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

wind the unraveled yam into a ball, stopping now and then to enjoy her story of the mother.
    "For months and months after they met in Pew, they were separated, months and months."
    Sandi rolls her eyes like her mother. She is a remarkably good mimic. Her three sisters laugh.
    "Otto was doing his research in Germany, but he wrote to her every day."
    "Every day!" Fifi laughs. "I wish it had been every day. Sometimes I had to wait weeks between letters."
    "But then," Yolanda says in the ominous voice of a radio melodrama, "then Papi found the letters."
    "Mami didn't mention the letters," Sandi says.
    "The story was short and sweet: He wrote to her every day. Then she went
    to see him last Christmas, then be proposed, and they married this spring, and here they are, parents!"
    "One, two, three, four," Carla says, beginning a countdown.
    Fifi grins. "Stop it," she says. "The baby was born exactly nine months and ten days after the wedding."
    "Thank God for the ten days," Carla says.
    "I like Mami's version of the story," Fifi laughs. "So she didn't bring up the letters?"
    Sandi shakes her head. "Maybe she forgot. You know how she keeps saying she wants to forget the past."
    "Mami remembers everything," Carla disagrees.
    "Well, Papi had no business going through my personal mail." Fifi's voice grows testy.
    The baby stirs on her shoulder. "He claims he was looking for his nailclippers, or something. In my drawers, right?"
    Yolanda mimics their father opening an envelope.
    Her eyes widen in burlesque horror. She clutches her throat. She even puts on a Count Dracula accent to make the moment more dramatic.
    She is not a good mimic.
    "What does this man mean, 'Have you gotten your period yett""
    Sandi choruses:
    "What business is it of Otto's if you've gotten your period or not"
    The baby begins to cry. "Oh honey, it's just a story." Fifi rocks her.

    "We disown you!"
    Sandi mimics their father. "You have dis-Carlo, Yolaada, Sandza, Sofia
    graced the family name. Out of this house!"
    "Out of ouz sight!"
    Yolanda points to the door. Sandi ducks the flailing needles. A ball of white yam rolls across the floor. The two sisters bend over, trying to contain their hilarity.
    "You guys are really getting into this." Fifi stands to walk her wailing baby to sleep. "Nothing like a story to take the sting out of things," she adds cooly.
    "It's not like things are any better between us, you know."
    Her three sisters lift their eyebrows at each other. Their father has not uttered a word since he arrived two days ago. He still has not forgiven Fifi for "going behind the palm trees." When they were younger, the sisters used to joke that they would likelier be virgins than find a palm tree in their neck of the woods.
    "It's hard, I know." As the therapist in the family, Carla likes to be the one who understands.
    "But really, give yourself credit. You've won them over, Fifi, you have. Mami's eating out of your hand with this baby, and Papi's going to come around in time, you'll see. Look, he came, didn't he?"
    "You mean, Mami dragged him here." Fifi looks down fondly at her baby and recovers her good mood. "Well, the baby is beautiful and well, and that's what counts."
    Beautiful and well, Yolanda muses, that's what she had wanted with Clive, all things beautiful and well, instead of their obsessive, consuming passion that left her-each time Clive left her-exhausted and distraught. "I don't understand why he does it,"
    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