How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

by Julia Alvarez

  The man’s hand fell fondly on his dog’s head. “Pets are a different matter, to be sure. But the little creature must be old enough to survive without its mother,” he concluded, rising.

  Just as he was rising, Kashtanka made a dash forward. The man snatched his collar and pulled the dog back so his front paws were still treading the air. “Drumsticks, eh?” The man laughed at something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw a large black mother cat, her teats pink and sagging, slinking into the coal shed. Kashtanka barked excitedly. The cat scurried in.

  “Your manners, Kashtanka!” the man said, giving the collar a jerk. The dog heeled, whining quietly to show that his feelings were hurt. “About drumsticks,” the man said, winking one eye so long I wondered if, like Pila’s, his wasn’t real either. “While a kitten is still a suckling, it cannot, now can it, be taken from its mother to be a pet?”

  I had to agree.

  “To take it away would be …” The man considered his words. “To take it away would be a violation of its natural right to live.” The man saw I did not understand him. “It would die,” he said plainly. “So you must wait,” he added, petting my hair so that Kashtanka gave me a jealous look, “you must wait until that kitten can make it on its own. Don’t you agree?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the coal shed.

  The man went on. “I would say in a week, and that’s one, two, three is Sunday, seven is Thursday, by Thursday I should think a kitten, even if born this very day, a kitten might be ready to belong to a fine young lady with a drum.”

  I drummed my fingers on my drum, one, three, five, seven is Thursday.

  “That’s a fine drum,” the man observed, “and a good, sturdy strap.”

  Just then, a flock of birds flew overhead. The dog looked up and let out an excited yelp. “We’re off,” the man announced. And off they were, before I could count to seven, down the lawn to a creaky wicker gate, through which they entered the orchard and disappeared among the trees.

  One, two, ba-bam, three is Sunday. The mother cat had gone into the coal shed to feed her kittens. Ba-bam. Mine was the best dressed one. I would name her Schwarz. Seven is less than the fingers of two hands, but seven was seven more than now, and as if to confirm my addition, I heard the thunderous report of the man’s gun in the distance. There was a clatter from the coal shed and, moments later, the mother cat dashed across the yard, flushed out by the noise of the gun.

  While the coast was clear, I decided to re-enter the coal shed and tell Schwarz of our plan for next Thursday. I walked in, looked over the brim of the coal barrel. Schwarz was meowing in terror. “There, there,” I comforted her. But there, there would not do. I picked her up and whispered in the sweet little seashell ears, “There, there.” I brought her down to my shoulder and burped her and put her in the crook of my arm and tickled her belly and poked my fingers under her arms, and she meowed that that was fun, that I should do it again. And there, there, I did.

  It was Friday and it would not be Thursday for another seven days. I had every intention of putting her back. But then, call it coincidence, call it plot, the man’s gun went off again in the distance, and I realized he was in the orange grove hunting. Hunting! Some of the birds he was aiming at this very moment were mothers with worms for their babies. I did not know at the time the word for saying one thing and doing another, but I did know plenty of practicing adults, and I was not going to be gypped of a well-dressed kitten by a moral imperative given to me by an exception to the rule!

  Out of the shed I strode with Schwarz clapped on my shoulder. She meowed out goodbyes to her brothers and sisters as we crossed the yard. Suddenly, I stopped. Up ahead sat the fat black mother cat enjoying the warm sun on her fat black back, licking a paw as if there were cake batter on it. She had not seen me, but I knew it was a matter of moments before Schwarz’s meowing reached her. In that instant the vague memory sharpened. I saw a cat slinking forward. I saw it crouch to spring. I saw it leap and land on a woman’s face. I saw its claws rip out an eye. I saw that jelly spill—and I remembered suddenly with shocking clarity Pila recounting how she had lost her eye!

  Slowly, my left hand patting Schwarz to encourage a hiatus in her meowing, I worked the top off my drum with my right hand. Schwarz’s mother put down one paw, lifted another, and began to lick it. I picked Schwarz up, and in one deft movement, plunked her down into the hollow of my drum, grabbing up my drumsticks in exchange, slapping the lid down, shifting the drum in front of me, and then as the mother cat jerked around and caught sight of me and then of my drum, which was meowing furiously, I brought down a loud, distracting drum-roll:

  BARRA BARRA BARRA BOOM BOOM? (Meow!)

  BARRA BOOM! (Meow! Meow!) BOOM

  BOOM

  BOOM

  (Meow!)

  I marched straight towards the house, lifting my knees high like a majorette. The baffled mother cat looked at me uncertainly and followed at a cautious distance, meowing. The drum meowed back. I drummed madly. My heart was drumming. And then, as the cat gained on me, I broke into a mad run, scrambled up the back steps, slammed shut the back door that led through the laundry room to the house. A deep sink full of soaking whites told that the new washerwoman had stepped out only for a moment. Backed against the wall, I spied out the window. The mother cat prowled in front of the door. She stopped, smelled the ground.

  “Schwarz!” she meowed.

  Schwarz meowed feverishly from inside the drum. The mother glanced all about her, at the door, at the sky, but she could not find where the sound was coming from.

  “Schwarz! Where are you?” she meowed.

  “THUNDER, THUNDER!” The gun thundered. The mother cat bolted away.

  I picked the meowing kitten out of my drum. Its little human face winced with meows. I detested the accusing sound of meow. I wanted to dunk it into the sink and make its meowing stop. Instead, I lifted the screen and threw the meowing ball out the window. I heard it land with a thud, saw it moments later, wobbling out from under the shadow of the house, meowing and stumbling forward. There was no sign of the mother cat.

  I must have gone to that window about a dozen times that morning and watched the wounded kitten make a broken progress across the lawn. I was tempted to go and deposit it at the door of the coal shed, but there was no leaving the house, my mother’s orders. Some crazy fellow was shooting illegally in the orange grove. The police had been called. Sometime before lunch the shooting stopped. I looked out the window of the laundry room. The kitten was gone.

  That night I woke with a start in the claws of a bad dream I could not remember. In those days we slept with mosquito nets strung from four poles at each corner of the bed. Everything in the dark assumed a spectral appearance through white netting: a ghostly bureau, a ghostly toybox, ghostly curtains. That night, sitting at the foot of my bed, poking her face in so that the gauzy net was molded to her features like an awful death mask, was the black mother cat. I froze with terror. She glared at me with fluorescent eyes. She let out soft, moaning meows. I closed my eyes and opened them again. She sat there, wailing until dawn. Then I saw her rise, leap, and land with a thud on the floor and trot down the hall and down the stairs. The next morning in tears I told my mother of the cat that haunted my bedside all night. “Impossible,” she said and to prove it, we went through the house, inspecting latches and windows. “Possible,” Mami said when we found a window left opened in the laundry room. That new washerwoman, Nivea, was almost as bad as the old one, Mami complained.

  Impossibly the next night—for the windows were locked and the house secure as an arsenal—the cat appeared again at my bedside. And night after night after that. Sometimes she meowed. Sometimes she just stared. Sometimes I cried out and woke the house up. “A phase,” Mami said, worried. “A perfectly normal nightmare phase.” The phase lasted. I gave the drum away to a little cousin, throwing the ghost cat into the bargain. But the cat came back, on and off, for years.

  Then we moved to t
he United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow. I solved the riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was. I went away to school. I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story? I began to write, the story of Pila, the story of my grandmother. I never saw Schwarz again. The man with the goatee and Kashtanka vanished from the face of creation. I grew up, a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils, a woman prone to bad dreams and bad insomnia. There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.

  How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

  My English: A Note from the Author

  Reading and Discussion Guide

  My English

  A Note from the Author

  Mami and Papi used to speak in English when they had a secret they wanted to keep from us children. We lived then in the Dominican Republic, and the family as a whole spoke only Spanish at home, until my sisters and I started school at Carol Morgan and we became a bilingual family. Spanish had its many tongues as well. There was the castellano of Padre Juaquín from Spain, whose lisp we all loved to imitate. Then the educated español my parents’ families spoke, aunts and uncles who were always correcting us children, for we spent most of the day with the maids and so had picked up their “bad Spanish.” Campesinas, theirs was a lilting animated campuno, s’s swallowed, endings chopped off, funny turns of phrase. This campuno was my true mother tongue, not the Spanish of Calderon de la Barca or Cervantes or even Neruda, but of Chucha and Iluminada and Gladys and Ursulina from Juncalito and Licey and Boca de Yuma and San Juan de la Maguana. Those women yakked as they cooked: they story-told, they gossiped, they prayed, they sang—boleros, merengues, mangulinas, mariachis, salves. Theirs were the voices that belonged to the rain and the wind and the teeny teeny stars even a small child could blot out with her thumb.

  Published, 1989, in the Proceedings of the Ollantay Center Conference.

  Besides all these versions of Spanish, every once in a while another strange tongue emerged from my papi’s mouth or my mami’s lips. What I first recognized was not a language but a tone of voice, serious, urgent, something important and top secret being said, some uncle in trouble, someone divorcing, someone dead. Say it in English so the children won’t understand. I would listen, straining to understand, thinking that this was not a different language but just another and harder version of Spanish. Say it in English so the children won’t understand. From the beginning English was the sound of worry and secrets, the sound of being left out.

  I could make no sense of this “harder Spanish,” and so I tried by other means to find out what was going on. I knew my mami’s face by heart. When the little lines on the corners of her eyes crinkled, she was amused. When her nostrils flared and she bit her lips, she was trying hard not to laugh. She held her head down, eyes glancing up, when she thought someone was lying. Whenever she spoke that gibberish English, I translated the general content by watching the Spanish expressions on her face.

  Soon, at the Carol Morgan School, I began to learn more English. That is, when I had stopped gawking. The teacher and some of the American children had the strangest coloration: light hair, light eyes, light skin, as if Ursulina had soaked them in bleach too long, to’detenio. I did have some blond cousins, but they had deeply tanned skin, and as they grew older, their hair darkened, so their earlier paleness seemed a phase of their acquiring normal color. Just as strange was the little girl in my reader who had a cat and a dog that looked just like un gatito y un perrito. Her mami was Mother and her papi Father. Why have a whole new language for school and for books with a teacher who could speak it teaching you double the amount of words you really needed?

  Butter, butter, butter, butter. All day, one English word that had particularly struck me would go round and round in my mouth and weave through all the Spanish in my head, until by the end of the day the word did sound like just another Spanish word. And so I would say, “Mami, por favor pasame la butter.” She would scowl and say in English, “Pm sorry, I don’t understand. But would you be needing some butter on your bread?”

  Why my parents didn’t first educate us in our native language by enrolling us in a Dominican school, I don’t know. Part of it was that Mami’s family had a tradition of sending the boys to the States to boarding school and college, and she had been one of the first girls to be allowed to join her brothers. At Abbot Academy, whose school song was our lullaby as babies (“Although Columbus and Cabot never heard of Abbot, it’s quite the place for you and me”), she had become quite Americanized. It was very important, she kept saying, that we learn our English. Always she used the possessive pronoun: your English, an inheritance we had come into and must wisely use. Unfortunately, my English became all mixed up with our Spanish.

  Mixup, or what’s now called Spanglish, was the language we spoke for several years. There wasn’t a sentence that wasn’t colonized by an English word. At school, a Spanish word would suddenly slide into my English like someone butting into line. Mrs. Buchanan, whose face I was learning to read as minutely as my mother’s, would scowl, but no smile played on her lips. Her pale skin made her strange countenance hard to read, so I often misjudged how much I could get away with. Whenever I made a mistake, Mrs. Buchanan would shake her head slowly, “In English, Jew-LEE-AH, there’s no such word as columpio. Do you mean a swing?”

  I would bow my head, embarrassed, humiliated by the smiles and snickers of the American children around me. I grew insecure about Spanish. My native tongue was not quite as good as English, as if words like columpio were illegal immigrants trying to cross a border into another language. But Mrs. Buchanan’s discerning grammar-and-vocabulary-patrol ears could tell and send them back.

  Soon I was talking up an English storm. “Did you eat an English parrot?” my grandfather asked one Sunday. I had just enlisted yet one more patient servant to listen to my rendition of Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers at break-neck pace. “Huh?” I asked impolitely in English, putting him in his place. Cat got your tongue? No big deal, I could quip. So there! Take that! Holy Toledo! (Mrs. Buchanan’s favorite “curse word”). Go jump in the lake! Really dumb. Golly. Gosh. Slang, little tricks, clichés, sayings, hotshot language that our teacher labeled ponderously: idiomatic expressions. Riddles, jokes, puns, conundrums, little exchanges. What is yellow and goes click-click! Why did the chicken cross the road! See you later, Alligator. How wonderful to call someone an alligator and not be scolded for being disrespectful. In fact, they were supposed to say back, In a while, Crocodile.

  There was also a neat little trick I wanted to try on an English-speaking adult at home. I had learned it from Elizabeth, my smart-alecky friend in fourth grade whom I alternately worshipped and resented. I’d ask her a question that required an explanation, and she’d answer, “Because …” “Elizabeth, how come you didn’t go to Isabel’s birthday party?” “Because …” “Why didn’t you put your name in your reader?” “Because …” I thought that such a cool way to get around having to come up with answers. So I practiced saying it under my breath, planning for the day I could use it on an unsuspecting English-speaking adult.

  One Sunday at our extended family dinner, my grandfather sat down at the children’s table to chat with us. He was famous, in fact, for the way he could carry on adult conversations with his grandchildren. He always spoke to us in English so that we could practice speaking it out of the classroom. He was a Cornell man, a world traveler, a United Nations representative from our country. He gave speeches in English. Perfect English, my mother’s phrase. That Sunday, he asked me a question. I can’t even remember what it was be-cause I wasn’t really listening but lying in wait for my cha
nce “Because …,” I answered him, the way Elizabeth said it. Papito waited a second for the rest of my sentence and then gave me a thumbnail grammar lesson: “Because has to be followed by a clause”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, nonplussed.

  “Because,” he winked. “Just because.”

  A beginning wordsmith, I had so much left to learn,; sometimes it was disheartening. Once Tio Gus, the family intellectual, put a tiny grain of salt on my grandparents’ big dining table during Sunday dinner. He said, “Imagine this whole table is the human brain. Then this teensy grain is all we ever use of our intelligence!” His face kept getting redder, his voice louder and louder as he enumerated geniuses who had perhaps used two grains, maybe three. Einstein, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Beethoven. “It’s been scientifically proven,” Tio Gus argued when his older brother told him to stop exaggerating. We children believed him. It was the kind of impossible fact we thrived on, proving as it did that the world out there was not drastically different from the one we were making up in our heads.

  Later, driving home, Mami said to Papi that Manuel was right, their younger brother Gus loved to exaggerate. “You have to take everything he says with a grain of salt,” she concluded. I thought she was still referring to Tio Gus’s demonstration, and I tried to puzzle out what she was saying. Finally, I asked what she meant. “Taking what someone ways with a grain of salt is an idiomatic expression in English,” she explained. It was pure voodoo is what it was—what later I learned poetry could also do: a grain of salt could both symbolize the human brain and be a condiment for human nonsense. And it could be itself too, a grain of salt to flavor a bland plate of American food.

  WHEN I WAS TEN, we emigrated to New York. How astonishing, a country where everyone spoke English! These people must be smarter, I thought. Maids, waiters, taxi drivers, doormen, bums on the street, garbagemen, all spoke this difficult language. It took some time before I understood that Americans were not necessarily a smarter, superior race. It was as natural for them to learn their mother tongue as it was for a little Dominican baby to learn Spanish. It came with mother’s milk, my mother explained, and for a while I thought a mother tongue was a mother tongue because you got it from your mother’s breast, along with nutrients and vitamins.