Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (51 page)

“Maybe if we get married,” I suggested, pathetic even to myself.
Ulvi shook his head. “No, we cannot get married.”
No explanation followed his refusal, and I didn't seek one. He was somber, patient. His eyes watched me with the same intensity as they had, months ago, when Shoshana and I sat in this room trying to impress him so that he would put us in his movie. This, I knew, was a test of my loyalty. If I refused to follow him to Florida, I would fail.
Over the seven months we'd known each other I'd relinquished my will to his. I'd stopped seeing my friends, stopped dancing, ran from work straight into his arms. But I still went home at night to sleep under Mami's roof. Without saying the words, Ulvi was asking me to give her up too, to choose between them.
In all the time we'd been lovers, it had never once occurred to me that I'd ever have to make such a choice. One day, Ulvi would return to Turkey; or to Germany; or to who knew, who cared where. It would be Ulvi who would leave my life, not Mami. Over the years of watching Mami, La Muda, my aunts and cousins as they loved, lost, loved again, I'd learned that love was something you get over. If Ulvi left, there would be another man, but there would never, ever be another Mami.
“You think about,” Ulvi advised when I didn't respond right away. For the first time since the first time, I left his apartment without taking my clothes off once. I rode the train to Brooklyn. The heavy, dusty air of the subways was suffocating, made it impossible to breathe, muddled my thoughts so that I didn't know where I was, where I was going, or why. The express hurtled between Nostrand Avenue, Utica Avenue, Broadway-East New York. I got off the train and switched to the local for one stop, to Liberty Avenue, a block from Mami's house. It was dark, but earlier than I usually came home. Mami and Tata had cooked a vat of
arroz con pollo
and stewed pinto beans.
“Ay, Negi, you're early, that's good,” Mami said. “Let me serve you some dinner.”
She was cheerful because it was Saturday and she was paid on Friday, which meant there was a big, generous
compra
in the pantry. The sewing machines in the living room were quiet, covered with sheets so that the younger kids knew not to touch them. Hector, Raymond, and Franky were in the cement backyard, throwing a ball around. A little dog snapped at my ankles. Where had it come from? Did we own it? How long had we had it? I changed into my stay-at-home clothes and sat with Mami and Tata in the kitchen, and the three of us ate their good cooking, while in the next room, the television blared a variety show.
My sisters and brothers sprawled on the floor or on the plastic-covered furniture and laughed and pointed at the outlandish costumes and performers. Somewhere one of the babies cried, another screeched, the dog yipped. Tata lit up a cigarette, opened a beer. Mami screamed at Edna to pick up Ciro so he'd stop crying. I stood up, put my dishes in the sink, and burrowed into the room I shared with Delsa, into the bed I shared with Delsa. Covers pulled over my head to block out the noise, the confusion, the drama of my family's life, I knew, just as Ulvi knew when he asked, that I'd already made my choice.
acknowledgments
This is what I remember, as I remember it. Memorable statements, compelling confessions, and intriguing questions have contributed to the recreated conversations in some scenes.
The names of members of my immediate family are real, but circumstances have forced me to change others. For example, so far, there have been twelve Franks and five Normas in my life. While I can tell one from the other, it was harder to do that on the page. To avoid confusion, I've nicknamed or renamed some people.
Then there are those people whose names I can't recall. Some might be minor characters in a novel, but in real life, if they're remembered, they're not minor at all. I beg forgiveness from those who recognize themselves but whose names are different in these pages. Please understand that, while I may have forgotten your name, I still remember you.
Several individuals have helped shape this book. I am particularly indebted to my editor Merloyd Lawrence, whose confidence and encouragement are the greatest motivators any writer could ever hope for. Whenever I was overwhelmed by the emotions the writing of this memoir evoked, I called my friend and agent Molly Friedrich, whose reassurances kept me on course. My writing buddies Terry Bazes, Ben Cheever, Joie Davidow, Audrey Glassman, Marilyn Johnson, and Mary Breasted generously put aside their own work to read this manuscript at various stages.
Mil gracias,
dear friends.
The Santiago/Cortéz/Martínez clan has been gracious and supportive, even if they sometimes disagree with my version of events. Individually and collectively, my mother, father, sisters, and brothers manifest what respect and
dignidad
mean to a Puerto Rican.
And finally, my husband, Frank Cantor, and our children, Lucas and Ila, have figured out when I need to be alone and when I need a hug. You make me sing. (But don't worry, I won't do it in public.)
readers group guide
About This Guide
The questions, discussion topics, and suggested reading list that follow are designed to enhance your group's reading of Esmeralda Santiago's
Almost a Woman,
the sequel to her moving and powerful memoir
When I Was Puerto Rican.
We hope they will provide you with a number of ways of looking at—and talking about—this vibrant story of an ambitious, headstrong teenager as she moves slowly out of the loving and safe but constricting grip of her Hispanic family and community and into the large and unimaginably different world of Manhattan.
About This Book
At the age of thirteen Esmeralda must leave the familiarity, warmth, and vibrancy of Puerto Rico to live in a three-room apartment in Brooklyn shared by ten family members. Challenged by language barriers, cultural stereotypes, and her strict and fiercely protective mother, Esmeralda begins her triumphant struggle for identity and independence. By day she studies acting at Manhattan's Performing Arts High School and interprets for the family at city welfare offices; by night she
accompanies her mother and sister to Latin dance halls, but on such a short leash that she does not have her first date until age twenty. Undaunted, she makes up for lost time in a romantic apprenticeship at once hilarious and heartbreaking. Filled with wisdom and humor, Esmeralda Santiago's story is both universal and personal: the immigrant's search for belonging, the adolescent's search for identity, and the daughter's fight, often at a great cost to herself, for independence from a beloved but too powerful parent.
Questions and Answers
1. “In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times” [p. 1]. Santiago feels that this fact kept her and her family from attaching too much importance to possessions, or even to friends. What other effects did the family's many moves have on their outlook on life, their relationships to one another and to outsiders, and, in particular, on Esmeralda's developing character?
2. After her discussion with a neighborhood child soon after her arrival in Brooklyn, Esmeralda reflects, “Two days in New York, and I'd already become someone else” [p. 5]. What does the two girls' conversation reveal about categories of identity? Is group identity, in a multicultural place like New York, seen to be primarily racial? National? Linguistic? Regional?
3. What different groups does Esmeralda identify herself with during the course of her narrative? How do her experiences at the Performing Arts High School change her ideas about hierarchy and group identity? How does she define herself at the memoir's end?
4. Mami says that Esmeralda's cousins Alma and Corazon are Americanized. “The way she pronounced the word
Americanized,
it sounded like a terrible thing, to be avoided at all costs, another algo to be added to the list of ‘somethings' outside our door” [p. 12]. What does Mami mean by “Americanized,” and why does the word have such negative connotations for her? Why is she so afraid of Esmeralda's becoming Americanized too? Isn't it true that she also wishes for Esmeralda and her siblings to enter into American life and to succeed there?
5. Listening to Mami, says Santiago, “had taught me that men were not to be trusted” [p. 14]. The same could be said of Esmeralda's observations of her father, and of some of the other men in her community. What mixed messages about men, women, and love does Esmeralda pick up, as a child, from her parents? How does her mother's example affect her own early relationships with men and boys? Does it make her more passive? Wary? Fearful? Impulsive? Why does she never feel “affection” for any man outside her family until she meets Allan—although she is not in love with him—whereas she has been in love with several other men?
6. What does Esmeralda learn about “another United States—the trim, horizontal suburbs of white Americans” [pp. 26–27]—from Archie comics? How much of the imaginary picture she constructs of the white suburbs is a true one, and how much is simple fantasy? In what ways is Esmeralda's life deeply different from those of real suburban teenagers?
7. How, according to Santiago, do race relations and racial consciousness differ between Puerto Rico and
New York? Have the racial attitudes and stereotypes encountered by Esmeralda in the 1960s changed over the ensuing decades? Are things better, worse, or much the same?
8. How does Mami's trip to the welfare office [pp. 43–44] make Mami look? Does this image that Mami presents to the welfare agent resemble the real Mami that we have come to know from the book? Does this scene, and your knowledge of Mami's character, change or affect your ideas about welfare recipients and the welfare system?
9. Mami has high expectations for her daughters: that they will remain virgins until marriage, that they will find good and responsible husbands, and that they will get married in a church. Esmeralda is not even allowed to date until the age of twenty. Yet the example Mami herself has provided is very different: eleven children by three different men, none of whom has married her. “Whenever we discussed it at home, it was agreed by the adults around the kitchen table that ‘the Pill' was nothing more than a license for young women to have sex without getting married. The fact that my mother, grandmother, and almost every other female relative of ours had sex without marriage was not mentioned” [pp. 156–157]. Is Mami entirely unreasonable and exasperating on this subject? Do you have any sympathy for her and the discrepancy between her standards and her behavior?
10. Why, as an actress, does Esmeralda refuse to venture into her deeper self [p. 74]? What is she afraid of finding? Is there any part of her teenage life during which she does not feel it necessary to act a role?
11. Jaime, who acts with Esmeralda in Babu, is a political activist who promotes Puerto Rican culture in New York. What is it in Esmeralda's life and experiences that make her resist his perorations, and to believe that “I could be of no help to ‘my' people until I helped myself” [p. 288]?
12. How can you explain the fact that Esmeralda accepts the marriage proposal of Jurgen, a man she has known only a few hours, when by her own admission she is deeply distrustful of men in general?
13. “Why him?” Esmeralda asks after losing her virginity to Ulvi. “Why not Otto or Avery Lee or Jurgen” [p. 272]? Can you answer her question? What of her special needs does Ulvi, alone among all the men she knows, meet? Why does she go along with his dominating manner, his wish to separate her from family and friends, his rules and regulations? Does Iris have a point when she says Esmeralda's bracelet, a gift from Ulvi, reminds her of shackles? Or do you agree with Santiago's own retrospective opinion that Ulvi served as a substitute father for her?
14. “Esmeralda's observations of her own family and community have taught her that ”love was something you get over. If Ulvi left, there would be another man, but there would never, ever be another Mami” [p. 310]. Why, then, does she opt to leave with Ulvi? Does this move amount to an out-and-out rejection of Mami? What else is she leaving behind when she leaves her mother and family?
15. How has the lack of a father during her formative years affected Esmeralda's life, her character, and her dealings
with the rest of the world? How might her life have been different if her father had been present? How might she, as a person, have developed differently?
16. The relationship between Mami and Esmeralda is a complex one: in some ways it is the classic mother-daughter story, while other elements of it are more unusual. “I felt guilty,” Santiago remembers, ”that so much of what little we had was spent on me. And I dreaded the price” [p. 86]. What price does Mami, in fact, try to exact? What does she expect of Esmeralda, and how far is Esmeralda willing to go to please Mami? What concessions does Esmeralda refuse to make when it comes to her own life? Do you find that the relationship between Mami and Esmeralda resembles that between Tata and Mami? In what ways is it different, and why?

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