How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

The four sisters’ mother calls her daughters “the four girls” even though they are now in their late 20s and early 30s. The sisters aren’t sure if their father is secretly resentful that he never had a son. The father often quips, “Good bulls sire cows.” In their childhood, the mother color-codes their clothing so that each girl always wears the same color. Sofia wears white, Yolanda wears pink, Sandra wears blue, and Carla wears yellow. Yolanda is happy because pink is a girly color, and as Sofia grows up she becomes jealous of Yolanda’s assigned color. The mother has a specific story about each girl that she shares on special occasions.

The mother attends one of Yolanda’s poetry readings one day, and she begins to tell her story about Yolanda to the person seated next to her. Unbeknownst to the mother, the person is Yolanda’s lover. He is a professor with gray hair. The mother tells the man that they call Yolanda “Yo” or “Yoyo” even though Yolanda doesn’t like these nicknames. The mother says that she and Yolanda's father (whom she calls Lolo) once took Yolanda to New York to see a doctor because Yolanda was losing her hair. The man knows this story would embarrass Yolanda because, in his experience, she is very private about her body.

The mother continues the story, commenting that the family was poor when Yolanda was young. In New York, they accidentally left three-year-old Yolanda on a crowded bus. The parents ran to catch up with the bus, and when they finally got back on, Yolanda was calmly reciting a poem to the other passengers. The mother thinks Yolanda was born to be a poet. At the reading, Yolanda dedicates a poem to Clive. Clive is Yolanda’s lover who her mother has been speaking to, but her mother still has no idea.

Sandra is the only daughter that the mother doesn’t tell a story about anymore, because the mother doesn’t want to remember Sandra’s difficult past. At some point in the past, the mother and father are in an office at a mental hospital, speaking to a psychiatrist about Sandra (her mother calls her Sandi), who is admitted there. The mother says that all four of her daughters have struggled emotionally due to bad romantic relationships. The mother explains that Sandra is the best-looking daughter because she has light features, but that Sandra always wanted to be skinnier and to have darker skin like her sisters.

The mother reports to the doctor that Sandra started an extreme weight-loss diet at some point in the recent past. A while later, Sandra was admitted to the hospital because she was extremely thin and weak, and refused to do anything but read. When her parents came to the hospital, Sandra told them that she was reading so much because she wanted to remember what it was like to be human, since she would soon become a monkey. She believed that evolution “was going backwards.” One day, the mother says, Sandra began to make animal sounds and thought that her hands looked like the hands of a monkey. The father gazes out the window and contributes little to this conversation with the doctor.

Outside the window, the father has been watching a man mowing the lawn. Suddenly, the father gets up and approaches the window. Sandra and a nurse are outside crossing the grounds. Sandra hears a loud noise and looks around as the nurse guides her toward the building. When the man mowing the lawn turns around to face her, Sandra thinks the lawnmower is a “roaring animal on a leash.” She shrieks in terror and runs toward the building. Her father stands at the window waving to her, but Sandra doesn’t see him.

At some point after Sandra is released from the mental institution, she and her mother are at the hospital for the birth of Sofia’s first baby. The mother sits with the baby in the nursery and strikes up conversation with the man next to her, who also has a newborn. When the man says that his baby is a girl, the mother tells him that “Good bulls sire cows.” The mother tells him about when she gave birth to Sofia, who she calls “Fifi.” The mother says that she was in labor for 24 hours, and that when she came home from the hospital, the house had been robbed. She says that they were lucky because they ended up getting their belongings back, and that Sofia is always lucky. The mother says it was Sofia’s luck that led her to meet Otto in Peru. She also brags that Sofia is “the smart one,” so they named her well, because “Sofia” was a goddess of wisdom.

A week later, the whole family is at Sofia’s house for Christmas. The sisters catch up in the morning while the others are still asleep. Yolanda and Sandra bicker, which makes Sandra cry—she is very sensitive since leaving the psychiatric hospital. Yolanda is on edge because her lover Clive left her to go “back to his wife again.” Carla and Sofia try to mediate the other two’s arguments. Throughout the conversation, Yolanda’s sisters call her “Yo” even though she prefers “Yolanda.” Yolanda says she is no longer writing poetry, but Sofia reveals that Yolanda wrote a poem for the new baby.

Sandra tells the others that their mother met a young man at the hospital and invited him to lunch, and over the meal their mother told him that Sofia and Otto came together in Peru by God’s doing. Their mother told the man that Otto wrote letters every day before proposing to Sofia. The girls laugh at the inaccuracies in their mother’s version of the story—it omits the part where their father finds Otto’s letters, and the fact that Sofia and Otto met in Colombia, not Peru. The sisters reminisce about their father finding Otto’s letters, and they mock his exaggerated response. Sofia doesn’t laugh—her relationship with her father is still strained.