It is the same family in a different situation, from a different perspective. How does that help you use perspectives better?

Sofia

Even after they'd been married and had their own families and often couldn't make it for other occa-sions, the four daughters always came home for their father's birthday. They would gather together, without hus-bands, would-be husbands, or bring-home work. For this too was part of the tradition: the daughters came home alone. The apartment was too small for everyone, the father argued. Surely their husbands could spare them for one overnight?

The husbands would just as soon have not gone to their in-laws, but they felt annoyed at the father's strutting. "when's he going to realize you've grown up? You sleep with us!"

"He's almost seventy, for God's sake!" the daughters said, defending the father. They were passionate women, but their devotions were like roots; they were sunk into. the past towards the old man.

So for one night every November the daughters turned back into their father's girls. In the cramped living room, surrounded by the dark oversized furniture from the old house they grew

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up in, they were children again in a smaller, simpler version of the world. There was the prodigal scene at the door. The father opened his arms wide and welcomed them in his broken English: "this is your home, and never you should forget it." Inside, the mother fussed at them-their sloppy clothes; their long, loose hair; their looking tired, too skinny, too made up, and so on.

After a few glasses of wine, the father started in on what should be done if he did not live to see his next birthday. "Come on, Papi," his daughters coaxed him, as if it were a modesty of his, to perish, and they had to talk him into staying alive. After his cake and candles, the father distributed bulky envelopes that felt as if they were padded, and they were, no less than sev-eral hundreds in bills, tens and twenties and fives, all arranged to face the same way, the top one signed with the father's name, branding them his. Why not checks? the daughters would won-der later, gossiping together in the bedroom, counting their money to make sure the father wasn't playing favorites. Was there some illegality that the father stashed such sums away? Was he -- none of the daughters really believed this, but to con-template it was a wonderful little explosion in their heads -- was he maybe dealing drugs or doing abortions in his office?

At the table there was always the pretense of trying to give the envelopes back. "No, no, Papi it's your birthday, after all."

The father told them there was plenty more where that had come from. The revolution in the old country had failed. Most of his comrades had been killed or bought off. He had escaped to this country. And now it was every man for himself so what he made was for his girls. The father never gave his daughters

money when their husbands were around. They might receive the wrong. idea," the father once said, and although none of the daughters knew specifically what the father meant, they all. understood what he was saying to them: Don't bring the men home for my birthday.

But this year, for his seventieth birthday, the youngest daughter, Sofia, wanted die celebration at her house. Her son had been born that summer, and she did not want to be traveling in November with a four-month-old and her little girl. And yet, she, of all the daughters, did not want to be the' absent one be-cause for the first time since she'd run off with her husband six years ago, she and her father were on speaking terms. In face?, the old man had been out to see her-or really to see his grandson---twice. It was a big deal that Sofia had had a son. He was the first male born into the family in two generations. In fact, the baby was to be named for the grandfather - Carlos -- and his middle name was to be Sofia's maiden name, and so' what the old man had never hoped for with his "harem of four girls," as he liked to joke, his own 'name was to be kept going in this new country!

During his two visits, the grandfather had stood guard by the crib all day speaking to little Carlos. "Charles the Fifth; Charles Dickens; Prince Charles." He enumerated the names of famous Charleses in order to stir up genetic ambition in the boy. "Charlemagne" he cooed at him also, for the baby was large and big-boned with blond fuzz on his pale pink skin, and blue eyes just like his German father's. All the grandfather's Caribbean fondness for a male heir and for fair Nordic looks

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had surfaced. There was. now good blood in the family against a future bad choice by one of its women.

"You can be president, you were born here," the grandfather crooned. "You can go to the moon, maybe even to Mars by the time you are of my age."

His macho babytalk brought back Sofia's old antagonism towards her father. How obnoxious for him to go on and on like that while beside him stood his little granddaughter, wide-eyed and sad at all the things her baby brother, no bigger than one of her dolls, was going to be able to do just because he was a boy. "Make him stop, please," Sofia asked her husband. Otto was considered the jolly, good-natured one among the brothers-in-law. "The camp counselor," his sisters-in-law teased. Otto approached the grandfather. Both men looked fondly down at the new Viking.

"You can be as great a man as your lather," the grandfather said. This was the first compliment the father-in-law had ever paid any son-in-jaw in the family. There was no way Otto was going to mess with the old man now. "He is a good boy, is he not, Papi?" Otto's German accent thickened with affection. He clapped his hand on his father-in-law's shoulders. They were friends now.

But though the father had made up with his son-in-law, there was still a strain with his own daughter. When he had come to Visit, she embraced him at the door, but he stiffened and politely shrugged her off. "Let me put down these heavy bags, Sofia." He had never called her by her family pet name, Fifi, even when she lived at home. He had always had problems…

(End of Excerpt)