Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (38 page)

I waited until I could speak without breaking into tears. “Thank you, but . . .”

He leafed through until he reached the back pages. “They don't usually photograph the face, so no one will recognize you.” He tipped the catalogue toward me. Black and white images of female torsos wearing cotton bras were printed along the left and right margins. Blocks of print gave particulars for styles, price, sizes available. “There's quite a bit of money in it,” he promised.

“It's not the kind of modeling I had in mind,” I said, trying to stay composed. I shook with anger and humiliation, but I didn't want to say or do anything stupid. After all, he was my teacher and would grade me at the end of the semester. “Thank you, anyway.”

“Don't decide right now. I know it's not the sort of thing a girl jumps into.” He returned the catalogue to its place.

“I'm sure it's not my thing.” I took my portfolio. He walked me to the door. “I appreciate the time you took.”

The long hall felt longer with him staring after me from the threshold. I tried to walk so that my hips didn't swing from side to side, my breasts didn't jiggle. No part of my body should appear suggestive in any way to someone who had just recommended a career for me as a bra model. Had the thought just occurred to him as he looked at my pictures? Or had he checked me out from every angle while I sat in class jotting down famous advertising slogans? How could I face him again? Never in tight clothes, that was for sure.

Shoshana didn't think I should have been offended. “Someone has to model bras,” she reasoned. “Why not you?”

“I'm not even allowed to wear a bikini. How can I tell my mother I model bras?”

“You tell her too much,” she said.

“That's not the point, Shoshana!”

She ignored my irritation. “Doesn't she make bras?”

“Yes she does. But that doesn't mean she wants me to wear them without a shirt.”

Shoshana's appointment with Mr. Delmar went much better. He thought she could be a model, but she needed more pictures. “Get some that are straightforward, less of this artsy-fartsy stuff,” was his assessment.

Since I was about four inches too short to be a model, I didn't want to be photographed any more.

“You can use them when you go on auditions,” Shoshana suggested. “Didn't you say they always ask for a head shot?”

I'd long felt at a disadvantage during auditions because I didn't have a composite or a head shot, which cost more than I was willing to invest in my career as an actress. But these photographs were nothing like the head shots other people brought to auditions. We made another appointment to be photographed,
and this time, we brought simple clothes, wore little makeup. Again we were snapped together, but at the end of the session, different students asked us to pose for them individually.

The young man who asked me was Indian. He was bony, slightly taller than I, stoop-shouldered. He spoke in a soft, deferential voice, a musical English that at first sounded too fast for me to understand. Once I became used to it, I liked his forceful explosives and snappy vowels, the way every syllable was differentiated from the other.

“My name is Shanti,” he said, as he set up lights for a portrait.

We worked well together. He was gentle and considerate, gave me breaks between setups, made little gestures with his lips, or his head, or his bony fingers to get me to move, or to hold a pose. It was as if we'd known each other a long time, and at the end of the session, he asked if it might be possible to do some exteriors.

“Is that okay with the school?” I asked.

“Yes, sure,” he said. “We're supposed to learn that too.”

We met that Sunday afternoon in Central Park. We walked around, and when he saw a nice background, he had me pose before it. After a couple of hours, he had enough pictures, and we went home, but not before he had asked me to meet him again the following weekend, this time in the Village.

The next Sunday we wandered around, and he snapped me next to a group of hippies in outlandish clothes and unkempt hair. I was uncomfortable around them, which showed in the photographs. The hippies made faces at the camera while I stood primly in front of them, my purse clasped to my bosom. He then photographed me in the midst of a group of old men observing a chess game. I had no idea how chess was played and watched the game intently to see if I could get a sense of it. But there was such little action, it was impossible to figure out, and when I looked up to see if Shanti was done photographing me, I gazed into the eyes of my math teacher, Mr. Grunwald. Behind him, Shanti snapped a picture of me looking shocked.

“Hi!” Mr. Grunwald seemed happy to see me, strangely, since in class he ignored me so that he could focus on people who understood scalar multiplication. He grinned. “Do you always travel with a photographer?” he asked. I introduced him to Shanti, and the three of us walked down the rows of chess tables crowded with spectators, as if the game held real excitement. Mr. Grunwald said he lived nearby and often walked to the park to see the players. He laughed when I suggested there was nothing to watch. Beside us, Shanti neither spoke nor took pictures, and I felt his sullenness grow like a balloon being pumped with air. Mr. Grunwald felt it too, because after a couple of blocks, he excused himself and went in the opposite direction.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Shanti asked, the minute Mr. Grunwald was out of hearing.

“No. He's my math teacher,” I blushed.

“I see.” He sounded annoyed, which made me mad. What business was it of his whether Mr. Grunwald was my boyfriend or my math teacher? “Maybe we're done for the day,” he said.

“All right.” I looked in the direction Mr. Grunwald had taken, wondering if I might catch up with him.

“Fine, then,” Shanti said, and stalked off. He quickly disappeared in the crowd, while I stood in place, surprised at his reaction. In the two weeks we'd worked together, it hadn't occurred to me that Shanti's interest might be more than professional. It was hard to imagine that when he looked at me through the lens, he saw more than a model. I walked around the Village for a while asking myself whether I wanted to be the object of Shanti's affection as well as his art. When I realized that my wanderings were meant to run into Mr. Grunwald again, I knew the answer.

The following week Mr. Grunwald asked me to stay after class. As everyone filed out, he handed me a copy of
Backstage
with an audition notice circled in red.

“I saw this,” he said, “and it sounded perfect for you.”

“Are you an actor?” I should have known that such a handsome man was in the theater.

“No,” he said, “but my roommate is.”

Shoshana waited outside, and I shared the news that Mr. Grunwald had a roommate. Her face fell. When I asked her why she looked so disappointed, she gave me her opinion.

“He's homosexual.”

“Oh, please!”

“Think about it. He's single, lives in the Village, has a roommate.”

It was the most ridiculous reasoning I'd ever heard. If anyone should know about homosexuals, it was me, I argued, since I was surrounded by them in dance classes. But Shoshana could not be dissuaded. She said some homosexuals didn't look it. “I bet his roommate,” she curled her tongue around the word, “is swishy.”

There was only one way to tell. We must see the roommate. If we followed Mr. Grunwald from school, we'd see where he lived. We might be able to catch a glimpse of the roommate through the window. Or, if we waited outside Mr. Grunwald's door, we might see them come out together.

In the excitement of planning how to follow Mr. Grunwald without being seen, I almost forgot why he asked me to stay after class. The audition notice in
Backstage
called for an ingenue for a children's theater company casting a Broadway-bound production of an Indian fable. It was a dream come true—a part I was qualified to play that took advantage of my looks and training. I called to set up a time and was told I didn't need to prepare anything because I'd read from the script.

If Shanti would talk to me again, I could learn an Indian accent and throw in a few Hindi words if necessary. We met for lunch, and as he showed me the pictures he had taken the previous week, I listened to his inflections, tried to capture the rhythm of his speech. He laughed at my attempts to mimic his accent.

“You can't learn it in one day,” he chuckled. “It takes a lifetime.”

The audition was at Michaels Rehearsal Studio on Eighth Avenue. Several other actresses waited ahead of me, but a couple
were too old to be ingenues, and none looked as Indian as I did. I'd made myself up to appear as Indian as possible without wearing a sari, my hair parted in the middle and braided, eyes done up with kohl, a dot of red nail polish in the middle of my forehead.

When I was called in, Bill, the director, and Vera, the producer, exchanged a look. They asked some questions about my prior experience, then said they were ready to hear me read from the script. In the scene, a character named Soni explained to a character named Babu that she was a prisoner in a tower because her uncle planned to marry her to a rajah. Soni was allowed to leave the tower to pray at a temple, but she had a chain around her waist, which her uncle pulled when it was time for her to return.

As soon as he heard my poorly executed Indian accent, Bill interrupted and asked if I could read it straight. Vera then asked me to improvise a scene in which a monkey entered through a window and offered to help Soni escape from the tower. I did my best to appear surprised, scared, curious, grateful. At the end, Vera took my phone number and said she'd get back to me.

Bill and Vera were professional and noncommittal, didn't give me a clear sense of whether or not they liked my audition. I wanted to play Soni more than anything in the world, and as I left the studio, I reviewed everything I'd done and said, tried to figure out if there was more I could have done to assure me the part. It was a Saturday, almost time for matinee performances. I walked on Broadway, past the marquees with the names of famous plays and actors, the tourists who gawked at tawdry posters in front of the pornography shops vying with legitimate theaters. I turned the corner and stood in front of Performing Arts's chocolate facade with its heavy red doors. I pressed my forehead against the glass. The familiar wooden boxes were stacked near the lockers in the Basement, the desks arranged in a semicircle, as if a scene were about to be performed for students and teachers. I shook with anxiety and had to lean against the front pillars of the shuttered
school until I no longer felt lightheaded and the trembling had stopped.

I hung up the phone and slumped against the wall of our kitchen. Mami panicked. “What's the matter?”

“I got the part,” I spoke to myself, unbelieving. “I'm going to be in a play.” I looked up at her. “On Broadway.”

“Is that good?” she wondered. She knew it was when I pulled Cibi from the playpen in the middle of the kitchen and danced her around the house. “I'm going to be on Broadway. I'm going to be a star,” I sang. Cibi chortled, drooled on me. I put her back.

Tata dragged herself from her room in the basement, Delsa and Norma left the television on in the living room and ran into the kitchen. Raymond and Franky appeared from the yard. The rest of my sisters and brothers came down from the bedrooms. The house was full of people I loved eager to hear good news. Without knowing what the fuss was about, my sisters and brothers, my mother and grandmother, could tell it was a wonderful thing because I was so happy. I repeated what Vera told me. The play was for young audiences. It was one of a repertory of other plays performed in schools and theaters around the Northeast. The company, Children's Theater International, had won several honors and awards.

My family was impressed. They didn't ask if I'd wear any of the bizarre costumes they'd seen on me, the bells strapped to my ankles, the nail polish dots in the middle of my forehead that had to be removed with acetone. They didn't joke about the strange sounds that came from my room when I practiced my Indian dances, which would increase now that I was to perform regularly. They were as glad as I was, which made my joy greater because it was wonderful to do something that not only made me feel good but made everyone else smile.

I called Shoshana, Shanti, Alma and Corazón, everyone I knew. I would have told total strangers if I had had the courage.

Rehearsals began that week, in a loft on Christopher Street in the Village. Some of the cast had performed in other Children's Theater International productions,
Petey and the Pogo Stick
and
Hans Brinker.
The play I'd be in,
Babu
, had been in repertory the year before.