Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (22 page)

My summer job consisted of stuffing negatives and pictures into envelopes, then mailing them to the people who'd sent in their film for processing. The film was developed next door, but fumes seeped through the wall into the room where I worked, which was dark and windowless. Two other women worked at desks doing the same thing I did, and one of them, Sheila, a black woman not much older than I was, was charged with teaching me how to do
the job. The other, an older Asian woman, mumbled to herself the whole time she worked and rarely looked up from her stacks of envelopes, negatives, and prints.

“That's what happens when you work here too long,” Sheila said, tipping her head in Mimi's direction. “You go cuckoo. All those chemicals.” She laughed, and I figured she must have been kidding.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Me? Oh, about seven months. I've got two kids to support, you know. I'm not like you, stayin' in school and all that.” Sheila worked three days a week; the other two she was enrolled at a training program for nursing assistants. “I had to get my GED,” she said, “then they made me take biology and chemistry and all that shit I slept through the first time. Do you have to study that in your school?”

“Yes.”

You like it, don't you?”

“I don't mind it.”

“I wish I'd stayed in school. Now I got two kids to support. Don't you go thinking it's good to quit school.”

“My mother wouldn't let me.”

“I'm with her.” She shuffled through some photographs. “Look at this fool in this picture here! What docs he have on his head?”

“It looks like a bunch of bananas.”

“You see the foolest people in this job. Check this one out . . . she thinks she looks good.”

For hours, I stuffed people's memories into envelopes, to the sound of Sheila's chatter and Mimi's mumbles. Every evening as I stepped onto the sidewalk, I breathed the air of Brooklyn, fresh and clean compared to that in the building where I spent eight hours a day. I went home, changed, and closeted myself in my room to read, or to write rambling entries in a journal La Muda had given me for my seventeenth birthday.

I was paid every Friday. At home, I gave Mami a portion of
my salary and paid my sisters or brothers to do the chores assigned to me that I didn't want to do. The rest was spent on clothes for the coming school year, but my biggest expense was for books that I didn't have to return to the library.

My first purchase was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking.
I liked his theory that negative thoughts result in negative actions. Mami, my sisters and brothers, friends in school had accused me more than once of having a morbid, negative streak. I hoped Dr. Peale's book would help me to think positively when life turned grim, which I was certain it would.

As Dr. Peale suggested, I made a list of the good things in my life:

Dr. Peale suggested ten things, but I could only come up with seven, which I interpreted to mean that I desperately needed the book.

To help me get into a positive mood, I memorized songs about the good life. At the library, I listened to scratchy recordings of Broadway musicals and learned to belt out “Everything's Coming Up Roses” like Ethel Merman. I sang “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from
Guys and Dolls
as I showered every morning. But the song that I hummed in moments of doubt came from the despised
West Side Story.
I found it insulting that the only positive thing in Maria's life was Tony under her fire escape. But I loved his song, and promised myself that there would be something good every day, and that the minute it showed, I would know it. While in
West Side Story
good things were around the corner only for the
non—Puerto Ricans, I made myself believe that a miracle was due, that it would come true, and that it was coming to me. So I slowed when I turned the corner and imagined what a miracle might look like whistling down the river.

Since Don Carlos had come into our lives, we didn't go dancing as much, because the only time Mami saw him was on weekends.

“Isn't it strange?” Tata asked Mami, “that he doesn't live here?”

“It's because of his work,” Mami explained. “It's too far for him from here to his job in the city.”

“You and Negi go into the city every day,” Tata pointed out.

“It's different. He has two jobs. One in the daytime and another one at night.”

Whether Tata put doubts in her mind or not, by the middle of the summer, when Mami showed signs that she was pregnant, she began to question Don Carlos about his whereabouts during the week. From my room next to theirs I heard them argue. Or rather, I heard Mami. Don Carlos responded in a low voice, as if he didn't want anyone but Mami to hear his defenses. Sometimes, he didn't answer her at all, which infuriated her, so that she hurled accusations that he stubbornly refused to respond to. He just picked up his briefcase and left. When Mami cooled off, he returned, and things were fine for a while.

He told us he had three children. We pestered him about meeting them, but he always postponed the visit with one excuse or another. He said he worked as an accountant during the day and in the evening kept books and did taxes for private clients. During his courtship of Mami, he made a show of paying for our tickets and breakfasts after the clubs. But once he moved in, he had trouble opening his wallet. He didn't offer to help with
la compra,
didn't hand out spare change or offer to pay the phone bill when Mami couldn't keep up the payments and it was cut off.

“
Tacaño
,” was Tata's assessment, as she tapped her elbow with
her fist. None of our relatives was rich, but neither were they stingy. They were generous with what they had, and Don Carlos's unwillingness to part with his money was interpreted as a weakness of character, a sure sign that there were other, more unpleasant traits in him that we had yet to discover.

At Performing Arts, we read Shakespeare in English classes, but the drama department didn't cast us in scenes from his plays until we were ready. Now that we were seniors, with two full years of voice and diction and acting classes behind us, we'd finally get to perform some of the Bard's greatest scenes. I'd already expressed my dislike of
Romeo and Juliet,
so it was no surprise that I wasn't cast as a Capulet. I was to be—what else—Cleopatra, in iambic pentameter.

I was paired with Northern Calloway (no relation to Cab, he said), one of the stars of the drama department, equally at home in tragedy, comedy, or musical theater. I liked him, but his openness and subversive humor sometimes turned me off. When we were assigned act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra,
I worried that we wouldn't work well together, but he was more disciplined than I'd expected. He helped me find aspects of Cleopatra's character that I'd underplayed or ignored. He advised that I give up the yellow tablecloth costume, because I'd developed mannerisms based on the limited range of motion the dress allowed.

I bought a pair of filmy nylon curtains, and made a transparent dress. After almost three years of seeing me concoct costumes out of sheets, drapes, and scraps of material, Mami no longer asked to inspect everything I made. But when she saw the sheer fabric, she warned me: “I hope you're planning to wear a slip under that.”
I explained that the queen of the Nile didn't wear slips but agreed that, for the sake of decency, I'd wear the costume over tights and leotards.

I was in the hall reading the drama department bulletin board, where newspaper clippings of famous alumni were posted along with the year they'd graduated noted in a corner. At Performing Arts, one didn't just stand around. Every opportunity to exercise body or craft was to be taken advantage of, so as I read, I executed plies in second position.

I felt someone standing behind me, and when I turned, I was face to face with a man with a large head topped by wild black hair, a big nose, piercing black eyes under shapely brows, and well-formed lips that didn't smile. I knew him to be one of the teachers in the dance department.

“You must be an Indian classical dancer,” he declared in a deep voice with a hint of a foreign accent.

“No, sir. I'm a Puerto Rican actress.”

He seemed annoyed at being corrected. “I didn't say you are, I said you must be. Come see me.”

I was intrigued, imagining Indians in feathered headdresses and moccasins performing
en pointe
around a campfire. During a free period, I ran up to the dance office, but there was no one there. I tried a couple more times that week but never found him.

One day, Miss Cahan, a dance teacher in the drama department, stopped me in the hall and asked if I could try out for a play. “It's for a children's theater company.”

She told me the audition was later that week, gave me the address. “Other students are auditioning,” she added. “Don't be late.”

The address was on Madison Avenue. A doorman had me wait as he called up my name and, after a few minutes, told me to go up to the fifth floor. The elevator operator, a short, swarthy man in a natty uniform that made him look like Napoleon stranded in
the wrong century, didn't look at me as we rose, pointed to the left when we reached a dim, carpeted hallway, waited until I pressed a button under the peephole of the apartment door. When the door opened, the elevator closed. Miss Cahan, dressed in tights, leotards, and a long dance skirt, greeted me and led me inside an enormous room with broad windows at the far end.

I was seventeen years old and had never been in an American home. Here I was, inside an apartment on the Upper East Side—thick carpets at my feet, dark brooding paintings on the walls, yards of fabric around the windows, two sofas, upholstered chairs, side tables with china and crystal figurines. I ached with envy.

Miss Cahan introduced me to Mrs. Kormendi, the writer and director of the play. Another Performing Arts student was in the room—Claire, whom I knew to be a superior actress. Her shoes were off, and she sat cross-legged on the floor at Mrs. Kormendi's left. The simple shirt and pants she wore, the casual “Hi” with which she acknowledged me, led me to believe that she lived in the apartment.

“Why don't you take your shoes off and put them under that bench.” Miss Cahan pointed to a plush, upholstered piece of furniture I would have never called a bench, although I didn't know what else to call it. I wore a skirt, as always, because Mami didn't think decent girls wore pants unless they were on a horse.