How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

The four Garcia daughters are gathered for their father’s birthday. Every year, he insists that his daughters come to celebrate with him without their husbands. During the party, the father typically gives each of his daughters an envelope of money. The girls wonder where their father gets it. This year, it is the father’s 70th birthday, and he mentions that the revolution in their home country has failed. Instead of taking place at the apartment Carlos shares with Laura, the party is at Sofia’s house, and the husbands and children are present.

Sofia had not been on speaking terms with her father since she ran away with her husband, but she has now given birth to the first son in the family in generations, and she names him Carlos after her father. During a past encounter with her father, Sofia was frustrated because her father was doting on her son much more than their daughter, and she asked her husband, Otto, to make her father stop. Sofia and her father have always had a difficult relationship, and her father believes “every woman’s character could use extra scolding” (28).

The relationship between Sofia and Otto initially caused Sofia’s father much consternation when he found love letters written between the two that intimated a sexual relationship. He became furious, calling her a “whore” and accusing her of ruining his good name. Sofia packed her bags and did not return to her family home. She went to Germany to reunite with Otto, a chemist she met when they were both in Colombia. The two married, had their first baby, and moved to Michigan.

When Sofia’s daughter was born, Sofia’s mother insisted on going to see her, and her father agreed to go with her. Still, he has refused to go into her home until now, his 70th birthday and baby Carlos’s christening. Sofia goes out of her way to make the party extravagant to get her father’s attention. The father becomes increasingly withdrawn as the party goes on because he realizes that everyone there will outlive him and that their lives will go on even after his death. They all play a game where the girls kiss the father, and he has to guess who the kisser is. Sofia becomes irritated that her father never guesses her, and she gives him “a wet, open-mouthed kiss in his ear” (39). This makes the father ashamed, and the party is over.

When the sisters were little, their mother used to dress them all the same, in miniature versions of her own outfits. Sometimes her husband called them the five girls. Laura assigned each daughter her own color: yellow, blue, pink, and white. Their belongings were all in their assigned colors, too. The sisters do not remember this fondly. The mother tells a specific story about each girl at gatherings and parties. Carla’s story is about sneakers, because as a child, Carla really wanted red sneakers. When the mother managed to procure a pair of white sneakers, Carla rejected them. Later, she found Carla and the father painting the sneakers red with nail polish.

The girls’ mother attends one of Yolanda’s poetry readings and unknowingly sits beside Yolanda’s lover, Clive, with whom she shares details about her family. Yolanda is the third oldest and has been divorced once. She is a literature instructor at a college, but she always wanted to be a poet. Yolanda does not like her family pet name, Yoyo, but her mother explains that with four daughters, she occasionally needed to take short cuts. Carla is a psychoanalyst who is on her second marriage, and Sandra uses drugs to manage her weight. Sofia has just settled down with Otto. The third-person narrator explains that the sisters had been rather wild at times.

The last story the mother told about Sandra was to Sandra’s psychologist as she was having Sandra committed to a psychiatric hospital. The mother explained that Sandra stopped eating, and the doctor explained that Sandra had a “breakdown.” Sandra wanted to look like the thin models she saw. After Sandra went to graduate school, her parents got a call that she was in the hospital, and all she would do was read. Sandra would not eat or do anything else because she believed that she had to consume all the books before she stopped being human. She believed she was turning into a monkey and that the only human part of her left was her brain. She thought the books might somehow stay with her and help her remember being human. Sanda also stopped eating meat, and she believed that evolution was going backward and that people were becoming animals again. She made animal sounds.

A week later, everyone gathers at Sofia’s house for Christmas. Sandra has been released from the hospital, and the sisters talk about how Yolanda’s lover has gone back to his wife and about how Yolanda does not want to be called Yo. Sandra is dating a man she met in the hospital. Sofia is upset to hear that her mother said she met Otto in Peru because she has never even been there.