driver down and climbed aboard. And you won’t believe what we found?”

  The lover knew better than to take a guess.

  “We found that one surrounded by a crowd like Jesus and the elders.”

  “Really?” The lover smiled, admiring the daughter from a distance. Yolanda was one of the more popular instructors at the college where he chaired the Comp Lit Department.

  “She hadn’t even realized we were gone. She had a circle of people around her, listening to her reciting a poem! As a matter of fact, it was a poem I’d taught her. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s by that guy who wrote that poem about the blackbird.”

  “Stevens?” the lover guessed.

  The mother cocked her head. “I’m not sure. Anyhow,” she continued, “imagine! Three years old and already drawing crowds. Of course, she became a poet.”

  “You don’t mean Poe, do you? Edgar Allan Poe?”

  “Yes, that’s him! That’s him!” the mother cried out. “The poem was about a princess who lived by the sea or something. Let’s see.” She began to recite:

  Many many years ago, something … something,

  In a … something by the sea …

  A princess there lived whom you may remember

  By the name of Annabel Lee…

  The mother looked up and realized that the hushed audience was staring at her. She blushed. The lover chuckled and squeezed her arm. At the podium, the poet had been introduced and was waiting for the white-haired woman in the first row to finish talking. “For Clive,” Yolanda said, introducing her first poem, “‘Bedroom Sestina.’” Clive smiled sheepishly at the mother, who smiled proudly at her daughter.

  The mother does not tell a favorite story about Sandra any-more. She says she would like to forget the past, but it is really only a small part of the recent past she would like to forget. However, the mother knows people listen to absolute statements, so she says in a tired voice, “I want to forget the past.”

  The last story the mother told about her second oldest was not in celebration but in explanation to Dr. Tandlemann, senior staff psychiatrist at Mount Hope. The mother explained why she and her husband were committing their daughter to a private mental hospital.

  “It started with that crazy diet,” the mother began. She folded and refolded her Kleenex into smaller and smaller squares. Dr. Tandlemann watched her and took notes. The father sat by the window quietly and followed the movements of a gardener, who was mowing first one, then another, darkening swath across the lawn.

  “Can you imagine starving herself to death?” The mother pinched little bits off her Kleenex. “No wonder she went crazy.”

  “She’s had a breakdown.” Dr. Tandlemann looked at the father. “Your daughter is not clinically crazy.”

  “What does that mean, clinically crazy?” The mother scowled. “I don’t understand all that psychology talk.”

  “It means that,” Dr. Tandlemann began, looking down at his folder to check the name, “it means that Sandra is not psychotic or schizophrenic, she’s just had a small breakdown.”

  “A small breakdown,” the father murmured to himself. In the middle of a row, the gardener stopped, machine roaring. He spat and shrugged his shoulder across his lips, wiping his mouth, then he continued his progress across the lawn. Grass bits spewed into a white sack ballooning behind the motor. The father felt he should say something pleasant. “Nice place you got here, beautiful grounds.”

  “Ay, Lolo,” the mother said sadly. She made a fist of what was left of her Kleenex.

  Dr. Tandlemann waited for a moment in case the husband wanted to respond to his wife. Then he asked the mother, “You say it started with that diet she went on?”

  “It started with that crazy diet,” the mother said again as if she had just found her place in a book she had been reading. “Sandi wanted to look like those twiggy models. She was a looker, that one, and I guess it went to her head. There are four girls, you know.”

  Dr. Tandlemann wrote down four girls although the father had already told him this when he asked, “No sons?;” Out loud, he noted, noncommittally, “Four girls”

  The mother hesitated, then glanced over at her husband as if unsure how much they should disclose to this stranger. “We’ve had trouble with all of them—” She rolled her eyes to indicate the kind of trouble she meant.

  “You mean other daughters have also had breakdowns?”

  “Bad men is what they’ve had!” The mother scowled at the doctor as if he were one of her ex sons-in-law. “Anyhow, that makes sense, heartbreak, breakdown. This is different, this is crazy.” The doctor’s hand lifted in protest. But the mother ignored the gesture and went on with her story.

  “The others aren’t bad looking, don’t get me wrong. But Sandi, Sandi got the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!” The mother spread her arms in all directions to show how pretty and pale and blue-eyed the girl was. Bits of her Kleenex fell to the floor, and she picked off the specks from the carpet. “My great-grandfather married a Swedish girl, you know? So the family has light-colored blood, and that Sandi got it all. But imagine, spirit of contradiction, she wanted to be darker complected like her sisters.”

  “That’s understandable,” Dr. Tandlemann said.

  “It’s crazy, that’s what it is,” the mother said angrily. “Anyhow, this diet took over. When her sister got married, Sandi wouldn’t even taste the wedding cake, taste!”

  “Did they get along?” Dr. Tandlemann glanced up; his hand had a life of its own and kept writing.

  “Who?” The mother blinked in disapproval. The man asked too many questions.

  “The siblings,” Dr. Tandlemann said. “Were they close? Was there a lot of rivalry between them?”

  “Siblings?” The mother frowned at all this crazy psychology talk. “They’re sisters,” she said by way of explanation.

  “Sometimes they fought,” the father added. Although he was looking out the window, he did not miss a word the doctor and his wife were saying.

  “Sometimes they fought,” the mother raced on. She wanted to get to the end of this story. “So Sandi kept losing weight. At first, she looked good. She had let herself get a little plump, and with her fine bones Sandi can’t carry extra weight. So losing a few pounds was okay. Then, she went away to a graduate pro-gram, so we didn’t see her for awhile. Every time we talked to her over the phone, her voice seemed further and further away. And it wasn’t because it was long distance either. I can’t explain it,” the mother said. “A mother just knows.

  “So one day we get this call. The dean. She says she doesn’t want to alarm us, but could we come down immediately. Our daughter is in the hospital, too weak to do anything. All she does is read.”

  The father was timing the gardener’s treks across the rolling lawns. When the man did not stop to spit or wipe his forehead, each row took him approximately two minutes.

  The mother tried to open the Kleenex in her lap, but it was too ragged to spread out. “We took the next plane, and when we got there, I didn’t recognize my own daughter.” The mother held up her little finger. “Sandi was a toothpick. And that’s not the least of it, she wouldn’t put a book down, read, read, read. That’s all she did”

  At the window the father’s view of the lawn was blurring.

  The mother looked over at her husband and wondered what he was thinking about. “She had lists and lists of books to read. We found them in her journal. After she finished one, she crossed it off the list. Finally, she told us why she couldn’t stop reading. She didn’t have much time left. She had to read all the great works of man because soon”—the mother got up her courage to say it—“soon she wouldn’t be human.”

  In the ensuing silence the mother heard the drone of a distant lawnmower.

  “She told us that she was being turned out of the
human race. She was becoming a monkey.” The mother’s voice broke. “A monkey, my baby!

  “Already the other organs inside her body were a monkey’s. Only her brain was left, and she could feel it going.”

  Dr. Tandlemann stopped writing. He weighed his pen in his hand. “I understood you committed her only because of the weight loss. This is news to me.”

  “Small breakdown,” the father murmured quietly so Dr. Tandlemann wouldn’t hear him.

  The mother was in control of her voice again. “If she read all the great books, maybe she’d remember something important from having been human. So she read and read. But she was afraid she’d go before she got to some of the big thinkers.”

  “Freud,” the doctor said, listing names on his pad. “Darwin, Nietsche, Erikson.”

  “Dante,” the father mused. “Homer, Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca.”

  “I told her to stop reading and start eating. I told her those books were driving her crazy. I made her everything she liked: rice and beans, lasagna, chicken a la king. I made her favorite red snapper with tomato sauce. She said she didn’t want to eat animals. In her own time, she said, she would be that chicken. She would be that red snapper. Evolution had reached its peak and was going backwards. Something like that.” The mother waved the very idea away. “It was crazy talk, I tell you.

  “One morning, I go in her room to wake her up, and I find her lying in bed and looking up at her hands.” The mother held up her hands and re-enacted the scene. “I call her name, Sandi!, and she keeps turning her hands, this way, that, and staring at them. I scream at her to answer me, and she doesn’t even look at me. Nothing. And she’s making these awful sounds like she’s a zoo.” The mother clucked and grunted to show the doctor what the animals had sounded like.

  Suddenly, the father leaned forward. He had caught sight of something important.

  “And my Sandi holds up her hands to me,” the mother continued. She turned her hands towards Dr. Tandlemann and then towards her husband, whose face was pressed up to the window. “And she screams, Monkey hands, monkey hands.”

  The father shot up from his chair. Outside, a fair, willowy girl and a heavy-set woman in white were walking across the lawn. The woman was pointing out the flowers and the leaves of the bushes in order to cajole the girl forward towards the building. At one end of the lawn, the gardener wiped his fore-head, turned the mower around and began a new row. A dark wake spread behind him. The girl looked up, wildly searching the empty sky for the airplane she was hearing. The nurse followed her distracted movements with alarm. Finally, the girl saw a man coming at her with a roaring animal on a leash, its baglike stomach swelling up as it devoured the grasses between them. The girl screamed and broke into a panicked run towards the building where her father, whom she could not see, stood at the window, waving.

  At the hospital, the mother leans on the glass with one hand and taps with the other. She makes a monkey face. The cradle has been turned towards her, but the tiny, wrinkled baby is not looking at the grandmother. Instead the baby’s eyes roll about as if she hasn’t quite figured out how to work them yet. Her lips pucker and stretch, pucker and stretch. The grandmother is sure the baby is smiling at her.

  “Look at that,” the grandmother says to the young man at her side, who is looking at the baby in the neighboring cradle.

  The young man looks at the stranger’s baby.

  “She’s smiling already,” the grandmother brags.

  The young man nods and smiles.

  “Yours is asleep,” the grandmother says in a slightly critical voice.

  “Babies sleep a lot,” the young man explains.

  “Some do,” the grandmother says. “I had four girls, and they never slept.”

  “Four girls, no boys?”

  The mother shakes her head. “I guess it’s in the blood. This one is a girl too. Aren’t you, Cuquita?” the grandmother asks her granddaughter.

  The young man smiles at his daughter. “Mine is a girl too.”

  The grandmother congratulates him. “Good bulls sire cows, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a saying my husband used to tell me after I had one of the girls. Good bulls sire cows. I remember the night Fifi was born.” The grandmother looks down at her granddaughter and explains, “Your mother.”

  The young man studies his baby daughter as he listens to the old woman’s story.

  “That girl gave me more trouble getting born than any of the others. And the funny thing was she was the last and smallest of the four. Twenty-four hours in labor.” The grandmother’s eyebrows lift for punctuation.

  The young man whistles. “Twenty-four hours is a long labor for a small fourth child. Any complications?”

  The mother studies the young man a moment. Is he a doctor, she wonders, to know so much about babies?

  “Twenty-four hours …” The young man is shaking his head, musing. “Ours lasted only three and a half.”

  The grandmother stares up at the young man. Ours! Men! Now they’re going to claim having the babies too.

  “But I’ll tell you, that Fifi, we didn’t name her wrong! Sofia, that’s her real name. My daughter, the poet, says Sofia was the goddess in charge of wisdom long ago. We Catholics don’t believe in that stuff. But still, she’s the smart one, all right. And I don’t mean books either! I mean smart.” The grandmother taps her temple, and then repeats the gesture on the glass. “Smart, smart,” the grandmother tells the baby. She shakes her head, musing to herself. “That Fifi, she might look like she’s headed for trouble, but it always turns out to be her luck.

  “That night she was finally born, her father came in, and I knew he was a little disappointed, especially after such a long wait. And I said, can’t help it, Lolo, they come out girls, and all he said was, Good bulls sire cows, like it was a credit to him. He was almost falling over with exhaustion. So I sent him home to bed.”

  The young man yawns and laughs.

  “He was so dead tired, he didn’t hear the burglars when they broke in. They stole us blind. They even stole my shoes and my under—” The grandmother remembers it is indelicate to say so. “Every last article of clothing,” she adds coyly.

  The young man pretends to be alarmed.

  “But this is what I mean about luck—they caught the burglars, and we got every last stitch back.” The grandmother taps the glass. “Cuquita,” she coos at the baby.

  “Lucky,” she says to the young man. “That Fifi has always been the lucky one. Not to mention her luck with”—the grand-mother lowers her voice—“with Otto.”

  The young man looks over his shoulder. Otto? Who would name a poor kid Otto?

  “Imagine,” the grandmother continues. “Fifi drops out of college and goes off on a church trip to Peru, chaperoned, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have let her go. We don’t believe in all this freedom.” The grandmother frowns as she looks out over the nursery. Beyond the glass, between the slender white bars of their cribs, half a dozen babies are fast asleep.

  “Anyhow she meets this German man Otto in a Peruvian market, who can’t speak a word of Spanish but is trying to buy a poncho. She bargains for him, and he gets his poncho for practically nothing. Well, just like that, they fell for each other, corresponded, and here they are, parents! Tell me that isn’t lucky?”

  “That’s lucky,” the young man says.

  “And you’re going to be a lucky one too, aren’t you?” The grandmother clucks at her granddaughter, then confides to the young man, “She’s going to look just like an angel, pink and blond.”

  “You never can tell when they’re this young,” the father says, smiling at his daughter.

  “I can,” the grandmother claims. “I had four of them.”

  “Mami picks up like these really gorgeous men,” Sandi laughs. She is sitting cross-legged on Fifi’s living room floor. The new mother sits in Otto’s recliner, the baby asleep on her shoulder. Carla is sprawled on the sofa. At her
feet, Yolanda is knitting furiously at a tiny blanket, pink and baby blue and pastel yellow squares with a white border. It is early morning. The family has gathered at Fifi’s house for Christmas, which falls a week after the baby’s birth. Husbands and grandparents are still asleep in the bedrooms. The four girls lounge in their nightgowns and tell each other the true story of how their lives are going.

  Sandi explains that she and the mother were in the waiting room, and the mother disappeared. “I find her at the nursery window talking to this piece of beefcake—”

  “That’s offensive,” Yolanda says. “Just call him a man.”

  “Lay off me, will you?” Sandi is close to tears. Since her re-lease from Mt. Hope a month ago, she cries so easily she has to carry Kleenex with her anti-depressants in her purse. She looks around the room for her bag. “Miz Poet is so goddamn sensitive to language.”

  “I don’t write poetry anymore,” Yolanda says in a wounded voice.

  “Goddamn it, you guys,” Carla says, refereeing this one. “It’s Christmas.”

  The new mother turns to the second oldest sister and runs her fingers through her hair. This is the first time the family has gathered together in a year, and she wants them all to get along. She changes the subject. “That was really nice of you to come see me at the hospital. I know how you just love hospitals,” she adds.

  Sandi looks down at the rug and picks at it. “I just want to forget the past, you know?”

  “That’s understandable,” Carla says.

  Yolanda lays aside the baby blanket. She has the same scowl on her face her sister wore a moment ago, a family sign of approaching tears. “I’m sorry,” she says to Sandi. “It’s been the worst week.”

  Sandi touches her hand. She looks at her other sisters. Clive, they all know, has gone back to his wife again. “He’s such a turd. How many times has he done this now, Yo?”

  “Yolanda,” Carla corrects her. “She wants to be called Yolanda now.”

  “What do you mean, wants to be called Yolanda now! That’s my name, you know?”

  “Why are you so angry?” Carla’s calmness is professional.