How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

They grew up in the late sixties. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered political acts against the military-industrial complex.

Her sister’s breathing in the dark room was like having a powerful, tamed animal at the foot of her bed ready to protect her.

His face grew red with fury, but hers was more terrible in its impassivity, a pale ivory moon, pulling and pulling at the tide of his anger, until it seemed he might drown in his own outpouring of fury.

“[…] Sandi got the fine looks, blue eyes, peaches and ice cream skin, everything going for her!” The mother spread her arms in all directions to show how pretty and pale and blue-eyed the girl was.

Fifi drops out of college and goes off on a church trip to Peru, chaperoned, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have let her go. We don’t believe in all this freedom.

The pictures all celebrated women and their bodies, so it wasn’t technically about sex as she had understood it up to then. But there were women exploring “what their bodies were all about” and a whole chapter on lesbians. (Things, Mami said, examining the pictures, to be ashamed of.)

Mundín wiggles his eyebrows. “How many taboos can we break here? Let’s see.” He enumerates: incest, group sex, lesbian sex, virgin sex—

There, among the pink vanities with baskets of little towels and talcum powder and brushes, we come up with our plot. We reach out our hands and seal our pact. Yoyo rallies us with “¡Que viva la revolución!”

These baby monkeys were kept in a cage so long, they wouldn’t come out when the doors were finally left open. Instead, they stayed inside and poked their arms through the bars for their food, just out of reach.

In a corner, hoses lay coiled like a family of dormant snakes. Fifi and I lined up against a far wall. Mundín faced us, his hands nervously working the snake into a rounder and rounder ball. “Go on,” he said. “Take them down.”