How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez

Joe

 

Yolanda

Yolanda, nicknamed Yo in Spanish, misunderstood joe in English, doubled and pronounced like the toy, Yoyo—or when forced to select from a rack of personalized key chains, joey—stands at the third-story window watching a 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.”

“I“—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 con-ceded. “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 fork between mouthfuls of the dishes she made that were always just this side of not 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) number one against was too much for her own good. Number two for 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—”

“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—”

“Words?” She swatted him with his paper. “Words? Wasn’t I the one always saying, Don’t say it. Don’t say it! 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 hot,” 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 out-lined 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 heart?” He discovered this every time he wanted to make love to her.

The valentine was too hot. “I’m sweating,” it moaned. “Don’t.”

The hand wouldn’t listen. The middle finger traced a heart on her lips. The pinkie shaped a heart on the fleshiness above her right breast.

“Please, John!” His fingertips felt like rolling beads of sweat.

“John, please,” he echoed. He printed J-o-h-n on her right breast with a sticky finger as if he were branding her his.

“John! It’s too hot.” She appealed to his common sense.

“John, it’s too hot,” he whined. The combination of heat and thwarted desire made him nasty.

She stoppered his mouth with her hand. He ignored the violence in the gesture and kissed her moist palm. His eyes lidded with hopefulness, he rolled towards her, his body making a sucking sound as it unglued itself from the bare mattress. The sheets had drooped from their hospital corners; they wilted onto the floor.

John’s right hand played piano on her ribs, and his mouth blew a piccolo on her breasts.

“Shit!” she yelled at him, leaping out of bed. “Fuck!” He had forced her to say her least favorite word in the world. She would never ever forgive him for that.

“Ever?” he said, angrily grabbing for her arm in the dark.

“Ever?”

Her heart folded, flattened, folded again. The halves fluttered, blinked and opened. Her heart lifted up to the cloud-flowers in the sky.

“Ever!” She slapped him with the sound. “Ever! Ever!” She wished she had her clothes on. It was strange to make absolute statements in the nude.

He came home with a bouquet of flowers that she knew he had paid too much for. They were blue, and she guessed they were irises. Irises was her favorite name for flowers, so they had to be irises.

But as he handed them to her, she could not make out his words.

They were clean, bright sounds, but they meant nothing to her.

“What are you trying to say?” she kept asking. He spoke kindly, but in a language she had never heard before.

She pretended she understood. She took a big smell of the flowers. “Thank you, love.” At the word love, her hands itched so fiercely that she was afraid she would drop the flowers.

He said something happily, again in sounds she could not ascribe meanings to.

“Come on, love,” she asked his eyes; she spoke precisely as if she were talking to a foreigner or a willful child. “John, can you understand me?” She nodded her head to let him know that he should answer her by nodding his head if words failed him.

He shook his head, No.

She held him steady with both hands as if she were trying to nail him down into her world. “John!” she pleaded. “Please, love!”

He pointed to his ears and nodded. Volume wasn’t the problem. He could hear her. “Babble babble.” His lips were slow motion on each syllable.

He is saying I love you, she thought! “Babble,” she mimicked him. “Babble babble babble babble.” Maybe that meant, I love you too, in whatever tongue he was speaking.

He pointed to her, to himself. “Babble?”

She nodded wildly. Her valentine hairline, the heart in her ribs and all the ones on her sleeves twinkled like the pinchers of the crab in the sky. Maybe now they could start over, in silence.

When she left her husband, Yo wrote a note, I’m going to my folks till my head-slash-heart clear. She revised the note: I’m needing some space, some time, until my head-slash-heart-slash-soul—No, no, no, she didn’t want to divide herself any-more, three persons in one Yo.

John, she began, then she jotted a little triangle before John. Dear, she wrote on a slant. She had read in a handwriting analysis book that this was the style of the self-assured. Dear John, listen, we both know it’s not working.

“It’s?” he would ask. “It’s, meaning what?”

Yo crossed the vague pronoun out.

We are not working. You know it, I know it, we both know it, oh John, John, John. Her hand kept writing, automatically, until the page was filled with the dark ink of his name. She tore the note up and confettied it over her head, a rainfall of John’s. She wrote him a short memo, Gone—then added—to my folks. She thought of signing it, Yolanda, but her real name no longer sounded like her own, so instead she scribbled his name for her, Joe.

Her parents were worried. She talked too much, yakked all the time. She talked in her sleep, she talked when she ate de-spite twenty-seven years of teaching her to keep her mouth shut when she chewed. She talked in comparisons, she spoke in riddles.

She ranted, her mother said to her father. Her father coughed, upset. She quoted famous lines of poetry and the opening sentences of the classics. How could anyone remember so much? her mother asked her sullen father. She was carried away with the sound of her voice, her mother diagnosed.

She quoted Frost; she misquoted Stevens; she paraphrased Rilke’s description of love.

“Can you hear me!” Doctor Payne held his hands up to his mouth like a megaphone and made believe he was yelling over a great distance. “Can you hear me?”

She quoted to him from Rumi; she sang what she knew of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” mixing it up with “Baa Baa, Black Sheep.”

The doctor thought it best if she checked into a small, private facility where he could keep an eye on her. For her own good: round-the-clock care; nice grounds; arts and crafts classes; tennis courts; a friendly, unintimidating staff, no one in a uniform. Her parents signed the papers—“For your own good,” they quoted the nice doctor to her. Her mother held her while a nurse camouflaged in street clothes filled a syringe. Yo quoted from Don Quijote in the original; she translated the passage on prisoners into instantaneous English.

The nurse stung her with an injection of tears. Yo went quiet for the first time in months, then burst into tears. The nurse rubbed a tiny cloud on her arm. “Please, honey, don’t cry,” her mother pleaded with her.

“Let her cry,” the doctor advised. “It’s a good sign, a very good sign.”

“Tears, tears,” Joe said, reciting again, “tears from the depths of some profound despair.”

“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, coaching the alarmed parents. “It’s just a poem.”

“But men die daily for lack of what is found there,” Yo quoted and misquoted, drowning in the flooded streams of her consciousness.

The signs got better. Yo fantasized about Doc. He would save her body-slash-mind-slash-soul by taking all the slashes out, making her one whole Yolanda. She talked to him about growth and fear and the self in transition and women’s spiritual quest. She told him everything except that she was falling in love with him.

Was she ready for her parents? he asked.

Ready for her parents, she echoed.

Her parents stepped into the room, staging happiness. They tested her with questions about the food, the doctor, the weather, and the tile ashtray she had made in arts and crafts therapy.

She offered it to her mother.

Her mother cried. “I shouldn’t cry.”

“It’s a good sign,” Yo said, quoting Doc, then caught herself. Quoting others again, a bad sign.

Her father moved to the window and checked the sky. “When are you coming home?” the back asked Yo.

“Whenever she’s ready to!” Her mother parted the hair from Yo’s forehead.

And the valentine appeared again on the earth.

“I love you guys,” Yo improvised. So what if her first original words in months were the most hackneyed. They were her own truth. “I do, I do,” she singsang. Her mother looked a little worried as if she had bitten into something sour she had thought would be sweet.

“What happened, Yo?” her mother asked the hand she was patting a little later. “We thought you and John were so happy.”

“We just didn’t speak the same language,” Yo said, simplifying.

“Ay, Yolanda.” Her mother pronounced her name in Spanish, her pure, mouth-filling, full-blooded name, Yolanda. But then, it was inevitable, like gravity, like night and day, little apple-bites when God’s back is turned, her name fell, bastardized, breaking into a half dozen nicknames—”pobiecita Yosita”—another nickname. “We love you.” Her mother said it loud enough for two people’s worth. “Don’t we, Papi?”

“Don’t we what, Mami?” Yo’s father turned.

“Love her,” his wife snapped.

“There’s no question at all.” Papi came towards Mami, or Yo.

“What is love?” Yo asks Dr. Payne; the skin on her neck prickles and reddens. She has developed a random allergy to certain words. She does not know which ones, until they are on the tip of her tongue and it is too late, her lips swell, her skin itches, her eyes water with allergic reaction tears.

The doctor studies her and smells the backs of his fingers. “What do you think it is, Joe? Love.”

“I don’t know.” She tries to look him in the eyes, but she is afraid if she does, he will know, he will know.

“Oh, Joe,” he consoles, “we constantly have to redefine the things that are important to us. It’s okay not to know. When you find yourself in love again, you’ll know what it is.”

“Love,” Yo murmurs, testing. Sure enough, the skin on her arm erupts into an ugly rash. “I guess you’re right.” She itches. “It’s just scary not to know what the most important word in my vocabulary means!”

“Don’t you think that’s the challenge of being alive?”

“Alive,” she echoes, as if she were relapsing to her old quoting days. Her lips burn. Alive, love, words she can use now only at a cost.

Yo’s finger traces Doc’s body on the metallic screen of the window as if she were making him up. Maybe she will try writing again, nothing too ambitious, a fun poem in the limerick mode. She’ll call it, “Dennis’ Racket,” playing on the double meaning of the word racket as well as on his last name, Payne.

Deep within her, something stirs, an itch she can’t get to. “Indigestion,” she murmurs, patting her belly. Perhaps not, she thinks, perhaps it is a personality phenomenon: the real Yolanda resurrecting on an August afternoon above the kempt green lawns of this private facility.

Her stomach hurts. She strokes wide I-am-hungry circles on her hospital smock. But the beating inside her is more desperate than hunger, a moth wild inside a lampshade.

It rises, a thrashing of wings, up through her trachea—until Yo retches. How tragic! At her age to die of a broken-heart attack. She tries to laugh, but instead of laughter, she feels ticklish wings unfolding like a fan at the base of her throat. They spread her mouth open as if she were screaming a name out over a great distance. A huge, black bird springs out; it perches on her bureau, looking just like the etching of the raven in Yo’s first English poetry book.

She holds out her hand to befriend the dark bird.

It ignores her, and looks philosophically out the window at the darkening sky. Slowly its wings lift and fall, huge arcs rise and collapse, rise and collapse, up and down, up and down. Her hair is blown about her face. Dust hurries to corners. Curtains set sail from their windows.

It flies towards the window. “Oh my God! The screen!” Yo remembers in a moment of suspension of belief. “Have a little faith,” she coaches herself, as the dark shape floats easily through the screen like smoke or clouds or figments of any sort. Out it flies, delighting in its new-found freedom, its dark hooded beak and tiny head drooping like its sex between arching wings.

Suddenly—it stops—midair. Delight and surprise are written all over its wing grin. It plummets down towards the sunning man on the lawn. Beak first, a dark and secret complex, a personality disorder let loose on the world, it plunges!

“Oh no,” Yo wails. “No, not him!” She had thought that alone at her window on an August afternoon she would be far from where she could do any harm. And now, down it dives towards the one man she most wants immune to her words.

Yo screams as the hooked beak rips at the man’s shirt and chest; the white figure on the lawn is a red sop.

Satiated, the dark bird rises and joins a rolling cluster of rain clouds in the northern sky.

Yo bangs on the screen. The man looks up, trying to guess a window. “Who is that?”

“Are you all right?” she cries out, liking her role as unidentified voice from the heavens.

“Who is that?” He stands, grabs the beach towel. The blood congeals into a long, red terrycloth rectangle. “Who is it?” He is annoyed at the prolonged guessing game.

“A secret admirer,” she trills. “God.”

“Heather?” he guesses.

“Yolanda,” she murmurs to herself. “Yo,” she shouts down at him. Who the hell is Heather, she wonders.

“Oh, Joe!” He laughs, waving his racket.

Her lips prickle and pucker. Oh no, she thinks, recognizing the first signs of her allergy—not my own name!

The lawn is green and clean and quiet.

“Love,” Yo enunciates, letting the full force of the word loose in her mouth. She is determined to get over this allergy. She will build immunity to the offending words. She braces herself for a double dose: “Love, love,” she says the words quickly. Her face is one itchy valentine. “Amor.” Even in Spanish, the word makes a rash erupt on the backs of her hands.

Inside her ribs, her heart is an empty nest.

“Love.” She rounds the sound of the word as if it were an egg to put into it. “Yolanda.” She puts in another one.

She looks up at the thunderclouds. His tennis game is going to be rainchecked, all right. There isn’t a sample of blue up there to remind her of the sky. So she says, “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 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.