How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (12 page)

It was that weekend too at one of our lingering departure scenes that I learned where he'd gotten his odd, ornate name. He'd had this crusty old grandfather he'd never met, from Germany, who'd left his unborn grandchild a trust fund with the proviso that he be named after the old man. "What if you'd been a girl?" I wondered.

"I wouldn't be having so much fun,"

Rudy said. By this time the kisses had migrated from behind my ear to my neck. I shivered when he put a necklace of them around me before departing.

Our next workshop, no one understood what my sublimated love sonnet was all about, but Rudy's brought down the house. Suddenly, it seemed to me, not only that the world was full of English majors, but of people with a lot more experience than I had. For the hundredth time, I cursed my immigrant origins. If only I too had been born in Connecticut or Virginia, I too would understand the jokes everyone was making on the last two digits of the year, 1969; I too would be having sex and smoking dope; I too would have suntanned parents who took me skiing in Colorado over Christmas break, and I would say things like "no shit," without feeling like I was imitating someone else.

Rudy and I began seeing each other regularly that spring. Besides class, we ate all our meals together, and on weekends, he'd asked me over to his dormitory for parties in his hall. His dorm was next to mine, the two buildings connected by an underground lounge which would fill weekends with good-natured, clean parties, much monitored by security. The real parties went on in the men's dorms. Mostly guys migrated from one room to another, smoking a little dope, drinking a lot. There were the heavy rooms for dropping acid or taking mushrooms. Candles flickered, incense burned in an unsuccessful attempt to cover the pungent smell of marijuana. The Beatles or Bob Dylan or The Mamas and the Papas blasted from stereos. It was a decadent atmosphere for me whose previous experience of dating had been mixers and parlor calls from boys at prep school. I'd go over to Rudy's, but I would drink only a sip or two of the Dixie cup he offered, and I wouldn't dare touch the drugs. I was less afraid of what they would do to my mind than I was of what Rudy might do to my body while I was under the influence.

He pooh-poohed my fears. For one thing, he said, without my consent, he couldn't do anything. "What about rape?" I asked,. I wasn't a total bumpkin. "Jesus Christ," he said, shaking his head, disbelieving what he'd let himself in forwith me.

"I'm not going to fucking rape you!" I was hurt.

I'd never been

spoken to that way. If my father had heard a man use such obscenities before his daughters, he would have asked him to step outside where he would have defended my honor. Of course, I would have had to do a lot of explaining afterwards about what I was up to at midnight on a Saturday night in a man's dormitory with a cigarette in one hand and a Dixie cup of cheap wine in the other.

After some time in his buddies' rooms sitting in clusters, guys and their dates, Rudy and I migrated to his room. His bed was a mattress on the floor, the American flag draped over it for a coverlet, which even as a non-native, I thought most disrespectful. We would lie down under it, side by side, cuddling and kissing, Rudy's hand exploring down my blouse. But if he wandered any lower, I'd pull away. "No," I'd say,

"don't." "Why not?" he'd challenge, or ironically or seductively or exasperat-edly, depending on how much he'd imbibed, smoked, dropped. My own answers varied, depending on my current hangups, that's what Rudy called my refusals, hangups. Mostly I was afraid I'd get pregnant. "From getting felt up?"

Rudy said with sarcasm.

"Ay,

Rudy," I'd plead, "don't say it that way."

"What do you mean, don't say it that way? A spade's a spade. This isn't a goddamn poetry class." .

Perhaps if Rudy had acted a little more as if lovemaking were a workshop of sorts, things might have moved more swiftly toward his desired conclusion. But the guy had no sense of connotation in bed. His vocabulary turned me off even as I was beginning to acknowledge my body's pleasure. If Rudy had said,

Sweet lady, lay across my big, soft bed and let me touch your dear, exquisite body, I might have felt up to being felt up.

But I didn't want to just be in the sack, screwed, balled, laid, and fucked my first time around with a man.

Rudy did have a honeymoon of patience with me at the start. He must have realized from his having had to explain to me so many references in his sonnet that I didn't know, as he put it, worth shit. To me, vagina, cervix, ovary were synonyms. Via diagrams he introduced me to my anatomy; he drew the little egg going down its hour glass into the sticky pocket of the uterus. He

calculated when I'd last had my period, when I'd probably ovulated, whether a certain night was a safe time of the month. "You're not going to get pregnant"-all his lessons ended with the same point. But still I didn't want to sleep with him.

"Why? What's wrong with you, are you frigid or something?"

Now there was a worry. I'd just gotten over worrying I'd get pregnant from proximity, or damned by God should I die at that moment, and now I started wondering if maybe my upbringing had disconnected some vital nerves. "I just don't think it's right yet," I said.

"Jesus, we've been going out a month," Rudy said. "When's it going to be all right?"

"Soon," I promised, as if I knew.

But soon didn't happen soon enough. We had progressed to where I stayed the night, waking up early in the morning, not daring to move for fear I'd wake Rudy up in an amorous mood and end up in an early morning discussion of why not now. I scanned the room, as small as mine. Beside his bed I could see the pad with the hourglass shapes. I touched my belly to make sure I was still intact.

On the cinderblock wall opposite

the bed, Rudy had put up a bulletin board.

There were pennants from his ski teams and photos of his family, all lined up on skis on top of a mountain. His parents looked so young and casual-like classmates. My own old world parents diswere still an embarrassment at parents' weekend, my father with his thick mustache and three-piece suit and fedora hat, my mother in one of her outfits she bought especially to visit us at school, everything overly matched, patent leather purse and pumps that would go back, once she was home, to plastic storage bags in her closet. I marveled at his youthful parents. No wonder Rudy didn't have hangups, no wonder his high school acne hadn't left him riddled with self-doubt, his name hadn't cowed him.

They encouraged him, his parents, to have experiences with girls but to be careful. 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. I met them only once right before spring break and ironically at the very close of my relationship with Rudy. What happened was the night before break started, Rudy and I had another one of our showdowns in his bed. Rudy turned on the light and sat up on his mattress, his back against the wall. He was nude-I, in my old long-sleeved flannel nightgown Rudy called a

nungown.

From the moonlight and streetlight coming in through the window, I saw his body beautifully sculpted by light and shadows. I did yearn for him, but I yearned for so much more along with that body, which I must have sensed

Rudy would never give me. He was worn down with frustration, he said. I was cruel. I didn't understand that unlike a girl, it was physically painful for guys not to have sex. He thought it was time to call it quits. I was tearful and pleading: I wanted to feel we were serious about each other before we made love. "'Serious!" He made a face. "How about fun? Fun, you know?" What did that have to do with this momentous rending of the veil, I wondered. "You mean you don't think sex is fun?" Rudy faced me as if he were finally seeing the root of the problem.

"Sure," I lied. "It's fun if it's right." But he shook his head. He had seen through me.

"You know," he said, "I thought you'd be hot-blooded, being Spanish and all, and that under all the Catholic bullshit, you'd be really free, instead of all hung up like these cotillion chicks from prep schools. But Jesus, you're worse than a fucking Puritan." I felt stung to the quick.

I got up and threw my coat over my nightgown, packed up my clothes, and left the room, half hoping he'd come after me and say he really did love me, he'd wait as long as I needed to after all.

But he didn't slip into my room and under my sheets and hold me tight against the empty, endless night. I hardly slept. I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in this country. I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles. Had I been raised with the tradition of stuffed

animals,

I would have hugged my bear or stuffed dog or rabbit, salting the ragged fur with my tears all night. Instead, I did something that even as a lapsed Catholic I still did for good luck on nights before exams. I opened my drawer and took out the crucifix I kept hidden under my clothes, and I put it under my

pillow for the night. This large crucifix had been a

"security blanket" I took to bed with me for years after coming to this country. I had slept with it so many nights that finally Jesus had come unglued, and I had to fasten him back on his cross with a rubber band.

Rudy did not come calling the next day. I bumped into him as he was leaving with his parents and I was exiting my dorm to take the taxi to the bus to my parents" in New York. I was sleepy and weepy and did not look back when I felt Rudy's eyes on me. His parents did most of the chatting, talking too slowly to me as if I wouldn't understand native speakers; they complimented me on my

"accentless" English and observed that my parents must be so proud of me. When we said goodbye, I did glance up at Rudy, and though I was out in the cold, he was still in the bedroom with the look in his eyes.

After break, I didn't see much of Rudy.

He didn't sit by me in class; his workshop poems became unaccountably straightforward and affectionate, out and out love poems. Was he trying to say he really had fallen in love with me? Then why didn't he stop by my room anymore? I started making excuses for him in my head. He had been there, but I wasn't in, and then he was too afraid to leave a note. He was too shy to come sit by me in class. Afraid, shy!

Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third!

How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.

Of course, I could have sought him out and told him how I felt about him. How I was frightened of sex with a man who called it

getting laid.

But I was still in the mode where the guy did all the courting and seeking out. I kept aloof, I waited, I

fantasized, misleading myself. The copies of my poems Rudy handed back had on them brief, inane remarks I read and reread for double meaning.

"Good," or "I don't get this line" or "Nice details." My copies of his poems went back to him with long, complimentary comments. I became more and more of a recluse, avoiding our old haunts for fear of running into him. But we rarely bumped into each other, and when we did, he always flashed me his cool, ironic smile and greeted me with an offhand, "How you doing?" I, on the other hand, was bristling with so much feeling, I pretended not to have seen him.

Spring dance approached. I don't know why I still thought Rudy would certainly end up going with me.

This was the culminating romantic event of the school year on campus, and it seemed to me in my fantasy mode to be the perfect vehicle for our reconciliation. I played it out in my head. We would dance all night. We would talk and confess how much we had missed each other. I would go back to his dorm room with him. We would make love, my first time, and then, almost as if they were the different positions Rudy had told me about, we would screw and fuck and ball and get laid-all the synonyms Rudy preferred for referring to his sex.

In real life, the day approached, and then the night, and I was still hoping. The dance was in the lounge between the two dorms, and so, when I heard the band start up, I wandered down the stairs to a landing where I could watch, unobserved, the partiers. They were a motley group: the conservative frat guy types in tuxedos and their dates in fancy prom dresses, the new hippies in Indian paisleys, jeans and sneakers, and maybe for flare, an incongruous bow tie. I saw the figures dancing luridly,

the lights flashing, the band going. They all seemed so caught up in a rhythm I didn't feel a part of. Then I saw Rudy come into the room, a glass in one hand, no doubt full of something spiked with alcohol or acid. My heart would have fluttered if there had been any time between the initial glimpse of his familiar figure and the sight of another figure clinging to him. I could hardly tell what she looked like, who she was, but by the way they were holding on to each other, leaning into each other's bodies, I knew, first off that she was the beloved of his poems, and second of all the beloved of his bed. Within weeks of breaking up with me! I was crushed. For the second time in our relationship, as a kind of closing frame to our first meeting which had ended in my flight out of the classroom, I fled up the stairs.

There's more to the story. There always is to a true story. About five years later, I was in grad school in upstate New York. I was a poet, a Bohemian, et cetera. I'd had a couple of lovers. I was on birth control. I guessed I'd resolved the soul and sin thing by lapsing from my heavy-duty Catholic background, giving up my immortal soul for a blues kind of soul.

Funky and low-down, the kind inspired by reading too much Carlos Castaneda and Rilke and Robert Bly and dropping acid with a guy who claimed to be my cosmic mate from a past life. I got this call one night from Rudy. His parents lived just down the road, and he had read that I was at the neighboring university in the Alumni Bulletin.