How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Read online

  During his two visits, the grandfather had stood guard by the crib all day, speaking to little Carlos. “Charles the Fifth; Charles Dickens; Prince Charles.” He enumerated the names of famous Charleses in order to stir up genetic ambition in the boy. “Charlemagne,” he cooed at him also, for the baby was large and big-boned with blond fuzz on his pale pink skin, and blue eyes just like his German father’s. All the grandfather’s Caribbean fondness for a male heir and for fair Nordic looks had surfaced. There was now good blood in the family against a future bad choice by one of its women.

  “You can be president, you were born here,” the grandfather crooned. “You can go to the moon, maybe even to Mars by the time you are of my age.”

  His macho babytalk brought back Sofía’s old antagonism towards her father. How obnoxious for him to go on and on like that while beside him stood his little granddaughter, wide-eyed and sad at all the things her baby brother, no bigger than one of her dolls, was going to be able to do just because he was a boy. “Make him stop, please,” Sofia asked her husband. Otto was considered the jolly, good-natured one among the brothers-in-law. “The camp counselor,” his sisters-in-law teased. Otto approached the grandfather. Both men looked fondly down at the new Viking.

  “You can be as great a man as your father,” the grandfather said. This was the first compliment the father-in-law had ever paid any son-in-law in the family. There was no way Otto was going to mess with the old man now. “He is a good boy, is he not, Papi?” Otto’s German accent thickened with affection. He clapped his hand on his father-in-law’s shoulders. They were friends now.

  But though the father had made up with his son-in-law, there was still a strain with his own daughter. When he had come to visit, she embraced him at the door, but he stiffened and politely shrugged her off. “Let me put down these heavy bags, Sofia.” He had never called her by her family pet name, Fifi, even when she lived at home. He had always had problems with his maverick youngest, and her running off hadn’t helped. “I don’t want loose women in my family,” he had cautioned all his daughters. Warnings were delivered communally, for even though there was usually the offending daughter of the moment, every woman’s character could use extra scolding.

  His daughters had had to put up with this kind of attitude in an unsympathetic era. They grew up in the late sixties. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered political acts against the military-industrial complex. But standing up to their father was a different matter altogether. Even as grown women, they lowered their voices in their father’s earshot when alluding to their bodies’ pleasure. Professional women, too, all three of them, with degrees on the wall!

  Sofía was the one without the degrees. She had always gone her own way, though she downplayed her choices, calling them accidents. Among the four sisters, she was considered the plain one, with her tall, big-boned body and large-featured face. And yet, she was the one with “non-stop boyfriends,” her sisters joked, not without wonder and a little envy. They admired her and were always asking her advice about men. The third daughter had shared a room with Sofía growing up. She liked to watch her sister move about their room, getting ready for bed, brushing and arranging her hair in a clip before easing herself under the sheets as if someone were waiting for her there. In the dark, Fifi gave off a fresh, wholesome smell of clean flesh. It gave solace to the third daughter, who was always so tentative and terrified and had such troubles with men. Her sister’s breathing in the dark room was like having a powerful, tamed animal at the foot of her bed ready to protect her.

  The youngest daughter had been the first to leave home. She had dropped out of college, in love. She had taken a job as a secretary and was living at home because her father had threatened to disown her if she moved out on her own. On her vacation she went to Colombia because her current boyfriend was going, and since she couldn’t spend an overnight with him in New York, she had to travel thousands of miles to sleep with him. In Bogotá, they discovered that once they could enjoy the forbidden fruit, they lost their appetite. They broke up. She met a tourist on the street, some guy from Germany, just like that. The woman had not been without a boyfriend for more than a few days of her adult life. They fell in love.

  On her way home, she tossed her diaphragm in the first bin at Kennedy Airport. She was taking no chances. But the father could tell. For months, he kept an eye out. First chance he got, he went through her drawers “looking for my nail clippers,” and there he found her packet of love letters. The German man’s small, correct handwriting mentioned unmentionable things—bed conversations were recreated on the thin blue sheets of aerogramme letters.

  “What is the meaning of this?” The father shook the letters in her face. They had been sitting around the table, the four sisters, gabbing, and the father had come in, beating the packet against his leg like a whip, the satin hair ribbon unraveling where he had untied it, and then wrapped it round and round in a mad effort to contain his youngest daughter’s misbehavior.

  “Give me those!” she cried, lunging at him.

  The father raised his hand with the letters above both their heads like the Statue of Liberty with her freedom torch, but he had forgotten this was the daughter who was as tall as he was. She clawed his arm down and clutched the letters to herself as if they were her babe he’d plucked from her breast. It seemed a biological rather than a romantic fury.

  After his initial shock, the father regained his own fury. “Has he deflowered you? That’s what I want to know. Have you gone behind the palm trees? Are you dragging my good name through the dirt, that is what I would like to know!” The father was screaming crazily in the youngest daughter’s face, question after question, not giving the daughter a chance to answer. His face grew red with fury, but hers was more terrible in its impassivity, a pale ivory moon, pulling and pulling at the tide of his anger, until it seemed he might drown in his own outpouring of fury.

  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, Sofía 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 eye-balls.

  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,” Sofía answered. Just like that on a snowy night someone at his door and a cold draft c
oming in. “I couldn’t let her freeze,” Otto boasted later.

  “Like hell you couldn’t!” Sofía 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 Sofía 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 “Sofía” 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 Sofía and her sisters tried to engage him in conversation. Banishment was better than this cold shoulder. But Sofía 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 now his seventieth birthday was coming up, and he had agreed to have the celebration at Sofía’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 Sofía had managed to have the husbands included this year. The husbands are coming, the husbands are coming, the sisters joked. Sofía 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. Sofía 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, Sofía 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 too 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 HI 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 Sofía had boasted the third oldest would be. Most of these friends were half in love with Sofía 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 any-more? 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 se
e 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, blind-folded 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.