How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (9 page)

she tells her sisters out loud.

"Old world stuff," Carla says. "You know he got a heavier dose than Mami."

Sandi looks at Yolanda; she understood whom Yolanda

meant. She tries to lighten her sister's dark mood. "Look, if beefcake's not your thing, there's a lot of fish out there," she says. "I just wish that cute guy hadn't been married."

"What cute guy?" Carla asks her.

"What guy?" the mother asks. She is standing at the entrance to the living room, buttoning down a multicolored, flowered houserobe. It is a habit of hers from their childhood to buy rainbow clothes for herself so none of the girls can accuse her of playing favorites.

"The guy you picked up at the hospital,"

Sandi teases.

"What do you mean,

picked up right-brace

He was a nice young man, and it just so happens that he had a baby daughter born the same time as my little Cuquita." The mother puts out her arms. "Come here, Cuca," she croons, taking the baby from Fifi's hands. She clucks into the blanket.

Sandi shakes her head. "God! You sound like a goddamn zoo."

"Your language," the mother scolds absently, and then, as if the words were an endearment, she coos them at her granddaughter, "your language."

The men trail in slowly for breakfast. First, the father, who nods grimly at all the well-wishing.

He is followed by Otto, who wishes everyone a merry Christmas. With his white-gold eyebrows and whiskers and beard, and plump, good-natured, reddish face, Otto looks very much like a young Santa Claus. The analyst shuffles in last. "Look at all those women," he whistles.

The mother is walking her granddaughter up and down the length of the room.

Caila, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia

"Just look at them." Otto grins. "A vision!

What the three kings saw!"

"Four girls," the father murmurs.

"Five," the analyst corrects, winking at the mother.

"Six," the mother corrects him, nodding towards the bundle in her arms. "Six of us," she says to the baby. "And I was sure of it! Why, a week before you were born, I had the strangest dream. We were all living on a farm, and a bull..."

The room is hushed with sleepiness. Everyone listens to the mother.

Joe

VAVAVAVAVAVATATAVATAVATATATATAYATIIIYA tay

Yolanda

y

olanda, nicknamed Yo in Spanish, misunderstood foe

in English, doubled and pronounced like the toy, Yoyo comor when forced to select from a rack of personalized key chains,

Joey-

stands at the third-story window watching less-than i man walk across the lawn with a tennis racket. He touches the border of the shrubbery with the rim of his racket and sets one or two wild irises nodding.

"Don't," Yo mumbles to herself at the window, outlining her hairline with a contemplative index finger. It is her secret pride: Her hair grows to a point on her forehead, arches up, semicircling her face, a perfect heart.

"Don't disturb the flowers, Doc." She wags her finger at his thumb-sized back.

The man stops. He throws an imaginary ball in the air and serves it to the horizon. The horizon misses. He walks on towards it and the tennis courts.

He is dressed in white shorts and a white shirt, an outfit which makes

him

look like a boy... a good boy... the only son of monied, unloving tycoons. Both of them are tycoons, Yo posits. Daddy Coon is a Fruit of the Loom tycoon. The band on her underwear squeezes gently.

Mama Coon is-Yo looks around the room-scarf, mirror, soap, umbrella-

an umbrella tycoon. A dark cloud rolls lazily towards her in the sky. The ghost of the tennis ball is coming to haunt the man. Yo smiles, appreciating her charms.

An umbrella tycoon will never do. One more turn around the room:

typewriter, red satchel-

nice sound to that. But he isn't a red satchel tycoon. A breeze blows the white curtains in on either side of her, two ghostly arms embracing her. A room tycoon....

The world is sweetly new and just created. The first man walks in the garden on his way to a tennis date. Yo stands at the third-story window and kisses her fingers and blows him the kiss. "Kiss, kiss," she hisses from the window. She wishes: Let him rip off his white shirt, push back the two halves of his chest like Superman prying open a door and let the first woman out.

Eve is lovely, a valentine hairline, white gossamer panties.

"In the beginning," Yo begins, inspired by perspective. Four floors down, her doctor, shrunk to child size, sits on the lawn. "In the beginning, Doc, I loved John."

She recognizes the unmistakable signs of a flashback: a woman at a window, a woman with a past, with memory and desire and wreckage in her heart. She will let herself have them today. She can't: help herself anyway.

In the beginning, we were in love. Yo smiles.

That was a good beginning. He came to my door. I opened it. My eyes asked,

Would you like to come in out of the rest of the world!

He answered,

Thank you very much, just what I had on the tip of my tongue.

It was at the beginning of time, and a river ran outside Yo's window, bordered by cypresses, willows, great sweating ferns, thick stalks and palms.

Huge creatures of the imagination scuttled across the muddy bottom of the river. At night as the lovers lay in bed and connected the stars into rams and crabs and twins, they heard the barks and howls of the happy mating beasts.

"I love you," John said, rejoicing, tricked by the barks and the howls.

But Yolanda was afraid. Once they got started on words, there was no telling what they could say.

"I love you," John repeated, so she would follow suit.

Yolanda kissed each eye closed, hoping that would do.

"Do you love me, Joe? Do you?" he pleaded.

He wanted words back; nothing else would do.

Yo complied. "I love you too."

"I'll always love you!" he said, splurging.

"Marry me, marry me."

A beast howled from the river. The ram galloped away from the sky, startled by human sound.

"One." John bowed Yolanda's thumb towards him. "Two." He folded up the index finger.

"Three." He kissed the nail. "All you need is love," the radio wailed, as if it were hungry.

"Four," she joined in, bending her fourth finger.

"Five," they chimed in unison.

His hand met hers, palm to palm, as if they were sharing a prayer.

"Love," the song snarled, starved. "Love...

love..."

"John, John, you're a pond!"

Yolanda teased, straddling him by Merritt Pond.

John was lying on his back; he had just said that when you look up at the sky, you realize nothing that you ever do really matters.

"John's a hon, lying by the pond, having lots of fun," Yolanda punned, nuzzling the hollow of his shoulder.

He stroked her back. "And you're a little squirrel! You know that?"

Yolanda sat up. "Squirrel doesn't rhyme," she explained. "The point's to rhyme with my name."

"Joe-lan-dah?" He quibbled, "What rhymes with Joe-lan-dah?"

"So use Joe.

Doe, roe, buffalo,"

she rhymed. "Okay, now, you try it." She spoke in the voice she had learned from her mother when she wanted a second helping of the good things in life.

"My dear Joe," John began, but put on the spot, he was blocked for a rhyme. He hemmed, he hawed, he guffawed. Finally, he blahhed:

"My dear, sweet little squirrel, you mean more to me than all the gold in the world." He grinned at his inadvertent rhyme.

Yo sat up again. "C minus!" She rolled away from him onto the grass. "Where'd you learn to talk Hallmark?"

Hurt, John stood and brushed off his pants as if the grass spears were little annoying bits of Yo.

"Not everyone can be as goddam poetic as you!"

She nibbled all up his leg in playful apology.

John pulled her up by the shoulders.

"Squirrel." He forgave her.

She winced. Anything but a squirrel. Her shoulders felt furry. "Can I be something else?"

"Sure!" He swept his hand across the earth as if he owned it all: "What do you want to be?"

She turned away from him and scanned the horizon:

trees, rocks, lake, grass, weeds, flowers, birds, sky.

...

His hand came from behind her; it owned her shoulder.

"Sky," she tried. Then, the saying of it made it right: "Sky, I want to be the sky."

"That's not allowed." He turned her around to face him. His eyes, she noticed for the first time, were the same shade of blue as the sky. "Your own rules: you've got to rhyme with your name."

"still"-she pointed to herself-"rhymes with the sky!"

"But not with

Joe!"

John wagged his finger at her. His eyes softened with desire. He placed his mouth over her mouth and ohhed her lips open.

"Yo rhymes with

cielo

in Spanish." Yo's words fell into the dark, mute cavern of John's mouth.

Cielo, cielo,

the word echoed. And Yo was running, like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue, where the proudly monolingual John could not catch her, even if he tried.

"What you need is a goddam shrink!" John's words threw themselves off the tip of his tongue like suicides.

She said what if she did, he didn't have to call them

shrinks.

"Shrink," he said. "Shrink, shrink."

She said that just because they were different, that was no reason to make her feel crazy for being her own person.

He was just as crazy as she was if push came to shove. My God! she thought. I'm starting to talk like him! Push comes to shove! She laughed, still half in love with him. "Okay, okay," she conceded.

"We're both crazy. So, let's both go see a shrink." She winced, taking on his language only to convince him.

He shoved her peacemaking hand away. She was the one who was crazy, remember? No way he was going to go be shrunk.

She kissed him in silent persuasion, but she could tell he wasn't convinced.

"I love you. Isn't that enough?" he resisted.

"I love you more than it's good for me."

"See! You're the one who's crazy!" she teased.

Already she had begun to mistrust him.

Because his pencils were always sharpened, his clothes always folded before lovemaking. Because he put his knife between the tines of his caret fork between mouthfuls of the dishes she made that were always just this side of tasting like they were supposed to-the lasagna like fried eggs, the pudding like frosting. Because he accused her of eating her own head by thinking so much about what people said. Because he believed in the Real World, more than words, more than he believed in her.

But this time it was because he made for-and-against lists before doing anything, and she had discovered the for-and-against-slash-Joe-slash-wife list. Number one

for

was

intelligent right-brace

number one

against

was

too much for her own good.

Number two stor was

exciting-,

number two against was crazy, question mark.

"What does this mean?" She met him at the door with the sheet of his calculations in her hand.

"What's that, Violet?" He had named her Violet after

shrinking

violet when she had started seeing Dr. Payne.

John balked the first time Yo told him the doctor's name and fees. "A pain in the bloody pocket all right!" His name became a joke between them. But secretly for luck, Yo called Payne, Doc.

"What the hell you have to make a list of the pros and cons of marrying me for?" Yo followed John into their bedroom, where he began to undress.

"Come on, Violet-was

"Stop violeting me! I hate it when you do that."

"Roses are red, violets are blue," he recited, instead of counting to ten so as not to have two lost tempers in one room.

"You really had to

decide

you loved me?" She read the pro and then the con list out loud, shaking her head as she did so, ducking whenever John grabbed for his list. "Looks to me like the cons have it. Why'd you marry me?"

"My way is to make lists. I could say the same thing to you about words-was

"Words?" She swatted him with his paper. "Words?

Wasn't I the one always saying, Don't say it. Don't say itf

I was the one who tried to keep words out of it."

"I made a list because I was confused. Yes, me, confused!"

John reached for her arm, more as a test of her temper than a touch of desire. She could tell the difference and pushed the hand away.

"Ah, come on, Joe," he said, his voice softening; he folded his tie ruler-size; he dressed the chair-back with his jacket.

She said no as sweetly as if it were yes.

"Nooooh," the word opening her mouth, soft and ripe and ready for him to bite into it.

"Come on, sweetie, tell us what's for supper?" he coaxed. He took her hands and led her towards him.

"Sugared spaghetti with glazed meatballs and honeydew spinach. Sweetie," she taunted, tugging away in play.

He drew her towards him, in play, and pressed his lips on her lips.

Her lips tightened. She set her teeth, top on bottom row, a calcium fortress.

He pulled her forward. She opened her mouth to yell,

No, no!

He pried his tongue between her lips, pushing her words back in her throat.

She swallowed them: No, no.

They beat against her stomach: No, no. They pecked at her ribs: No, no.

"No!" she cried.

"It's just a kiss, Joe. A kiss, for Christ's sake!" John shook her. "Control yourself!"

"Nooooooo!" she screamed, pushing him off everything she knew.

He let her go.

John and Yo were lying in bed with the lights off because it was too hot to have them on or to be afoot. John's hand slipped down to her hips, beating a beat.

"It's too hotst" Yo said, silencing it.

He tried to humor her, playing on a new nickname. "Not tonight, Josephine?" He turned on his side to face her and outlined her features in the dark. He traced the heart line from her chin to her forehead and down again. He kissed her chin to seal the valentine. "Beautiful. Do you know your face is a perfect