ABOVE ALL, SARA by Janelle Garcia A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of Degree of Master of Fine Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2012 i ABOVE ALL, SARA by Janelle Garcia This thesis was prepared under the direction ofthe.candidate's thesis advisor, A. Papatya Bucak, M.F.A., Department of.English, .and has been approved. by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty ofthe Dorothy F. 'Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofMaster ofFine Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: A~~£t:(ti:~M.F~ Thesis Advisor ",.-;. Andrew Furman, Ph.D. Interim Chair, Department ofEnglish Heather Coltman, DMA. Interim Dean, The Dorothy F. Schmidt College ofArts and Letters B!'ii:ln:.~ l:?~h~t~/:z- Dean, Graduate College ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to express her deepest gratitude to her husband and daughters for all of their love and encouragement; without her husband’s enduring patience and support, she would not have persevered in completing this novel. She would also like to thank her thesis committee members, Professor Kate Schmitt and Professor Taylor Hagood, for their time and attention. Furthermore, she extends a special thanks to Professor A. Papatya Bucak, her committee chair; her guidance and patience in reading and commenting on multiple drafts and incarnations of this novel were invaluable in helping the author come closer to writing the kind of story she set out to write. iii ABSTRACT Author: Janelle Garcia Title: Above All, Sara Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: A. Papatya Bucak, M.F.A. Degree: Master of Fine Arts Year: 2012 The following manuscript charts the relationship between first cousins, Sara and Marina, from the day they are both born, only minutes apart, to the day Marina and Sara, both seven years old, witness Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolutionaries’ victorious march to the capitol, to the present day, when an ailing Sara reaches out to her estranged cousin, asking Marina to return to the land she risked her life to leave. This multigenerational novel also explores the destructive effects of Sara’s political activism and gigantism on her parents, Elisa and Rolando, whose conflicted feelings towards their daughter have as much do with unrequited love and regret as they do with her Communist loyalties. Finally, this manuscript pushes against the conventions of the novel by exploring variations in structure, perspective, and style. iv ABOVE ALL, SARA Book One: ........................................................................................................................... 1 Cusp and Divergence ...................................................................................................... 1 On Billboards, In Dreams................................................................................................ 8 History Written in Sand................................................................................................. 18 A Demon, a Monster, a Saint ........................................................................................ 22 Book Two: ........................................................................................................................ 32 His Name in a Flower.................................................................................................... 32 In the Name of the Father .............................................................................................. 54 The Hands of Men ......................................................................................................... 62 The Hearts of Women ................................................................................................... 79 Book Three: ...................................................................................................................... 88 A Stockingful of Bullets ................................................................................................ 88 Love Letters................................................................................................................. 106 Splintered Senses......................................................................................................... 122 Book Four: ...................................................................................................................... 130 They Wash Ashore ...................................................................................................... 130 Familiar Impositions ................................................................................................... 141 How Things Might Have Gone and Other Wasted Thoughts ..................................... 157 Returning ..................................................................................................................... 164 Writing Above All, Sara .................................................................................................. 185 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 203 v BOOK ONE: Cusp and Divergence Santa Clara, Cuba, 1952. Sara and Marina are born three minutes apart. Their mothers, sisters themselves, will one day come to call them jemelas del alma—soul twins—to help describe the curious bond the two share, but for now, they are simply cousins born at nearly the same time. Her skin thin and translucent and her mouth pressed into a perpetual pucker, Sara weighs just under three pounds. Her too-tiny head fits into the palm of her mother’s hand like a strange piece of fruit. Her eyes, nose, and mouth all crowd together to form a face no larger than her mother’s gaping mouth. Her shoulders prove much smaller than her father’s thumbs (thumbs that are already slight and delicate and ill-suited for work as a police officer). And when it comes to her miniscule hands with fingers smaller still— each perfect digit tapering to fingernails and swirling, ever-so-minute fingerprints—her mother and father, Elisa and Rolando, stop breathing, stop blinking, keep absolutely still, whenever they glance at them, astounded as they are that the complexity of hands and fingers and fingertips could ever be replicated in miniature. Elisa wraps newborn Sara in the diapers she sewed herself, and Sara appears smaller still. When Sara was in the womb, Elisa and Rolando had laughed at the smallness of the diapers, picturing the tiny bottom each diaper would cradle. But now, 1 with actual Sara inside, the diapers are monstrous—a gross miscalculation. Each square of cloth is a continent of fabric that no amount of bunching, folding, or pinning can disguise. Wrapping them around Sara’s thighs makes Elisa tremble. The sight of Sara’s jerking legs makes Rolando openly weep. Those thigh bones and knee bones are ludicrously small and yet so prominent inside their sheaths of loose skin. Those legs remind them both of the rest of the bones swimming just underneath Sara’s translucent skin—skin that reveals networks of arteries, veins, and capillaries, lending Sara an otherworldly hue. And though neither will speak of the association until years later, when Elisa will be surprised to learn that their minds traveled down similar paths during this tumultuous time, Sara reminds them of a trip they took to an aquarium years ago. She reminds them both of the run down aquarium that held just a handful of fish tanks, each flanked by large plywood cut-outs of hand-painted sea creatures—some real, some mythical. Specifically, they recall one of the smaller tanks, with a sign reading “Ghost Fish” and displaying a crudely drawn figure of a ghost with fins and a fish tail propped up beside it. Inside the tank were dozens of tiny fish, their movements so synchronized they appeared to be a single unit rather than countless fractured bits. Sara’s mother and father, so timid they barely spoke to each other, pressed their faces to the glass and waited for the mass of fish to swim by. When the fish finally circled the tank and made their way towards them, Elisa and Rolando both gasped at the fish, each one clear as the glass itself. Each little fish bone—each skull and jaw bone and vertebra— could be seen as the fish swam about. At the time, Sara’s parents thought the see-through fish a novelty, but with little, prematurely-born Sara, the memory of the fish fills them with dread. Like the fish, perhaps Sara is an aberration. Sara, with her bones and blue 2 skin, is, herself, a ghost fish. And neither parent can stop thinking about the tiny skeleton barely concealed inside the slack suit of bluish flesh. In the days following her birth, Sara refuses to nurse. A panicked Rolando trickles droplets of evaporated milk into her mouth from his pinkie finger whenever she parts her lips to yawn or cry. Elisa sobs as she watches them, her heavy breasts seeping milk down the front of her blouse. She’s failing at the most natural thing in the world, something blank-faced cows accomplish without effort. It is a sign of all the future failures she’ll endure as a mother, to be sure. Rolando, meanwhile, knows Sara’s denial of sustenance is a rejection not only of her mother’s milk, but of life itself, which means she is rejecting God, the giver of that precious life. And so Rolando begins leading the small family in prayer daily, nightly— whenever pinpricks of fear lance