Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (29 page)

There was more work than two people could handle. Ilsa said she'd hire another person to help us, but that the right candidate hadn't come along.

“I'm very particular about who works for me,” she assured me. She spoke with an accent that became heavier when she was nervous or had to talk on the telephone. I asked her where she was from.

“Far away,” she said with a mysterious smile. I felt bad for prying.

The best part of my job was when I collected or delivered the mail. It gave me a chance to visit the departments, to chat with the secretaries or typists, the purchasing clerks, the salesmen. One of them, Sidney, was always at his desk when I came around.

“He's a good boy,” Ilsa said, which made me giggle. “What's so funny?”

“He doesn't look like he's ever been a boy, he's so serious.”

“As he should be,” she said, but didn't elaborate and I didn't ask because she was frequently enigmatic, and when I asked her to explain, she clammed up or found something to do that minute.

Fisher Scientific had an employee cafeteria, but because someone had to be available should a file be needed, Ilsa and I didn't take our breaks together. In any case there was a hierarchy that determined who took breaks with whom. After a few awkward attempts to join people who were friendly when I came to drop off or pick up their mail, I learned that my place was with the clerks and other low-level employees. The supervisors, managers, and
executive secretaries sat in their own groups, like high school cliques on an adult level.

There was a lot of gossip during the breaks. Gus drank too much. Phil's marriage was on the rocks. Loretta was pregnant with no husband in sight. People's problems kept us in suspense from morning coffee break to lunch to afternoon coffee break, as details emerged over the course of the eight-hour workday. When nothing juicy happened, there was the question of how women dressed for work. Brenda was too conservative and wasn't it a pity, because she had a nice figure. Lucille, however, was not nearly shapely enough for the revealing outfits she insisted on wearing. Penny's frequent hair color changes made her bald, and that was why she wore wigs. Jean's legs were too thick for miniskirts. Roberta wore too much perfume.

I worried that if I wasn't there, my coworkers would talk about me, so I rushed to the cafeteria the minute my break was due and stayed until they all headed back to their desks. At home, I repeated the gossip for the amusement of my family, who followed the stories as if they'd met the people involved. For dramatic impact, I exaggerated or added details not present in the first telling. Pretty soon I believed my version was the real thing and was surprised when facts veered from what ought to have happened, given the scenario I'd invented.

One day, as I came down the stairs of the elevated train on my way home, I was surprised to find Neftalí waiting for me. In the few weeks since he left for Puerto Rico, I'd sent him off to war, where he distinguished himself. I had received his love letters, responded with cool but interested reserve, obtained vows of enduring love, married in a cathedral with my sisters and brothers in attendance, gone on a honeymoon to Tahiti, and was about to bear twins—all in the fifteen minutes it took me to walk to and from the train station. Faced with him, I realized that the Neftalí
of my imagination was taller and better dressed than the Neftalí in real life. He was also more poised. The flesh-and-blood Neftalí hung his head and mumbled hello while I asked myself what I could have seen in him a mere three weeks ago.

We walked side by side down the crowded sidewalk. It was a mild September afternoon, and the stores were open. Each door was an entrance into a cave rich with treasures: tropical fruits and vegetables; newspapers and magazines; colorful candies in shiny wrappers; racks of plastic-covered dresses, blouses, and skirts. People ducked in and out, their shopping carts squeaking behind them. Crumpled brown bags bulged with musty-smelling coats from the secondhand store. Women sat on their stoops while their children skipped rope, roller-skated, pitched bottle caps against a wall.

Neftalí and I dodged in and out of the crowd, enough space between us to fit a small child. I wished he'd try to touch me, to steal a kiss, something to indicate we were more than just neighbors. But all he did was tell me about his trip to Puerto Rico, which made me jealous.

“I hadn't been since I was kid,” he said. “Those
quenepas,
man. You can't get them here.”

I ignored that he'd called me “man” because I tasted the round, crackly skinned, slippery, sweet, solid-centered
quenepa
of my childhood.

He touched my shoulder and I jumped back. “You were in a trance,” he explained.

“I'm sorry.”

“Anyway, I was wondering if you'd like to live in Puerto Rico.”

“Someday.”

“Then we can settle there. In Ponce, so you can eat all the
quenepas
you like. I picked out a
solar
for a house.”

“Are you planning to marry me?” I asked, incredulous.

“You like me, don't you?” Then, in an accusatory tone, “You act like you do.”

“Is this a proposal?”

“You want me down on my knees?” He kneeled on the sidewalk, like in church, clutched my hand. “Is this what you want?”

People steered around us on the sidewalk. “Say yes!” somebody called, and there was laughter.

“Let go!” I pulled my hand back and ran up the street.

“Who do you think you are?” he yelled after me. “You're a big movie actress now. Is that it? I'm not good enough for you, is that it? Is that it?”

His voice faded into the clatter and thrum of the street. I ran as fast as my high heels allowed, my purse banging my side as if someone followed me with a stick. Who did I think I was? I wasn't sure, but I knew for certain I wasn't about to be Neftalí's wife.

There were times when I left our apartment, caught a train, rode for an hour, rose from the subway station to the crooked streets of the Village, walked six blocks to Fisher Scientific, rode in the elevator, and realized where I was only when the doors opened to the fluorescent glow and clatter of typewriters in the huge room where I worked. It was an enormous stage lit on all sides, with an audience that could see every action from any angle. A daily theater in the round.

Ilsa professed that she had hired me because of my attitude. “You're positive and enthusiastic,” she asserted. “You'll go far if you keep that up.”

Sometimes my face hurt from smiling, from maintaining the alert demeanor of someone excited about what she did. But the truth was that my job was boring. Hours of filing papers that I couldn't read because Ilsa made a face if the stack in front of me hadn't decreased every time she looked in my direction. I looked forward to the half hour I spent delivering and picking up the mail, which at least allowed me to chat with the other employees. But it took enormous energy to talk without saying much about myself. People were shocked when they learned I was the oldest
of nine children with a tenth on the way. Their reaction embarrassed me, as if it were my fault Mami was fertile.

When my coworkers asked for details, I made light of our living situation. “Nine children, three adults in a four-room apartment,” I grinned. “It sounds worse than it feels.” I insisted.

If pressed, I admitted that Mami wasn't married to the man whose baby she carried, had, in fact, not married the father of any of her children. My coworkers' eyes crinkled, their lips tightened as they judged what kind of woman Mami was and, by extension, what kind of girl I was.

“But I'm not allowed to date,” I joked, to let them know I understood the irony but that my family had values that ought to command respect.

More than once I was told I didn't “sound” Puerto Rican. “You don't have an accent,” Mr. Merton, one of the supervisors, remarked, and I explained about Performing Arts and standard speech. When he implied that I didn't “act” Puerto Rican, I swallowed the insult. “Maybe you haven't met enough of us,” I suggested, hurt that he was surprised Puerto Ricans could be competent, chaste girls who spoke good English.

I smiled, did my job, gossiped. At the end of the day, I retraced my steps to Brooklyn, sometimes in the same haze in which I left, but exhausted, the performance having gone on too long.

“How was your day?” Mami asked each evening as I walked into our apartment.

“Good,” I smiled brightly, and ducked into my room to change. Delsa, used to the routine by now, climbed down from the top bunk of our bed and left me alone.

I wiped off my makeup, then stripped. Esmeralda Santiago remained in the folds of each garment I took off and put away. Naked, nameless, I lay on my bed and slept. Half an hour later, Negi emerged, dressed in the comfortable clothes I wore at home. Another performance was about to begin, this one in Spanish.

After weeks of interviewing people, Ilsa hired another clerk, Regina.

“She's beautiful, isn't she?” remarked Ilsa one day, as Regina walked away from us.

“She's giving them whiplash,” I laughed.

Every man in the office craned his neck when Regina strolled by. Their eyes followed her as she moved from desk to desk, her hips and buttocks undulating in a most un-American fashion. Some of our male coworkers actually broke into a sweat when Regina came near. When she spoke, in a throaty voice with a Brazilian accent, her shushes and hums sent visible ripples through men's bodies.

Regina seemed unaware of her beauty. She dressed in long skirts, sleeved blouses with prim collars, squat-heeled shoes. She favored drab colors, wrapped her shoulder-length hair into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, wore little makeup, just a dab of lipstick and mascara.

Ilsa assigned me to train her. Regina followed me around long after she learned the simple tasks involved in our work as mail/file clerks. At first, I was annoyed that whenever I turned around, there she was, beautiful and dazed. Then one day, as we walked down for our coffee break, she thanked me.

“What did I do?”

“I am, how you say, culture shock,” she confided. “In Brasil was not so.” She opened her arms as if to embrace the world.

“In Puerto Rico,” I said, “it was not so either.”

Neither of us needed to say more to understand what the other meant, but I still didn't know why she thanked me.

“I have not friends here,” she said. “Only you.”

I was so touched, I hugged her.

During our breaks, we didn't sit with the other clerks but took a table by ourselves and talked about our lives. She was an only child who had nursed her mother through a three-year battle with breast cancer. When her mother died, Regina's father sent her to New York.