The mother still calls them the four girls even though the youngest is twenty-six and the oldest will be thirty-one next month. She has always called them the four girls for as long as they can remember, and the oldest remembers all the way back to the day the fourth girl was born. Before that, the mother must have called them the three girls, and before that the two girls, but not even the oldest, who was once the only girl, remembers the mother calling them anything but the four girls.
The mother dressed them all alike in diminishing-sized, different color versions of what she wore, so that the husband sometimes joked, calling them the five girls. No one really knew if he was secretly displeased in his heart of hearts that he had never had a son, for the father always bragged, “Good bulls sire cows” and the mother patted his arm, and the four girls tumbled and skipped and giggled and raced by in yellow and baby blue and pastel pink and white, and strangers counted them, “One, two, three, four girls! No sons?”
“No,” the mother said, apologetically. “Just the four girls.”
Each of the four girls had the same party dress, school clothes, underwear, toothbrush, bedspread, nightgown, plastic cup, towel, brush and comb set as the other three, but the first girl brushed in yellow, the second one boarded the school bus in blue, the third one slept in pink, and the baby did every-thing she pleased in white. As the baby grew older, she cast an envying look at pink. The mother tried to convince the third daughter that white was the best color, and the little one wanted pink because she was a baby and didn’t know any better, but the third girl was clever and would not be persuaded. She had always believed that she had gotten the best deal since pink was the color for girls. “You girls are going to drive me crazy!” the mother said, but the girls had gotten used to the mother’s rhetorical threats.
The mother had devised the color code to save time. With four girls so close in age, she couldn’t indulge identities and hunt down a red cowboy shirt when the third daughter turned tomboy or a Mexican peasant blouse when the oldest discovered her Hispanic roots. As women, the four girls criticized the mother’s efficiency. The little one claimed that the whole color system smacked of an assembly-line mentality. The eldest, a child psychologist, admonished the mother in an autobiographical paper, “I Was There Too,” by saying that the color system had weakened the four girls’ identity differentiation abilities and made them forever unclear about personality boundaries. The eldest also intimated that the mother was a mild anal retentive personality.
The mother did not understand all that psychology talk, but she knew when she was being criticized. The next time the four girls were all together, she took the opportunity of crying a little and saying that she had done the best she could by the four girls. All four girls praised the good job the mother had done in raising four girls so close in age, and they poured more wine into the mother’s glass and into the father’s glass, and the father patted the mother’s arm and said thickly, “Good cows breed cows,” and the mother told the story she liked to tell about the oldest, Carla.
For although the mother confused their names or called them all by the generic pet name, “Cuquita,” and switched their birthdates and their careers, and sometimes forgot which husband or boyfriend went with which daughter, she had a favorite story she liked to tell about each one as a way of celebrating that daughter on special occasions. The last time she told the story she liked to tell about the eldest was when Carla got married. The mother, tipsy on champagne, seized the mike during the band’s break and recounted the story of the red sneakers to the wedding guests. After her good cry at the dinner table, the mother repeated the story. Carla, of course, knew the story well, and had analyzed it for unresolved childhood issues with her analyst husband. But she never tired of hearing it because it was her story, and whenever the mother told it, Carla knew she was the favorite of the moment.
“You know, of course, the story of the red sneakers?” the mother asked the table in general.
“Oh no,” the second daughter groaned. “Not again.”
Carla glared at her. “Listen to that negativity.” She nodded at her husband as if to confirm something they had talked about.
“Listen to that jargon,” the second one countered, rolling her eyes.
“Listen to my story.” The mother sipped from her wine glass and set it down a little too heavily. Wine spilled on her hand. She looked up at the ceiling as if she had moved back in time to when they were living on the Island. Those downpours! Leaks, leaks—no roof could keep them out during rainy season. “You all know that when we were first married, we were really really poor?” The father nodded, he remembered. “And your sister”—the stories were always told as if the daughter in question were not present—“your sister wanted some new sneakers. She drove me crazy, night and day, she wanted sneakers, she wanted sneakers. Anyhow, we couldn’t afford to make any ends, no less start in with sneakers! If you girls only knew what we went through in those days. Words can’t describe it. Four—no, three of you, back then—three girls, and no money coming in.”
“Well,” the father interrupted. “I was working.”
“Your father was working.” The mother frowned. Once she got started on a story, she did not acknowledge interruptions. “But that measly little paycheck barely covered the rent.” The father frowned. “And my father,” the mother confided, “was helping us out—”
“It was only a loan,” the father explained to his son-in-law. “Paid every penny back.”
“It was only a loan,” the mother continued. “Anyhow—the point is to make the story short—we did not have money for one little frill like sneakers. Well, she drove me crazy, night and day, I want sneakers, I want sneakers.” The mother was a good mimic, and everybody laughed and sipped their wine. Carla’s husband rubbed the back of her neck in slow, arousing circles.
“But the good Lord always provides.” Although she was not particularly religious, the mother liked to make her plots providential. “It just so happened that a very nice lady who lived down the block with a little girl who was a little older than Carla and much bigger—”
“Much bigger,” The father blew out his cheeks and made a monkey face to show how much bigger.
“This little girl’s grandmother had sent her some sneakers for her birthday from New York, not knowing she had gotten so much bigger, and the little sneakers wouldn’t fit her.”
The father kept his cheeks puffed out because the third oldest burst into giggles every time she looked over at him. She never held her liquor well.
The mother waited for her to control herself and gave the father a sobering stare. “So the nice lady offers me the sneakers because she knows how much that Carla has been pestering me that she wants some. And you know what?” The table waited for the mother to enjoy answering her own question. “They were just her size. Always provides,” the mother said, nodding.
“But Señorita Miss Carla could not be bothered with white sneakers. She wanted red sneakers, she wanted red sneakers.” The mother rolled her eyes the same way that the second daughter had rolled her eyes at her older sister. “Can you believe it?”
“Uh-huh,” the second daughter said. “I can believe it.”
“Hostile, aren’t we?” Carla said. Her husband whispered something in her ear. They laughed.
“Let me finish” the mother said, sensing dissension.
The youngest got up and poured everyone some more wine. The third oldest turned her glass, stem up, and giggled without much enthusiasm when the father puffed out his cheeks again for her benefit. Her own cheeks had gone pale; her lids drooped over her eyes; she held her head up in her hand. But the mother was too absorbed in her story to scold the elbow off the table.
“I told your sister, It’s white sneakers or no sneakers! And she had some temper, that Carla. She threw them across the room and yelled, Red sneakers, red sneakers.”
The four girls shifted in their chairs, anxious to get to the end of the story. Carla’s husband fondled her shoulder as if it were a breast.
The mother hurried her story. “So your father, who spoiled you all rotten”—the father grinned from his place at the head of the table—“comes and rescues the sneakers and, behind my back, whispers to Carlita that she’s going to have red sneakers just like she wants them. I find them, the both of them on the floor in the bathroom with my nail polish painting those sneakers red!”
“To Mami,” the father said sheepishly, lifting his glass in a toast. “And to the red sneakers,” he added.
The room rang with laughter. The daughters raised their glasses. “To the red sneakers.”
“That’s classic,” the analyst said, winking at his wife.
“Red sneakers at that.” Carla shook her head, stressing the word red.
“Jesus!” the second oldest groaned.
“Always provides,” the mother added.
“Red sneakers,” the father said, trying to get one more laugh from the table. But everyone was tired, and the third oldest said she was afraid she was going to throw up.
Yolanda, the third of the four girls, became a schoolteacher but not on purpose. For years after graduate school, she wrote down poet under profession in questionnaires and income tax forms, and later amended it to writer-slash-teacher. Finally, acknowledging that she had not written much of anything in years, she announced to her family that she was not a poet anymore.
Secretly, the mother was disappointed because she had al-ways meant for her Yo to be the famous one. The story she told about her third daughter no longer had the charm of a prophetic ending: “And, of course, she became a poet.” But the mother tried to convince her daughter that it was better to be a happy nobody than a sad somebody. Yolanda, who was still as clever as when the mother had tried to persuade her that white was a better color than pink, was not convinced.
The mother used to go to all the poetry readings her daughter gave in town and sit in the front row applauding each poem and giving standing ovations. Yolanda was so embarrassed that she tried to keep her readings a secret from her mother, but somehow the mother always found out about them and appeared, first row, center. Even when she behaved herself, the mother threw her daughter off just by her presence. Yolanda often read poems addressed to lovers, sonnets set in bedrooms, and she knew her mother did not believe in sex for girls. But the mother seemed not to notice the subject of the poems, or if she did, to ascribe the love scenes to her Yoyo’s great imagination.
“That one has always had a great imagination,” the mother confided to whoever sat next to her. At a recent reading the daughter gave after her long silence, the mother’s neighbor was the daughter’s lover. The mother did not know that the hand-some, greying professor at her side knew her daughter at all; she thought he was just someone interested in her poetry. “Of all the four girls,” the mother told the lover, “that Yo has always loved poetry.”
“That’s her nickname, Yo, Yoyo,” the mother explained. “She complains she wants her name, but you have to take shortcuts when there’s four of them. Four girls, imagine!”
“Really?” the lover said, although Yolanda had already filled him in on her family and her bastardized name—Yo, Joe, Yoyo. He knew better than to take shortcuts. Jo-laahn-dah, she had drilled him. Supposedly, the parents were heavy-duty Old World, but the four daughters sounded pretty wild for all that. There had been several divorces among them, including Yolanda’s. The oldest, a child psychologist, had married the analyst she’d been seeing when her first marriage broke up, something of the sort. The second one was doing a lot of drugs to keep her weight down. The youngest had just gone off with a German man when they discovered she was pregnant.
“But that Yo,” the mother continued, pointing to her daughter where she sat with the other readers waiting for the sound system to work properly so the program could begin, “that Yo has always had a great imagination.” The buzz of talk was punctuated now and then by a crackling, amplified “testing” spoken too close to the microphone. Yolanda watched the absorbed conversation of her mother and lover with growing uneasiness.
“Yes, Yoyo has always loved poetry. Why, I remember the time we went on a trip to New York. She couldn’t have been more than three.” The mother was warming to her story. The lover noticed that the mother’s eyes were those that looked at him softly at night from the daughter’s face.
“Testing,” a voice exploded into the room.
The mother looked up, thinking the poetry reading had begun. The lover waved the voice away. He wanted to hear the story.
“We went up to New York, Lolo and I. He had a convention there, and we decided to make a vacation of it. We hadn’t had a vacation since the first baby was born. We were very poor.” The mother lowered her voice. “Words can’t describe how poor we were. But we were starting to see better days.”
“Really?” the lover said. He had fixed on that word as one that gave the appropriate amount of encouragement but did not interrupt the flow of the mother’s story.
“We left the girls back home, but that one”—the mother pointed again to the daughter, who widened her eyes at her lover—“that one was losing all her hair. We took her with us so she could see a specialist. Turned out to be just nerves.”
The lover knew Yolanda would not have wanted him to know about this indelicacy of her body. She did not even like to pluck her eyebrows in his presence. An immediate bathrobe after her bath. Lights out when they made love. Other times, she carried on about the Great Mother and the holiness of the body and sexual energy being eternal delight. Sometimes, he complained he felt caught between the woman’s libber and the Catholic señorita. “You sound like my ex,” she accused him.
“We got on this crowded bus one afternoon.” The mother shook her head remembering how crowded the bus had been. “I couldn’t begin to tell you how crowded it was. It was more sardines in a can than you could shake sticks at.”
“Really?”
“You don’t believe me?” the mother accused him. The lover nodded his head to show he was convinced. “But let me tell you, that bus was so crowded, Lolo and I got our wires totally mixed up. I was sure Lolo had her, and Lolo was sure she was with me. Anyhow, to make it a short story, we got off at our stop, and we looked at each other. Where’s Yo! we asked at the same time. Meanwhile, that bus was roaring away from us.
“Well, I’ll tell you, we broke into a run like two crazy people! It was rush hour. Everyone was turning around to look at us like we were running from the police or something.” The mother’s voice was breathless remembering that run. The lover waited for her to catch up with the bus in her memory.
“Testing?” a garbled voice asked without much conviction.
“After about two blocks, we flagged the driver down and climbed aboard. And you won’t believe what we found?”
The lover knew better than to take a guess.
“We found that one surrounded by a crowd like Jesus and the elders.”
“Really?” The lover smiled, admiring the daughter from a distance. Yolanda was one of the more popular instructors at the college where he chaired the Comp Lit Department.
“She hadn’t even realized we were gone. She had a circle of people around her, listening to her reciting a poem! As a matter of fact, it was a poem I’d taught her. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s by that guy who wrote that poem about the blackbird.”
“Stevens?” the lover guessed.
The mother cocked her head. “I’m not sure. Anyhow,” she continued, “imagine! Three years old and already drawing crowds. Of course, she became a poet.”
“You don’t mean Poe, do you? Edgar Allan Poe?”
“Yes, that’s him! That’s him!” the mother cried out. “The poem was about a princess who lived by the sea or something. Let’s see.” She began to recite:
Many many years ago, something … something,
In a … something by the sea …
A princess there lived whom you may remember
By the name of Annabel Lee…
The mother looked up and realized that the hushed audience was staring at her. She blushed. The lover chuckled and squeezed her arm. At the podium, the poet had been introduced and was waiting for the white-haired woman in the first row to finish talking. “For Clive,” Yolanda said, introducing her first poem, “‘Bedroom Sestina.’” Clive smiled sheepishly at the mother, who smiled proudly at her daughter.
The mother does not tell a favorite story about Sandra any-more. She says she would like to forget the past, but it is really only a small part of the recent past she would like to forget. However, the mother knows people listen to absolute statements, so she says in a tired voice, “I want to forget the past.”
The last story the mother told about her second oldest was not in celebration but in explanation to Dr. Tandlemann, senior staff psychiatrist at Mount Hope. The mother explained why she and her husband were committing their daughter to a private mental hospital.
“It started with that crazy diet,” the mother began. She folded and refolded her Kleenex into smaller and smaller squares. Dr. Tandlemann watched her and took notes. The father sat by the window quietly and followed the movements of a gardener, who was mowing first one, then another, darkening swath across the lawn.
“Can you imagine starving herself to death?” The mother pinched little bits off her Kleenex. “No wonder she went crazy.”
“She’s had a breakdown.” Dr. Tandlemann looked at the father. “Your daughter is not clinically crazy.”
“What does that mean, clinically crazy?” The mother scowled. “I don’t understand all that psychology talk.”
“It means that,” Dr. Tandlemann began, looking down at his folder to check the name, “it means that Sandra is not psychotic or schizophrenic, she’s just had a small breakdown.”
“A small breakdown,” the father murmured to himself. In the middle of a row, the gardener stopped, machine roaring. He spat and shrugged his shoulder across his lips, wiping his mouth, then he continued his progress across the lawn. Grass bits spewed into a white sack ballooning behind the motor. The father felt he should say something pleasant. “Nice place you got here, beautiful grounds.”
“Ay, Lolo,” the mother said sadly. She made a fist of what was left of her Kleenex.
Dr. Tandlemann waited for a moment in case the husband wanted to respond to his wife. Then he asked the mother, “You say it started with that diet she went on?”
“It started with that crazy diet,” the mother said again as if she had just found her place in a book she had been reading. “Sandi wanted to look like those twiggy models. She was a looker, that one, and I guess it went to her head. There are four girls, you know.”
Dr. Tandlemann wrote down four girls although the father had already told him this when he asked, “No sons?;” Out loud, he noted, noncommittally, “Four girls”
The mother hesitated, then glanced over at her husband as if unsure how much they should disclose to this stranger. “We’ve had trouble with all of them—” She rolled her eyes to indicate the kind of trouble she meant.
“You mean other daughters have also had breakdowns?”
“Bad men is what they’ve had!” The mother scowled at the doctor as if he were one of her ex sons-in-law. “Anyhow, that makes sense, heartbreak, breakdown. This is different, this is crazy.” The doctor’s hand lifted in protest. But the mother ignored the gesture and went on with her story.
“The others aren’t bad looking, don’t get me wrong. But Sandi, 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. Bits of her Kleenex fell to the floor, and she picked off the specks from the carpet. “My great-grandfather married a Swedish girl, you know? So the family has light-colored blood, and that Sandi got it all. But imagine, spirit of contradiction, she wanted to be darker complected like her sisters.”
“That’s understandable,” Dr. Tandlemann said.
“It’s crazy, that’s what it is,” the mother said angrily. “Anyhow, this diet took over. When her sister got married, Sandi wouldn’t even taste the wedding cake, taste!”
“Did they get along?” Dr. Tandlemann glanced up; his hand had a life of its own and kept writing.
“Who?” The mother blinked in disapproval. The man asked too many questions.
“The siblings,” Dr. Tandlemann said. “Were they close? Was there a lot of rivalry between them?”
“Siblings?” The mother frowned at all this crazy psychology talk. “They’re sisters,” she said by way of explanation.
“Sometimes they fought,” the father added. Although he was looking out the window, he did not miss a word the doctor and his wife were saying.
“Sometimes they fought,” the mother raced on. She wanted to get to the end of this story. “So Sandi kept losing weight. At first, she looked good. She had let herself get a little plump, and with her fine bones Sandi can’t carry extra weight. So losing a few pounds was okay. Then, she went away to a graduate pro-gram, so we didn’t see her for awhile. Every time we talked to her over the phone, her voice seemed further and further away. And it wasn’t because it was long distance either. I can’t explain it,” the mother said. “A mother just knows.
“So one day we get this call. The dean. She says she doesn’t want to alarm us, but could we come down immediately. Our daughter is in the hospital, too weak to do anything. All she does is read.”
The father was timing the gardener’s treks across the rolling lawns. When the man did not stop to spit or wipe his forehead, each row took him approximately two minutes.
The mother tried to open the Kleenex in her lap, but it was too ragged to spread out. “We took the next plane, and when we got there, I didn’t recognize my own daughter.” The mother held up her little finger. “Sandi was a toothpick. And that’s not the least of it, she wouldn’t put a book down, read, read, read. That’s all she did”
At the window the father’s view of the lawn was blurring.
The mother looked over at her husband and wondered what he was thinking about. “She had lists and lists of books to read. We found them in her journal. After she finished one, she crossed it off the list. Finally, she told us why she couldn’t stop reading. She didn’t have much time left. She had to read all the great works of man because soon”—the mother got up her courage to say it—“soon she wouldn’t be human.”
In the ensuing silence the mother heard the drone of a distant lawnmower.
“She told us that she was being turned out of the human race. She was becoming a monkey.” The mother’s voice broke. “A monkey, my baby!
“Already the other organs inside her body were a monkey’s. Only her brain was left, and she could feel it going.”
Dr. Tandlemann stopped writing. He weighed his pen in his hand. “I understood you committed her only because of the weight loss. This is news to me.”
“Small breakdown,” the father murmured quietly so Dr. Tandlemann wouldn’t hear him.
The mother was in control of her voice again. “If she read all the great books, maybe she’d remember something important from having been human. So she read and read. But she was afraid she’d go before she got to some of the big thinkers.”
“Freud,” the doctor said, listing names on his pad. “Darwin, Nietsche, Erikson.”
“Dante,” the father mused. “Homer, Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca.”
“I told her to stop reading and start eating. I told her those books were driving her crazy. I made her everything she liked: rice and beans, lasagna, chicken a la king. I made her favorite red snapper with tomato sauce. She said she didn’t want to eat animals. In her own time, she said, she would be that chicken. She would be that red snapper. Evolution had reached its peak and was going backwards. Something like that.” The mother waved the very idea away. “It was crazy talk, I tell you.
“One morning, I go in her room to wake her up, and I find her lying in bed and looking up at her hands.” The mother held up her hands and re-enacted the scene. “I call her name, Sandi!, and she keeps turning her hands, this way, that, and staring at them. I scream at her to answer me, and she doesn’t even look at me. Nothing. And she’s making these awful sounds like she’s a zoo.” The mother clucked and grunted to show the doctor what the animals had sounded like.
Suddenly, the father leaned forward. He had caught sight of something important.
“And my Sandi holds up her hands to me,” the mother continued. She turned her hands towards Dr. Tandlemann and then towards her husband, whose face was pressed up to the window. “And she screams, Monkey hands, monkey hands.”
The father shot up from his chair. Outside, a fair, willowy girl and a heavy-set woman in white were walking across the lawn. The woman was pointing out the flowers and the leaves of the bushes in order to cajole the girl forward towards the building. At one end of the lawn, the gardener wiped his fore-head, turned the mower around and began a new row. A dark wake spread behind him. The girl looked up, wildly searching the empty sky for the airplane she was hearing. The nurse followed her distracted movements with alarm. Finally, the girl saw a man coming at her with a roaring animal on a leash, its baglike stomach swelling up as it devoured the grasses between them. The girl screamed and broke into a panicked run towards the building where her father, whom she could not see, stood at the window, waving.
At the hospital, the mother leans on the glass with one hand and taps with the other. She makes a monkey face. The cradle has been turned towards her, but the tiny, wrinkled baby is not looking at the grandmother. Instead the baby’s eyes roll about as if she hasn’t quite figured out how to work them yet. Her lips pucker and stretch, pucker and stretch. The grandmother is sure the baby is smiling at her.
“Look at that,” the grandmother says to the young man at her side, who is looking at the baby in the neighboring cradle.
The young man looks at the stranger’s baby.
“She’s smiling already,” the grandmother brags.
The young man nods and smiles.
“Yours is asleep,” the grandmother says in a slightly critical voice.
“Babies sleep a lot,” the young man explains.
“Some do,” the grandmother says. “I had four girls, and they never slept.”
“Four girls, no boys?”
The mother shakes her head. “I guess it’s in the blood. This one is a girl too. Aren’t you, Cuquita?” the grandmother asks her granddaughter.
The young man smiles at his daughter. “Mine is a girl too.”
The grandmother congratulates him. “Good bulls sire cows, you know.”
“Huh?”
“It’s a saying my husband used to tell me after I had one of the girls. Good bulls sire cows. I remember the night Fifi was born.” The grandmother looks down at her granddaughter and explains, “Your mother.”
The young man studies his baby daughter as he listens to the old woman’s story.
“That girl gave me more trouble getting born than any of the others. And the funny thing was she was the last and smallest of the four. Twenty-four hours in labor.” The grandmother’s eyebrows lift for punctuation.
The young man whistles. “Twenty-four hours is a long labor for a small fourth child. Any complications?”
The mother studies the young man a moment. Is he a doctor, she wonders, to know so much about babies?
“Twenty-four hours …” The young man is shaking his head, musing. “Ours lasted only three and a half.”
The grandmother stares up at the young man. Ours! Men! Now they’re going to claim having the babies too.
“But I’ll tell you, that Fifi, we didn’t name her wrong! Sofia, that’s her real name. My daughter, the poet, says Sofia was the goddess in charge of wisdom long ago. We Catholics don’t believe in that stuff. But still, she’s the smart one, all right. And I don’t mean books either! I mean smart.” The grandmother taps her temple, and then repeats the gesture on the glass. “Smart, smart,” the grandmother tells the baby. She shakes her head, musing to herself. “That Fifi, she might look like she’s headed for trouble, but it always turns out to be her luck.
“That night she was finally born, her father came in, and I knew he was a little disappointed, especially after such a long wait. And I said, can’t help it, Lolo, they come out girls, and all he said was, Good bulls sire cows, like it was a credit to him. He was almost falling over with exhaustion. So I sent him home to bed.”
The young man yawns and laughs.
“He was so dead tired, he didn’t hear the burglars when they broke in. They stole us blind. They even stole my shoes and my under—” The grandmother remembers it is indelicate to say so. “Every last article of clothing,” she adds coyly.
The young man pretends to be alarmed.
“But this is what I mean about luck—they caught the burglars, and we got every last stitch back.” The grandmother taps the glass. “Cuquita,” she coos at the baby.
“Lucky,” she says to the young man. “That Fifi has always been the lucky one. Not to mention her luck with”—the grand-mother lowers her voice—“with Otto.”
The young man looks over his shoulder. Otto? Who would name a poor kid Otto?
“Imagine,” the grandmother continues. “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 grandmother frowns as she looks out over the nursery. Beyond the glass, between the slender white bars of their cribs, half a dozen babies are fast asleep.
“Anyhow she meets this German man Otto in a Peruvian market, who can’t speak a word of Spanish but is trying to buy a poncho. She bargains for him, and he gets his poncho for practically nothing. Well, just like that, they fell for each other, corresponded, and here they are, parents! Tell me that isn’t lucky?”
“That’s lucky,” the young man says.
“And you’re going to be a lucky one too, aren’t you?” The grandmother clucks at her granddaughter, then confides to the young man, “She’s going to look just like an angel, pink and blond.”
“You never can tell when they’re this young,” the father says, smiling at his daughter.
“I can,” the grandmother claims. “I had four of them.”
“Mami picks up like these really gorgeous men,” Sandi laughs. She is sitting cross-legged on Fifi’s living room floor. The new mother sits in Otto’s recliner, the baby asleep on her shoulder. Carla is sprawled on the sofa. At her feet, Yolanda is knitting furiously at a tiny blanket, pink and baby blue and pastel yellow squares with a white border. It is early morning. The family has gathered at Fifi’s house for Christmas, which falls a week after the baby’s birth. Husbands and grandparents are still asleep in the bedrooms. The four girls lounge in their nightgowns and tell each other the true story of how their lives are going.
Sandi explains that she and the mother were in the waiting room, and the mother disappeared. “I find her at the nursery window talking to this piece of beefcake—”
“That’s offensive,” Yolanda says. “Just call him a man.”
“Lay off me, will you?” Sandi is close to tears. Since her re-lease from Mt. Hope a month ago, she cries so easily she has to carry Kleenex with her anti-depressants in her purse. She looks around the room for her bag. “Miz Poet is so goddamn sensitive to language.”
“I don’t write poetry anymore,” Yolanda says in a wounded voice.
“Goddamn it, you guys,” Carla says, refereeing this one. “It’s Christmas.”
The new mother turns to the second oldest sister and runs her fingers through her hair. This is the first time the family has gathered together in a year, and she wants them all to get along. She changes the subject. “That was really nice of you to come see me at the hospital. I know how you just love hospitals,” she adds.
Sandi looks down at the rug and picks at it. “I just want to forget the past, you know?”
“That’s understandable,” Carla says.
Yolanda lays aside the baby blanket. She has the same scowl on her face her sister wore a moment ago, a family sign of approaching tears. “I’m sorry,” she says to Sandi. “It’s been the worst week.”
Sandi touches her hand. She looks at her other sisters. Clive, they all know, has gone back to his wife again. “He’s such a turd. How many times has he done this now, Yo?”
“Yolanda,” Carla corrects her. “She wants to be called Yolanda now.”
“What do you mean, wants to be called Yolanda now! That’s my name, you know?”
“Why are you so angry?” Carla’s calmness is professional.
Yolanda rolls her eyes. “Spare me the nickel and dime therapy, thank you.”
Trouble brewing again, Fifi changes the subject. She touches the evolving blanket. “It’s really beautiful. And the poem you wrote the baby made me cry.”
“So you are writing!” Carla says. “I know, I know, you don’t want to hear about it.” Carla makes a peace offering of compliments. “You’re so good, Yolanda, really. I’ve saved all your poems. Every time I read something in a magazine, I think, God, Yo’s so much better than this! Give yourself credit. You’re so hard on yourself.”
Yolanda keeps her mouth shut. She is working on a thought about her bossy older sister: Carla has a tendency to lace all her compliments with calls to self-improvement. Give yourself credit, Believe in yourself, Be good to yourself. Somehow this makes her praise sound like their mother’s old “constructive” criticism.
Carla turns to Sandi. “Mami says you’re seeing someone.” The eldest weighs her words carefully. “Is it true?”
“What of it?” Sandi looks up defensively, and then, realizing her sister means a man, not a therapist, she adds, “He’s a nice guy, but, I don’t know—” She shrugs. “He was in at the same time I was.”
What was he in for? hangs in the air—a question that none of her sisters would dare ask.
“So, tell us about this cute guy at the nursery,” Fifi pleads. Each time her sisters seem on the verge of loaded talk, the new mother changes the subject to her favorite topic, her newborn daughter. Every little detail of the baby’s being—what she eats, what she poops—seems an evolutionary leap. Surely, not all newborns smile at their mothers? “You met this guy at the nursery?”
“Me?” Sandi laughs. “You mean Mami. She picks this guy up and invites him for lunch at the hospital coffee shop.”
“Mami is so fresh,” Yolanda says. She notices she has made a mistake and begins unraveling a lopsided yellow row.
Fifi pats her baby’s back. “And she complains about us!”
“So we all have lunch together,” Sandi continues, “and Mami can’t shut up about how God brought you and Otto together from opposite ends of the earth in Perú.”
“God?” Carla screws up her face.
“Perú?” Fifi’s face mirrors her sister’s scowl. “I’ve never been to Perú. We met in Colombia.”
“In Mami’s version of the story, you met in Perú,” Sandi says.
“And you fell in love at first sight.”
“And made love the first night,” Carla teases. The four girls laugh. “Except that part isn’t in Mami’s version.”
“I’ve heard so many versions of that story,” Sandi says, “I don’t know which one is true anymore.”
“Neither do I,” Fifi says, laughing. “Otto says we probably met in a New Jersey Greyhound Station, but we’ve heard all these exciting stories about how we met in Brazil or Colombia or Perú that we got to believing them.”
“So was it the first night?” Yolanda asks, her needles poised midair.
“I heard the first night,” Carla says.
Sandi narrows her eyes. “I heard it was a week or so after you guys met.”
The baby burps. The four girls look at each other and laugh. “Actually”—Fifi calculates by lifting her fingers one by one from the baby’s back, then patting them down—“it was the fourth night. But I knew the minute I saw him.”
“That you loved him?” Yolanda asks. Fifi nods. Since Clive left, Yolanda is addicted to love stories with happy endings, as if there were a stitch she missed, a mistake she made way back when she fell in love with her first man, and if only she could find it, maybe she could undo it, unravel John, Brad, Steven, Rudy, and start over.
In the pause before someone picks up the thread of conversation, they all listen to the baby’s soft breathing.
“Anyhow, Mami tells this guy about your long correspondence.” Sandi helps Yolanda wind the unraveled yarn into a ball, stopping now and then to enjoy her story of the mother. “For months and months after they met in Perú, they were separated, months and months.” Sandi rolls her eyes like her mother. She is a remarkably good mimic. Her three sisters laugh. “Otto was doing his research in Germany, but he wrote to her every day.“
“Every day!” Fifi laughs. “I wish it had been every day. Sometimes I had to wait weeks between letters.”
“But then,” Yolanda says in the ominous voice of a radio melodrama, “then Papi found the letters”
“Mami didn’t mention the letters,” Sandi says. “The story was short and sweet: He wrote to her every day. Then she went to see him last Christmas, then he proposed, and they married this spring, and here they are, parents!”
“One, two, three, four,” Carla says, beginning a countdown. Fifi grins. “Stop it,” she says. “The baby was born exactly nine months and ten days after the wedding.”
“Thank God for the ten days,” Carla says.
“I like Mami’s version of the story,” Fifi laughs. “So she didn’t bring up the letters?”
Sandi shakes her head. “Maybe she forgot. You know how she keeps saying she wants to forget the past.”
“Mami remembers everything,” Carla disagrees.
“Well, Papi had no business going through my personal mail.” Fifi’s voice grows testy. The baby stirs on her shoulder. “He claims he was looking for his nailclippers, or something. In my drawers, right?”
Yolanda mimics their father opening an envelope. Her eyes widen in burlesque horror. She clutches her throat. She even puts on a Count Dracula accent to make the moment more dramatic. She is not a good mimic. “What does this man mean, ‘Have you gotten your period yet¡’”
Sandi choruses: “What business is it of Otto’s if you’ve gotten your period or no¡”
The baby begins to cry. “Oh honey, it’s just a story.” Fifi rocks her.
“We disown you!” Sandi mimics their father. “You have disgraced the family name. Out of this house!”
“Out of our sight!” Yolanda points to the door. Sandi ducks the flailing needles. A ball of white yarn rolls across the floor. The two sisters bend over, trying to contain their hilarity.
“You guys are really getting into this.” Fifi stands to walk her wailing baby to sleep. “Nothing like a story to take the sting out of things,” she adds cooly. “It’s not like things are any better between us, you know.”
Her three sisters lift their eyebrows at each other. Their father has not uttered a word since he arrived two days ago. He still has not forgiven Fifi for “going behind the palm trees.” When they were younger, the sisters used to joke that they would likelier be virgins than find a palm tree in their neck of the woods.
“It’s hard, I know.” As the therapist in the family, Carla likes to be the one who understands. “But really, give yourself credit. You’ve won them over, Fifi, you have. Mami’s eating out of your hand with this baby, and Papi’s going to come around in time, you’ll see. Look, he came, didn’t he?”
“You mean, Mami dragged him here.” Fifi looks down fondly at her baby and recovers her good mood. “Well, the baby is beautiful and well, and that’s what counts.”
Beautiful and well, Yolanda muses, that’s what she had wanted with Clive, all things beautiful and well, instead of their obsessive, consuming passion that left her—each time Clive left her—exhausted and distraught. “I don’t understand why he does it,” she tells her sisters out loud.
“Old world stuff,” Carla says. “You know he got a heavier dose than Mami.”
Sandi looks at Yolanda; she understood whom Yolandameant. She tries to lighten her sister’s dark mood. “Look, if beefcake’s not your thing, there’s a lot of fish out there,” she says. “I just wish that cute guy hadn’t been married.”
“What cute guy?” Carla asks her.
“What guy?” the mother asks. She is standing at the entrance to the living room, buttoning down a multicolored, flowered houserobe. It is a habit of hers from their childhood to buy rainbow clothes for herself so none of the girls can accuse her of playing favorites.
“The guy you picked up at the hospital,” Sandi teases.
“What do you mean, picked up¡ He was a nice young man, and it just so happens that he had a baby daughter born the same time as my little Cuquita.” The mother puts out her arms. “Come here, Cuca,” she croons, taking the baby from Fifi’s hands. She clucks into the blanket.
Sandi shakes her head. “God! You sound like a goddamn zoo.”
“Your language,” the mother scolds absently, and then, as if the words were an endearment, she coos them at her grand-daughter, “your language.”
The men trail in slowly for breakfast. First, the father, who nods grimly at all the well-wishing. He is followed by Otto, who wishes everyone a merry Christmas. With his white-gold eyebrows and whiskers and beard, and plump, good-natured, reddish face, Otto looks very much like a young Santa Claus. The analyst shuffles in last. “Look at all those women,” he whistles.
The mother is walking her granddaughter up and down the length of the room.
“Just look at them.” Otto grins. “A vision! What the three kings saw!”
“Four girls,” the father murmurs.
“Five,” the analyst corrects, winking at the mother.
“Six,” the mother corrects him, nodding towards the bundle in her arms. “Six of us,” she says to the baby. “And I was sure of it! Why, a week before you were born, I had the strangest dream. We were all living on a farm, and a bull…”
The room is hushed with sleepiness. Everyone listens to the mother.