How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (11 page)

"Blue."

She searches for the right word to follow the blue of blue. "Cry... why... sky

..." She gains faith as she says each word, and dares further:

"World . .. squirrel. .

. rough . . . tough . ..

love . . . enough..."

The words tumble out, making a sound like the rumble of distant thunder, taking shape, depth, and substance.

Yo continues:

"Doc, rock, smock, luck,"

so many words. There is no end to what can be said about the world.

The Rudy Elmenhurst Story

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Yolanda

W

e took turns being the wildest. First one, then another, of us would confess our sins on vacation nights after the parents went to bed, and we had double-checked the hall to make sure there were "no Moors on the coast," an Island expression for the coast being clear. Baby Sister Fifi held that title the longest, though Sandi, with her good looks and many opportunities, gave her some competition. Several times Carla, the responsible eldest, did something crazy. But she always claimed she had done whatever it was she'd done to gain ground for us all. So her reigns of error smacked of good intentions and were never as juicy as Fifi's. To our

"Wow, Fifi, how could you?!" Fifi gave us bad-girl grins and the catchphrase from the Alka-Seltzer commercial, "Try it, you'll like it!"

For a brief few giddy years, I was the one with the reputation among my sisters of being the wild one. I suppose it all started at boarding school when I began getting lots of callers, and though none of these beaus lasted long enough to even

be called relationships, my sisters mistook volume for vamp-ishness. Back in those days I had what one teacher called "a vivacious personality." I had to look up the word in the dictionary and was relieved to find out it didn't mean I had problems. English was then still a party favor for me-crack open the dictionary, find out if I'd just been insulted, praised, admonished, criticized. Those shy prep school guys at mixers with their endearing long hands and blushing complexions, I could make them laugh. I could make them believe they had really engaged a girl in conversation. There wasn't a Saturday afternoon or Sunday after morning service that I didn't have callers. A bunch of guys from our brother school would come down the hill and hang out in our parlor to get away from their dormitories, maybe sneaking a cigarette or a swig from a flask on the walk over. At our front desk, they had to give a girl's name, and quite a few gave mine. This had nothing to do with my being attractive in any remarkable way. This was vivaciousness through and through.

When I went away to college, my

vivaciousness ultimately worked against me. I'd meet someone, conversation would flow, they'd come calling, but pretty soon afterwards, just as my heart was beginning to throw out little tendrils of attachment, they'd leave.

I couldn't keep them interested. Why I couldn't keep them interested was pretty simple: I wouldn't sleep with them. By the time I went to college, it was the late sixties, and everyone was sleeping around as a matter of principle. By then, I was a lapsed Catholic,- my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn't have a good excuse. Why I didn't just sleep with someone

as

persistent as Rudy Elmenhurst is a mystery I'm exploring here by picking it apart the way we learned to do to each other's poems and stories in the English class where I met Rudolf

Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third.

Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, didn't show up until ten minutes or so into the class. I, on the other hand, had been the first to arrive, selecting a place around the seminar table close to the door, but unfortunately since the table was round, equally exposed. Others strolled in, the English jocks at the school. I knew they were special from their jeans and T-shirts, their knowing, ironic looks when obscure works of literature were referred to. The girls didn't all knit during class like education and socio majors. I'd already been writing on my own for a while, but this was my first English class since I'd talked my parents into letting me transfer to this co-ed college last fall.

At my place around the seminar table I unpacked my notebook and every one of the required and recommended texts which I had already bought, stacking them in front of me like my credentials. Most of the other students were too cool to have done anything hasty like purchase the books for the course. The professor walked in, a young guy in a turtleneck and jacket, the uniform of the

with it

professors of the day; he had that edge of the untenured, too eager, too many handouts, too many please feel frees

on his syllabus, a home number as well as an office number. He called roll, acknowledging most of the other students with nicknames and jokes and remarks, stumbling over my name and smiling falsely at me, a smile I had identified as one flashed on "foreign students" to show them the natives were friendly. I felt profoundly out of place. The only person I seemed to have anything in common with was the absent Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third, who also had an odd name and who was out of it because he wasn't there.

We were into the logistics of how to make copies for workshops when a young man walked in, late. He was one of those guys who has just come through a bout of adolescent acne into a scarred, masculine, bad-boy face. A guy to be passed over by the beauties in our class looking for sweethearts.

He had an ironic smile on his lips, and-a phrase I haven't heard in a while-bedroom eyes. A guy who would break your heart. But you wouldn't know all this if you went by the sound of his name-which I did, an immigrant's failing, literalism.

I assumed he was late because he'd just whizzed in from his small barony somewhere in Austria.

The professor stopped the class. "Rudolf Brodermann Elmen-hurst, the third, I presume?" Everybody laughed, this guy too. I admired that from the start, to be able to make such an entrance without blushing and stumbling and arraying the floor with your books and the contents of your pocketbook. He could take a joke, and put on such an ironic self-assured face no one felt bad laughing.

The guy looked around and there was a space next to the territory I'd carved out for myself on the table with my pile of books. He came and sat down. I could tell he was looking me over, probably wondering who the hell I was, this intruder upon the sanctuary of English majors.

Class resumed. The professor

started explaining again about what all he expected from us in the course. Later, he asked us to write down a response to a little poem he passed around. This guy with a name like a title leaned over and asked if I could lend him a piece of paper and a pen. I felt honored to be the one asked. I tore some pages out of my notebook, then rummaged in my pocketbook for another pen.

I looked up with a sorry-eyed expression. "I don't have an extra pen," I whispered, complete sentences for whispers, that's what tells you I was still a greenhorn in this culture. This guy looked at me as if he didn't give a damn about a pen, and I was a fool to think so. It was such an intense look, I felt myself coloring. "That's okay,"

he mouthed, without really using his voice so I had to lip-read, his full lips puckering as if he were throwing little kisses at me. If I'd known what sexy feelings felt like I would have identified the shiver going down my spine and into my legs. He turned to his other neighbor, who didn't have a pen either. The word went round. Anyone have an extra pen?

No one. There was a dearth of pens that day in class.

I sunk my hand back into my pocketbook. I was the proverbially overprepared student; I had to have a standby writing utensil. I felt something promising at the bottom of my purse and pulled it out: it was a teensy pencil from a monogrammed set my mother had given me for Christmas: a box of pencils "my color," red, and inscribed with my so-called name in gold letters:

Jolinda.

(my mother had tried for my own name Yolanda, but the company had substituted the Americanized, southernized

Jolinda. right-brace Jolinda,

that's what this pencil used to say. In fact, it was so worn down, only the hook of the still was left. We didn't throw things away in my family. I used both sides of a piece of paper. I handed my find over to this guy. He

took it and held it up as if to say, "What have we here?" His buddies around us chuckled. I felt shabby for having saved a pencil through so many sharpenings.

At the end of class, I fled before he could turn around and give it back to me.

That night there was a knock on my door. I was in my nightgown already, doing our assignment, a love poem in the form of a sonnet. I'd been reading it out loud pretty dramatically, trying to get the accents right, so I felt embarrassed to be caught. I asked who it was.

I didn't recognize the name. Rudy? "The guy who borrowed your pencil," the voice said through the closed door. Strange, I thought, ten-thirty at night. I hadn't caught on yet to some of the strategies. "Did I wake you up?" he wanted to know when I opened the door. "No, no," I said, laughing apologetically. This guy I had sworn never to talk to after he had embarrassed me in class, but my politeness-training ran on automatic. I excused myself for not asking him in.

"I'm doing my homework." That wasn't an excuse in the circles he ran in. We stood at the door a long moment, he looking over my shoulder into my room for an invitation. "I just came to return your pencil." He held it out, a small red stub in his palm. "Just to return that?" I said, calling his bluff. He grinned, dimples making parenthesis at the corners of his lips as if his smile were a secret between us. "Yeah," he said, and again he had that intent look in his eye, and again he looked over my shoulder. I picked the pencil out of his palm and was glad it had been sharpened to a stub so he couldn't see my name in gold letters inscribed on the side. "Thank you," I said, shifting my weight on my feet and touching the door knob, little moves, polite preliminaries to closing the door.

He spoke up. "Can we have lunch sometime?"

"Sure, we can have lunch, sometime." The way I emphasized

sometime

it was hopeless. I didn't trust this guy, I didn't know how to read him. I had nothing in my vocabulary of human behavior to explain him.

Ten minutes late to the first meeting of a class. I knock myself out to get him a pencil and he makes fun. Ten-thirty, he shows up at my door to return it, and asks me to have lunch with him.

"How about tomorrow before class," Rudy said.

"We don't have class tomorrow."

"That gives us time for a long lunch," he answered, real quick on his feet. I couldn't help being impressed. "Okay," I said, shaking my head. "Tomorrow, lunch."

We had lunch the next day, talked until supper, and then had supper. That's the way I remember relationships starting in college-those obsessive marathon beginnings. It was hard to go back to your little dorm room and do your homework after having been so absorbed in someone else. But that's just what I did, I went back and worked on my sonnet. It was a fourteen-line treatise on the nature of love, but the whole time I was writing down my abstractions, I was thinking about how Rudy listened, looking at my mouth, so that it was hard for me to pay attention to what I was saying. How he puckered his lips as if he were kissing each word goodbye. How his hand had touched the small of my back to steer me through a crowd of rowdy frat guys in the dining room. If we admire some people for their originality with words, others for their quirky interesting minds, then Rudy had to be admired for his sexy, instinctive way with his body. He was the kind of guy who could

kiss you behind your ear and make you feel like you'd just had kinky sex.

The next day Rudy didn't turn in his sonnet.

After class, while I packed up my luggage of schoolbooks, I heard him talking to the professor how he'd gotten stuck and couldn't think of anything. The professor was likable, it was the sixties, not having your creative juices flowing was understandable. Rudy could have until Monday to turn in his sonnet. We spent most of the weekend together, writing it, actually me writing down lines and crossing them off when they didn't scan or rhyme, and Rudy coming up with the ideas. It was the first pornographic poem I'd ever co-written; of course I didn't know it was pornographic until Rudy explained to me all the word plays and double meanings. "The coming of the spring upon the boughs," was the last line. That meant spring was ejaculating green leaves on the trees,- the new crocuses were standing stiff on the lawn on account of they were turned on.

I was shocked by all of this. I was a virgin; I wasn't one hundred per cent sure how sex worked.

That anyone should put all of this into a poem, a place I'd reserved for deep feelings and lofty sentiments! I wonder now how much of Rudy's gutsiness was a veiled flirtation with me, who was obviously much taken with words and their meanings. I can't say; like I said, I hadn't learned yet some of the strategies one went through. But I was catching on.

I remember the close of each of those weekend nights as a prolonged farewell. It would start by my noting the time, midnight, one, one-thirty, and saying, "Well, I'm going to bed."

Rudy would concur, "Me too," but then, he wouldn't move

from his place at the foot of my bed next to my desk where I sat writing. It was a teensy dorm room. If you stood up to open the closet, you'd have to negotiate the desk so you wouldn't end up piled on the bed. "Me too." He smiled that ironic smile of his that always made me feel so foolish.

Finally, I would just blurt out, "You've got to go, Rudy." He wouldn't say yes or no, or sorry to have stayed too long. He would just look at me with those bedroom eyes, and stand, as if he wasn't going out the door but coming-in both the old sense of the word and the new I had just learned-coming in from the cold outside for a night of lovemaking with his lady-lay. We stood at the door. Then he leaned over and kissed me behind the ear for goodbye.