How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

She and her sisters have led such turbulent lives—so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them. But look at her cousins, women with households and authority in their voices. Let this turn out to be my home, Yolanda wishes.

The Palmolive woman’s skin gleams a rich white; her head is still thrown back, her mouth still opened as if she is calling someone over a great distance.

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.

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.

Jolinda, that’s what this pencil used to say. In fact, it was so worn down, only the hook of the / was left. We didn’t throw thing away in my family.

He had told them he was seeing “a Spanish girl,” and he reported they said that should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son. But I didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain even to myself what annoyed me about their remark.

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.)

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.

The old woman in the apartment below […] had been complaining to the super since the day the family moved in a few months ago. The Garcías should be evicted. Their food smelled. They spoke too loudly and not in English. The kids sounded like a herd of wild burros.

Now everything she sees sharpens as if through the lens of loss—the orchids in their hanging straw baskets, the row of apothecary jars Carlos has found for her in old druggists’ throughout the countryside, the rich light shafts swarming with a golden pollen. She will miss this glorious light warming the inside of her skin and jeweling the tress, the grass, the lily pond beyond the hedge.

[…] nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside Sandi.

They will be haunted by what they do and don’t remember. But they have spirit in them. They will invent what they need to survive.

There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life…wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art.