Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (33 page)

Regina came back two days later, still weak from a bad cold. She'd heard about Mami and Don Carlos coming to rescue me in Long Island.

“How horrible for you! Minna said you were so shamed. Everybody felt bad.”

“It's all right. Otto was impressed,” I laughed.

“Gilbert and me, we see each other more.” Regina blushed.

“Don't tell Ilsa,” I warned.

Unable to convince Mami to let me stay out after I was due home, I could see Otto only at work. Over the next few days, we took lunch or coffee breaks together. Ilsa scowled every time she saw me leave without Regina, but I didn't care. Whatever feelings she had about Germans were hers, not mine. Used to being judged because some Puerto Ricans did bad things, I wasn't about to do the same to Otto.

I expected Otto to want something to remember me by. I snipped a few strands of my hair, tied them in a thin red ribbon. But he didn't ask, and I was too embarrassed to admit such a silly thing had occurred to me. He left right after the New Year. Other than holding my hand and giving me an occasional peck on the
cheek, he never touched me as he had the night of the Christmas party. His gentlemanly behavior proved that Mami was right: “A man who really cares about you respects you.” I appreciated it but couldn't erase the sensations of his tongue in my mouth, his hands on my breast, his probing fingers. He was a man, and his kiss had made me feel like a woman.

Fisher Scientific was to move its offices to New Jersey after the first of the year. Regina, Ilsa, and I were offered promotions if we transferred to the new location. With the promise of a job in New Jersey, I made a case for moving closer to work, as Regina's roommate. Mami vetoed the plan. “There's plenty of work in New York,” she claimed.

Before the company moved, I took advantage of a benefit they offered. They paid part of the tuition for employees who wished to continue their education. Don Carlos, who studied accounting in night school, encouraged me to look into a community college. They were less expensive than the famous New York universities, he said. They also offered evening and weekend classes, which meant I could work and study.

I applied to Manhattan Community College because it was on 51st Street, off Sixth Avenue, close to the theater district and dance studios where I still took lessons. Courses focused on business, advertising, and marketing. I signed up for those that allowed me to be out of classes by one o'clock in the afternoon. After school, I picked up temporary jobs as a receptionist in nearby offices.

Soon after classes started, I went to the college bookstore to buy supplies. On line ahead of me stood a young woman about my age whose presence overpowered the hallway leading into the bookstore. She wore knee-high brown boots, a leather miniskirt, a
brown chiffon blouse through which her black bra showed. Her hair was ratted into a mass of golden curls held back with a leopard print chiffon scarf whose ends draped over her shoulder. Her makeup was elaborate, complete with false eyelashes.

Tired with the long line ahead of them, the two people in front of me left in disgust. The young woman turned around, smiled radiantly, and introduced herself as Shoshana. “We're in the same English Composition class,” she informed me.

We chatted while we waited our turn, continued over lunch at the Horn & Hardart. She lived in Queens with her parents, who were as old-fashioned as Mami.

“It's stupid. I spend half my time arguing with them,” she complained. Her mother was particularly critical of the way Shoshana dressed, which didn't surprise me. If I were to wear anything half as flashy as Shoshana's most conservative outfits, Mami would lock me up.

Shoshana was born in Israel, came to the United States the same year I did. Her parents were Holocaust survivors, so it took me a while to tell her about my German boyfriend.

“It's true then,” she mused, “that Puerto Rican girls prefer blond, blue-eyed men.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“In school. A classmate told me.”

“Maybe she was speaking for herself.”

“You have a blond, blue-eyed boyfriend,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, but it just worked out that way. The first guy I dated was Jewish,” I added. “But he couldn't bring me home to his mother.”

“What, and give her a heart attack?”

When I was with Shoshana, I felt happy, even if she sometimes made assumptions, like Puerto Rican girls wanting blond boyfriends. If she offended me and I set her straight, she nodded as if she understood and moved on to other things. I did the same with her.

Shoshana could date, if she dated Jewish men.

“I'm being loyal to Otto,” I gave as my reason for not going out with anyone.

“Do you think,” she asked, “that he just sits at home on weekends thinking of you?”

Otto's letters weren't as frequent as I would have liked, but they brought news of evenings at the opera, the symphony, museums. He described hikes in the woods in such detail that it felt as though I were there. My news was less interesting, mostly reports on my courses, the New York weather, and the people I met as a part-time receptionist. Occasionally, I fabricated this or that highly accomplished man who took an interest in me. Otto never responded to my attempts to make him jealous. I also invented friends happily married to foreign men, stories about marriage by proxy, in which the bride and groom were in different cities (the Corín Tellado romances I still read had lots of those), and marriages in which everything was arranged by the bride while the groom lived in Europe. He never responded to those hints either.

Shoshana insisted that as far as she could tell, Otto and I were pen pals, in which case, I should go out with whomever I chose.

“My mother doesn't want me alone with men until after I get married,” I admitted.

“My mom's the same,” Shoshana chuckled. “It's because they're from the old country.”

Shoshana said the reason our mothers said no so much was that we asked them too many questions. “Does she have to know everything you do?” Shoshana asked. She suggested we get part-time night jobs, but that we should tell our mothers we worked every night. That way, the nights we didn't work, we could go out.

We answered an ad for telephone operators, evenings only, and were interviewed by Mr. Vince, a perfumed, coiffed, man who wore a pinkie ring, tight-fitting pants, and a shirt unbuttoned to display his hairy chest. He hired us on the spot and put us to work that same night.

Our job was to return phone calls from people who'd inquired
about how to win a fabulous vacation. The company advertised destinations on television. Viewers called a special number, actually an answering service, and were asked their names, phone numbers, the best time to call, and which commercial they'd seen.

Mr. Vince said that we couldn't use our real names when returning the calls. We should each pick one that was short and easy to remember. Shoshana became Miss Green and I Miss Brown. He gave us a script. “You're an actress, you shouldn't have any trouble with this,” he grinned.

We read aloud before Mr. Vince let us make the first call.

To qualify for the prize, the prospect had to agree to a sales visit. If they accepted, we transferred them to Mr. Vince, who set the date and time. We were paid by the hour, but if Mr. Vince sold a certain number of vacations to prospects we'd contacted, we received a commission and the chance to go on the fabulous vacation ourselves.

“How many do you have to sell?” Shoshana asked.

“I'll let you know when I sell them,” Mr. Vince laughed.

We worked in cubicles, each with a phone, a stack of pink message slips, a few #2 pencils, and notepads. At first Mr. Vince monitored our end of the conversation by standing behind us when we talked to prospects or by listening on an extension. But once he was sure we were talking to his clients and not our friends (“You do that, you're fired,” he threatened), he wasn't as strict. Sometimes he left us in the office alone, since he was not kept very busy. In spite of our best efforts, most prospects refused a sales call to make them eligible, if they purchased another trip from Mr. Vince, to win the fabulous vacation. As soon as he left the
office, Shoshana called her boyfriends. I didn't have anyone to call, so I talked to her boyfriends, too.

“Are you as beautiful as Shoshana?” they asked, and I answered that no one was as beautiful as Shoshana, which she loved.

Many of the calls we returned were from people with no intention of ever going on vacation. “You can't let them waste your time,” Mr. Vince scolded. “I'm not paying you to be their friend.”

But I liked listening. Given interested silence, people talked. They complained about inattentive spouses, ungrateful children, undeserving nieces and nephews, greedy neighbors. The dead were recalled with regrets.

“
I didn't know how much I defended on him until he was gone
.”

“
She was an angel, and I didn't appreciate her
.”

“
He never knew how much I loved him
.”

More than once I was brought to tears by the voices that floated out of the darkness into my ear. No one was happy. I let them talk, asked questions, pointed out the snares they'd stumbled into that left them sad and lonely. If I listened carefully, I might hear myself speak twenty years from now, or thirty, or even fifty. Would my life be summed up in a series of regrets and resentments? Would I wish to turn back time, to relive this or that moment, as so many of my callers did, to change the outcome? How could I tell if a decision I made today would haunt me for years to come?

“I hope you never have to go through what I went through,” a woman began her tale, and I paid close attention. Each life was a message I had to decode, clues for what lay ahead. Not a blueprint, but a road map from which to choose a path.

When we weren't in classes or working, Shoshana and I went to tapings of television shows. Manhattan Community College was only a few blocks from the CBS and ABC studios and two blocks
from NBC. In the daytime, we sat in the audience of game shows, hoping we'd be picked as contestants. We never were. After a while, the NBC pages recognized us and moved us to the front of the ticket line or saved places for us in the studios. They were pleasant, clean-cut young men in neat blue uniforms. We each had a favorite. Mine was Andy, a pudgy redhead with freckles on every visible part of his body, including his earlobes and knuckles. He worked the evening shift most of the time and always made sure I got in to watch tapings of
The Johnny Carson Show.
Andy reminded me of comic-book Archie. He had the same goofy grin and dreamed of writing the jokes Johnny Carson read off cue cards during his monologue.

“You mean those are not his jokes?”

“There's a whole army of writers who make Johnny funny,” he confided.

“But the ad libs . . .”

“Oh, those are his,” Andy said. “The man is funny. But the writers make him funnier.”

Because he worked nights like me, Andy and I could only go out days, if I didn't have a class. We visited museums and art galleries, ate lunch from hot dog vendors on Fifth Avenue, sat in coffee shops for hours, each engrossed in a different book.

“That's what you do on dates?” Shoshana asked. “You read next to each other?”

I explained that with Andy, what I had was a friendship, not a romance.