Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (7 page)

“What happiness,” she declared with a wistful expression, “to see a daughter walk down the aisle in a long white dress and veil!”

Mami hadn't married in a church, but we were supposed to. We never went to church, but someday we would each stand in front of a priest and receive the vows she never had.

“I sacrifice myself for you,” she told us over and over. A fancy church wedding for each of us was one of the rewards she expected for that sacrifice.

Soon after Mami's belly started growing with his child, Francisco was rushed to the emergency room with a stomachache. When Mami returned from the hospital she told us he had cancer.

“But don't worry,” she said, “he'll be well soon.”

Her face was tight, her lips pressed together, her eyes scared, and we knew she was just saying that to make us feel better.

We moved to an apartment down the street so that Tata could live with us. Don Julio brought Tata's cot and small dresser, her radio and clothes, a few pictures of herself as a young woman, her altar. Now that Francisco was sick, she didn't gripe about him being too young or about Mami setting a bad example by living with him. Instead, she cooked and watched us so that Mami could go to the hospital right after work to spend time with Francisco.

A few weeks later, the landlord told us to leave because too many people lived in the three rooms he'd rented to a woman and two kids. We moved for the fifth time in a year. In the new apartment on Ellery Street, the bathtub was again in the kitchen, covered with an enameled metal sheet to make a counter during the day, removed at night so we could bathe. When the temperature dropped, the radiators stayed metal cold, and wind whistled through cracks in the casings.

We all had to transfer to new schools. Junior High School 33,
where I attended ninth grade, took up most of a city block. The cement playground and handball court were surrounded by hurricane fencing. Inside, the walls were the same amber-colored brick that covered the outside. The floors were shiny vinyl that squeaked when I wore sneakers, only allowed on gym days.

I scored well in a series of tests that Mr. Barone, the guidance counselor, gave me. I had no idea what the tests were for or why I had to take them, but Mr. Barone said they showed APTITUDE and POTENTIAL and that instead of going to the local vocational high school, I should apply to a school that would prepare me for college. While written English was getting easier for me to understand, spoken English still baffled me, so I agreed to an academic education not knowing what it meant and too embarrassed to ask. It was Mr. Barone's idea that I apply to Performing Arts High School in Manhattan.

“Why so far?” Mami asked. “Don't they have schools in Brooklyn?”

“It's a special school.”

She frowned. “Special?”

“I have to apply . . .”

“A private school. We don't have the money . . .”

I explained that it was a public school for kids who wanted to be actors, dancers, or musicians.

She stared at me. “Do you want to be an actress?”

“I don't know. It's just a school.”

“You'll do well there,” Tata interrupted, “because you're so dramatic.”

“There are no Puerto Rican actors on television,” Delsa reminded everyone.

“What about Ricky Ricardo?” wondered Raymond.

“Babalú!”
Edna beat an imaginary drum at her side and Alicia and Hector joined her in a conga line, singing
“Babalú, Babalú Oyé!”

“Stop that,” Mami said, “the people downstairs will think we have savages up here.”

“Ricky Ricardo is Cuban, and he's a singer, not an actor,”
Delsa continued once the kids settled. “And we know Negi can't sing.”

“And if you could, Mami would never let you wear those skimpy costumes the vedettes wear,” Norma warned. “Would you, Mami?”

“Stop this nonsense,” Mami said, eyes back on her mending.

“You see!” Norma laughed.

Mami smiled but didn't say more.

I'd never considered acting as a profession, but once he suggested Performing Arts and I agreed to try out, Mr. Barone made a fuss over me, and that felt good. I didn't tell him that Mami might not let me go even if I were accepted. He helped me prepare for the required audition, chose a monologue, recruited Mr. Gatti, the English teacher, to coach me in the pronunciation of words that I memorized phonetically without knowing their meaning. Mrs. Johnson from Home Economics taught me how to enter a room like a lady and how to sit with my legs together.

I took every opportunity to show Mami I was preparing for my audition. I stood in front of her dresser mirror to practice my monologue, trying to overcome the lifelong habit of speaking with my hands, which Mrs. Johnson said was distracting. I felt like a paper doll, stiff and flat, a smile pasted on my face.

“You belong to a type that's very common in this country, Mrs. Phelps,” I began. My sisters and brothers laughed at my attempts to be dramatic and repeated passages from my monologue, their faces twitching as they tried to be serious.

“Stop molestationing me,” I yelled, and Mami or Tata shooed them into the next room, where I heard them laughing.

For weeks my sisters and brothers teased me about my lack of talent, while in school Mr. Barone, Mr. Gatti, and Mrs. Johnson helped me prepare. No one from JHS 33 had attended Performing Arts High School, and Mr. Barone made sure the whole school knew I was applying. Now, in addition to my family, everyone in ninth grade questioned my artistic ability.

“Hey, spick!” Lulu taunted as I walked into the girls' bathroom
one day. “You think you're better than us? Well, you're just a spick, and don't you forget it.” She shoved me into the stall, and for a moment I thought she'd punch my face, but she was happy to spit on it, laugh, and leave me sitting on the toilet, so scared I might have peed in my pants.

I wiped my face with toilet tissue, pulled down my panties and did pee, holding back the tears. She wouldn't see me cry. Neither would she see me fight, because I'd never win. Lulu and her friends were tough, a gang of girls who sat in the back of classrooms passing notes to each other, smoked in the stairwells, picked fights with anyone they didn't like. They knew I was afraid of them, and they made sure I stayed scared. They tripped me in gym class, pushed me in the stairs, took food from my lunch tray. Because of Lulu and her friends, I only went to the bathroom in school if I couldn't hold it in anymore. Because of them, I walked home the long way, to avoid the corner where they stood mornings and afternoons, smoking, laughing, threatening passersby.

For months, Lulu and her gang ignored me. I was one of the kids they bumped into in the hall during period changes. But the minute they heard that I was applying to Performing Arts, Lulu and her friends began a campaign to put me back in my place.

“There goes the actress,” LuzMari jeered, as I passed her in the hall.

“She thinks she's white,” Violeta mumbled when I was excused from social studies to work on my monologue with Mr. Gatti.

“What?” Denise asked, as I waited to climb the rope in gym, “Eli Whitney not good enough for you?” Almost everyone from JHS 33 ended up at the nearest vocational school, which trained secretaries and nurses, auto mechanics and refrigeration technicians.

“It's just a school,” I defended myself, but it didn't matter. Lulu and her gang, to whom I'd been invisible, considered me a traitor because I accepted the teachers' guidance.

“They're jealous,” my friend Natalia suggested, as we walked
home from school one day. “They'll be pregnant and on welfare before we graduate from high school.”

Natalia lived with her mother and sisters in a building down the block from ours. She was a native New Yorker, her English was perfect, and she spoke Spanish well enough so that I could speak a mixture of both without confusing her. Natalia's mother, like mine, worked in the garment factories of Manhattan, although mine sewed bras and girdles, while hers worked in sportswear.

On Saturdays we waved to each other as we helped our mothers lug shopping carts full of groceries up the steps. Weekday mornings, Natalia made breakfast for her two sisters and walked them to their school before she came to ours. Her mother picked the girls up in the afternoons, so Natalia and I went home together almost every day. When I first met her, I thought she was religious, because she never wore makeup, short skirts, or bright colors. Then I found out that she looked that way because her mother, like mine, was old-fashioned.

Because our mothers saw how strict they were with us, Natalia and I were allowed to be friends, as neither could be considered a bad influence on the other. We were both “good” girls who did as we were told, were expected to be an example to our siblings, and were supposed to take that responsibility seriously. Natalia was better at being a role model than I was, however. Goodness was in her nature, whereas I chafed at the idea that whatever I did was watched by six sisters and brothers who might then do the same. I worried that if I stumbled, Delsa, Norma, Hector, Alicia, Edna, and Raymond were sure to fall behind me like a row of dominoes, never to rise again.

Natalia and I talked a lot about our future. She applied to the Bronx High School of Science, dreamed of becoming a doctor in one of the big hospitals, like Mount Sinai.

“I'll have an apartment on Park Avenue with a doorman and an elevator,” she fantasized, hands pressed to her chest as if to contain the happiness it would bring her.

“When I become a famous actress, I'm going back to Puerto
Rico,” I said, “to a farm in the country. And I'll have chickens and a rooster and maybe a dog.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because . . .” Could I tell her that I longed to return to Macún? That I missed the leisurely pace of rural Puerto Rico, the wild, green, gentle hills, the texture of the dirt road, from dust to gravel to sand to mud? I joked that the riches we hoped to make in our adult lives were meant to bring me back to where I'd started, while she dreamed of something completely different from what she'd known. She laughed politely, and I fretted that I had offended her by implying that my childhood was happier than hers.

“Are you going to be famous?” Raymond asked a few days before my audition.

“Leaf me a lone,” I said, annoyed, and worried that maybe I was in over my head. I had memorized the monologue Mr. Barone had chosen and had practiced how to enter a room like a lady, how to sit without plopping on the chair, how to keep my hands still on my lap instead of using them to punctuate my speech. It already felt as if I were acting, and I hadn't even seen the school.

“Mami, the audition is next week, can you take me?” I showed her the paper on which Mr. Barone had written the school's address: 120 West 46th Street. She studied it as if there were more in it than the two numbers and two short words.

“When do you have to be there?” she asked after a long while, and I went limp with relief. I gave her the details, mentioned that Mrs. Johnson had suggested I didn't have to get dressed up, but that I should look nice. “I saw a dress that will look good on you,” Mami offered, and I didn't argue that if she were to buy something new, I'd rather pick it out.

Several days later, she brought home a red plaid wool jumper
and new shoes. “This is a garter belt,” she told me, unwrapping a white cotton and lace undergarment with straps ending in rubber buttons snapped onto a metal loop. “It's what we're working on at the factory. I made this one myself.”

I'd watched Mami pull on her stockings, smooth them with her fingers, snap them on. I'd seen her stand with her back to the mirror to check that the seams were straight, then gently tug them into place. Until now, I'd not been allowed to wear stockings, and I knew the garter belt and the flat package that held a pair of “Nude” seamless stockings were a concession from Mami, an acknowledgment that I was no longer a child, although neither of us was ready to call me a woman.