Free How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Álvarez Page A

Yo?"
    "Yolanda," Carla corrects her. "She wants to be called Yolandanow."
    "What do you mean,
    wants to be called Yolanda now right-brace That's my name, you know?"
    "Why are you so angry?" Carla's calmness is professional.
    Yolanda rolls her eyes. "Spare me the nickel and dime therapy, thank you."
    Trouble brewing again, Fifi changes the subject. She touches the evolving blanket.
    "It's really beautiful. And the poem you wrote the baby made me cry."
    "So you
    are
    writing!" Carla says. "I know, I know, you don't want to hear about it." Carla makes a peace offering of compliments. "You're so good, Yolanda, really. I've saved all your poems.
    Every time I read something in a magazine, I think, God, Yo's so much better than this! Give yourself credit. You're so hard on yourself."
    Yolanda keeps her mouth shut. She is working on a thought about her bossy older sister: Carla has a tendency to lace all her compliments with calls to self-improvement.
    Give yourself credit, Believe in yourself, Be good to yourself.
    Somehow this makes her praise sound like their mother's old "constructive" criticism.
    Carla turns to Sandi. "Mami says you're seeing someone." The eldest weighs her words carefully. "Is it true?"
    "What of it?" Sandi looks up defensively, and then, realizing her sister means a man, not a therapist, she adds, "He's a nice guy, but, I don't know-was She shrugs. "He was in at the same time I was."
    What was
    he
    in for? hangs in the air-a question that none of her sisters would dare ask.
    "So, tell us about this cute guy at the nursery," Fifi pleads. Each time her sisters seem on the verge of loaded talk, the new mother changes the subject to her favorite topic, her newborn daughter. Every little detail of the baby's being-what she eats, what she poops-seems an evolutionary leap. Surely, not all newboms smile at their mothers? "You met this guy at the nursery?"
    "Me?" Sandi laughs. "You mean Mami. She picks this guy up and invites him for lunch at the hospital coffee shop."

    "Mami is so fresh," Yolanda says.
    She notices she has made a mistake and begins unraveling a lopsided yellow row.
    Fifi pats her baby's back. "And she complains about us!"
    "So we all have lunch together," Sandi continues,
    "and Mami can't shut up about how God brought you and Otto together from opposite ends of the earth in Peru."
    "God?" Carla screws up her face.
    "Peru?" Fifi's face mirrors her sister's scowl. "I've never been to Peru. We met in Colombia."
    "In Mami's version of the story, you met in Peru," Sandi says. "And you fell in love at first sight."
    "And made love the first night," Carla teases.
    The four girls laugh. "Except that part isn't in Mami's version."
    "I've heard so many versions of that story," Sandi says, "I don't know which one is true anymore."
    "Neither do I," Fifi says, laughing. "Otto says we probably
    Carlo, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofia
    met in a New Jersey Greyhound
    Station, but we've heard all these exciting stories about how we met in Brazil or Colombia or Peru that we got to believing them."
    "So was it the first night?" Yolanda asks, her needles poised midair.
    "I heard the first night," Carla says.
    Sandi narrows her eyes. "I heard it was a week or so after you guys met."
    The baby burps. The four girls look at each other and laugh. "Actually"-Fifi calculates by lifting her fingers one by one from the baby's back, then patting them down-"it was the fourth night. But I knew the minute I saw him."
    "That you loved him?" Yolanda asks. Fifi nods. Since Clive left, Yolanda is addicted to love stories with happy endings, as if there were a stitch she missed, a mistake she made way back when she fell in love with her first man, and if only she could find it, maybe she could undo it, unravel John, Brad, Steven, Rudy, and start over.
    In the pause before someone picks up the thread of conversation, they all listen to the baby's soft breathing.
    "Anyhow, Mami tells this guy about your long correspondence." Sandi helps Yolanda