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.

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.

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.

Out it flies, delighting in its newfound freedom, its dark hooded beak and tiny head dropping like its sex between arching wings.

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.)

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!”

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.”

Sharp points came out of her head, the rays of the Virgin’s halo, though they could just as well have been the horns of a demon woman. Her hair coiled in complex curls over her shoulders like snakes. Her head was fully formed, but her face was still a blank.