Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (14 page)

The girl eyed me from under mascaraed lashes; and the woman, petite, corseted and skillfully made up, sized me up and found me deficient. I had no idea who they were and didn't care. “Friends from the factory?” I suggested, and Mami laughed.

“This is your sister Margie.”

My mouth dropped in surprise, and I quickly closed it, because they laughed. Margie; her mother, Provi; my sisters and brothers, who were bunched on the side of the table closest to Margie, all seemed to think it was hilarious that I didn't recognize someone I didn't remember meeting.

“She's got the most expressive face,” Provi giggled, and my cheeks burned. Mami crinkled her eyes at me and tipped her head toward Margie and Provi. I touched each one's shoulders with my fingertips, leaving lots of space between us, and kissed them lightly on the right cheek.

Provi had been my father's “wife” before he met my mother. I'd expected Margie to look like our father, with his high forehead, prominent cheekbones, broad nose, full lips. I'd expected his coloring, but she was lighter and looked more like my sister Norma, with the same tightly curled auburn hair, slanted brown eyes, regal bearing.

Mami served me coffee and cake. “Provi brought it from a bakery near her apartment in Manhattan.” It sounded like a warning, but when I looked up, Mami's back was to me as she refilled her coffee cup.

Margie was uncomfortable at our table, her back to the wall, as my sisters and brothers jostled and pushed one another to stand the closest to her. Hector brought out his entire bottle cap collection, and Edna drew flowers and birds and offered them for Margie's approval. Every once in a while, Margie smiled at me, and I wished we could go somewhere to talk. But there was no other place, no living room, no yard, no room that wasn't filled with beds or people. I was embarrassed and tried to read Mami's feelings. But she was serene, didn't seem to notice that Provi's eyes darted from the sink stacked with clean but battered pots and pans to the next room, where a rope was strung from the window to the door jamb. Under it, water dripped onto the dull linoleum from the diapers hung up to dry. Every once in a while, Delsa grabbed the mop, soaked up the puddles, then pushed her way back to Margie's side.

I was annoyed at Mami's composure. She should have been as ashamed as I felt. As soon as the thought surfaced, I banished it. Mami worked hard for us, and while I had less than I wanted, as the eldest I got more than my younger sisters and brothers. When they complained that Mami favored me, I argued that she didn't; but inside I knew she did, as did Tata. I settled back on my chair, seething, alternating shame with guilt, envious of Margie's fashionable clothes; her rolled, teased, sprayed hair; her meticulous makeup; the charm bracelet that tinkled on her right wrist, the Timex on her left. At the same time I longed to talk to her, to find out if she was in touch with Papi, if it hurt her when he remarried, if she remembered our grandmother, whom, Provi said, I resembled.

Mami spoke with pride about how much English we'd learned in a scant two years, about the school I attended, about how sweet-natured baby Franky was, about her job as a Merrow
sewing machine operator in a Maidenform factory. The two of them talked as if they were long-lost friends, when in fact for years Mami had referred to Provi as “that woman” and Provi must have had a few names for Mami when she wasn't sitting at our kitchen table drinking coffee and delicately chewing the too-sweet cake she'd brought.

Provi boasted about their apartment in Manhattan, where, she pointed out, Margie had her own room. About how Margie was one of the top students in her school, about how they'd lived in the United States so long, they were forgetting their Spanish while still learning English.

“And then what do we do?” she cackled. “We'll be mute, with nothing to say!” Mami and I exchanged a look, remembering our far-from-speechless La Muda.

I interpreted Provi's friendliness as an act. Used to the drama student's obsession with finding subtext in dialogue, I listened to Provi chatter but heard the unspoken “You weren't woman enough to hold on to Pablo,” while Mami's unsaid “I had him for fourteen years, four times longer than you did” heated the air.

I imagined Provi was glad Mami was widowed, saw Francisco's death as a punishment for the wrong I guessed Mami had done her. Mami, younger and prettier, was, I suspected, the reason Papi had left Provi.

I sulked at my end of the table, listened to our mothers babble, aware they were still competing for my father, who wasn't there, who was married to another woman neither one of them had met. I heard nothing but criticism in Provi's remarks, only defenses in Mami's. I pitied Margie, whose shoulders slumped into the chair, as if she too was embarrassed by her mother's behavior. I resisted Provi's tight smiles and Margie's frequent attempts to make eye contact. Every second of their visit was a test we had to pass to rise to another level, but 1 wasn't sure what that level was, where it lay, if it existed. Margie had come too late, but I didn't know what she was late for, or whether and why I'd been waiting for her.

As Mami closed the door after them, she breathed a deep sigh. My sisters and brothers scattered to other parts of the apartment. Tata, who stayed in her room during the entire visit, stumbled into the kitchen and began chopping onions for that night's supper.

“Isn't Margie pretty?” Mami asked, not expecting an answer. Tata grumbled about “that woman.” I was about to make a sarcastic remark but decided against it.

“She has nice hair,” I allowed. “I like the way she lines her eyes, with the little tail at the corner,” I added, to say something nice, and Mami fixed her gaze on me, as if seeing what wasn't obvious before.

“You have better hair,” she said, running her fingers through it. “It's wavy, not so curly as hers. You can do more with it.” She took my face in her hands, tipped it to the light. “As for her makeup, that line wouldn't look good on you. Your eyes are a completely different shape.” She pushed my face to the left, to the right. “Maybe if the tail were shorter.... Why don't you try it?”

I dashed to the dresser where she kept the cosmetics she hadn't worn since Francisco's death. Breathless, I opened the zippered pouch. Inside, there was a mirrored plastic compact with a thin circle of pressed powder around the metal bottom, the once fluffy cotton pad flat and frayed around the edges. A smaller, round cardboard box held her powdered rouge, which leaked a fine red dust over two lipsticks and a stubby eyebrow pencil. I uncapped the point, whittled the wood with a Gem blade, and drew a curve on the back of my hand. When I tried it on my lid, the hard point slipped and left a faint ashen stripe, which I wiped with spit and toilet tissue. When I finally got it to sketch a dark line on my upper lid, I extended it to a jaunty angle, like a smile.

“What do you think?” I tried to still the thumps inside my chest that betrayed my excitement. Mami leaned against the counter, squinting as if evaluating an expensive purchase.

“It looks nice,” she said. “But next time, make the tails shorter.”

“Okay.” Next time, she'd said. Next time! I ran back to the bathroom, erased the ends of the lines so that they didn't extend beyond the lids.

“Like this?”

“Perfect,” she smiled. “That looks nice.”

Tata watched from her post by the stove. “She's growing up,” she said softly, and I pleaded for silence with my eyes. She turned with a grin. Mami smiled and went back to washing the rice.

In my room I stared at my reflection, fingered the thick dark lines around my eyes that made me look older, sophisticated. Delsa was in bed, wrapped in a blanket, her black curls peeking through the top.

“Quit it,” she mumbled, though I hadn't made a sound. I left the room, curled up against the wall on Norma and Alicia's bed, and watched television. My eyes felt heavy, as if the black line added weight to them. During a commercial, Alicia stared hard at me, then trotted to the kitchen yelling. “Mami, Negi is wearing makeup.”

“Shut up,” I rushed after her and held her back.

“What's all the shouting?” Mami called.

“Negi's wearing makeup,” Alicia repeated, fighting me.

“Leave your sister alone,” Mami yelled, and I wasn't sure if she meant me or Alicia. “Next time I go to the drugstore,” she said over her shoulder as she headed back, “I'll buy you your own pencil.”

I let go of Alicia, who looked from me to Mami with a puzzled expression. She was nine, I was fifteen, and although Mami took my side in many arguments with my sisters and brothers, we both knew that something important had happened. I had stopped being a little girl because Mami wouldn't be outmothered by Provi.

It was always still dark when I left the apartment at five-thirty in the morning, my books and dance clothes in La Muda's old black
leather bag. The fifteen-minute walk to the elevated train station was a gauntlet of shadows under burned-out street lamps that lengthened the distance between abandoned buildings and parked cars. I walked in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes fixed straight ahead but alert, expecting danger from any direction at any moment. Once, a rat scurried in front of me. I didn't know what to do, afraid to walk, afraid to stand in the same spot. After a few seconds, I ran past the pile of garbage into which the rat had disappeared and added “bite from a rabid rat” to the list of
“algos”
that could happen away from home.

Even at six in the morning the trains were packed, and I often stood most of the way into Manhattan. That morning, I was lucky. When the train came, I spotted a space in the two-seater bench across from the conductor's booth. I took it, careful not to disturb the woman who slept on the seat closest to the door, her gloved hands pressed against a handbag on her lap. The passengers already on the train were black and Puerto Rican, but as we moved from East New York to Brownsville into Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Brooklyn Heights, the people waiting at the platforms were white and older than the passengers already on board. They pushed into the subway car as everyone squeezed together to make room.

A man elbowed his way toward the hang-strap above where I sat against the wall. He set his briefcase on the floor between his legs, grabbed the hang-strap with his left hand, unbuttoned and pulled open his coat, his right hand in the pocket. I kept my eyes on my book, only dimly aware of the movement in front of me, until I realized he was leaning in so close that he blocked the light. When I looked up to ask him to move, I saw that his zipper was open and his penis dangled outside his pants, not two feet from my face. I quickly looked down at my book, too embarrassed to say or do anything. His coat formed a curtain on one side, and the wall trapped me on the other. I pretended to read while I tried to figure out what to do. I could get up and move, but my bag was under my feet, and if I bent down to reach it, I'd be dangerously
close to his wan, wrinkled penis. I considered but didn't have the nerve to look him in the eye and tell him to put it back where it belonged. As we reached a station and the train slowed, he dropped his arm from the hang-strap, covered himself, and waited until the train was moving, then raised his arm so that his penis was again in my face. I felt him stare while I struggled with what to do. I could grab the penis and pull hard. I could bite it. Without touching it, I could slam the pages of my biology text around it. But I sat stony-faced and silent, pretending to read, angry that I was being such a
pendeja,
wondering what I'd done to provoke him.

Theatrical makeup was taught in a room across from the auditorium's backstage entrance. The teacher, Mrs. Bank, a no-nonsense woman with a reputation for being exacting and difficult to please, was nevertheless beloved by those students who managed to impress her with their talent. I wasn't among her favorites. I had too little range as an actress to meet her high standards.