“How should I know these things, Sonia? Who ever showed me how to be warm when I was young? I was lonely; I was angry at Mayo. What else did I see?”
My anger at her would still surge from time to time, and when it did, I would call on this awareness: she had her own story, pieces that were missing in her own life. I called too on a talisman of memory, one I could grasp like the smooth beads of a rosary. I’d return to it like some childhood storybook I knew by heart but of which I never tired. It was the memory of those summer nights when I woke in a terrible sweat, and Mami would towel me down with a cool wet cloth, whispering softly, so as not to wake Junior, because this was for me, my time. The little fan whirring away; my neck turning cool as the moisture evaporated; my mother’s hand on my back.
I wouldn’t suffer the same lack of examples as my mother. Friends would show me how to be warm, and I would learn by allowing others a chance to do for me as they had let me do for them, until no one remembered a time when it was not that way. As I learned, I practiced on my mother—a real hug, a sincere compliment, an extra effort to let down my guard—and miraculously she softened in turn, out of instinct long dormant, even if she didn’t quite know what was going on. Opening up, I came to recognize the value of vulnerability and to honor it, and soon I found that I wasn’t alone even on this journey. My mother was taking every step alongside me, becoming more affectionate and demonstrative herself, the person who, given a chance, she might have been.
KILEY RUNS to greet me, jumps into my embrace. She throws her skinny little arms around my neck, squeezes her tiny, birdlike three-year-old body to mine in crazy disproportion. And without warning my heart bursts, tears well in my eyes. A tenderness I have no name for rushes like a drug through my veins, as I realize that the absence of human touch has been, for so long, a burden carried unwittingly.
I wrote myself a prescription for hug therapy. I told each of the children in my life that I wasn’t getting enough hugs. Tommy, Vanessa, Zachary … “Would you help me out by giving me a hug whenever you see me?” Kiley didn’t need telling, of course, but every one of the others got it instantly. In this, the wisdom of toddlers is unassailable. The hugs came. And feeling flowed that had never come so easily before. Even as the kids grew into gangly teenagers, the hugs never stopped. Younger siblings, John and Kyle, would join the cause as the years went by.
What I’ve learned from children I’ve been able to give back to adults. The stroke on the arm that says I understand, the welcome hug, the good-bye kiss, the embrace that lingers that much longer in a time of sorrow. I’ve discovered the palpable difference between such acts as mere gestures and as sluices of true feeling between two people.
WE WERE IN the dressing room, and I was getting out of my jeans, ready to attack the pile of possibilities that my friend Elaine had gathered off the racks, when she dropped the armful of clothes and doubled over, hooting hysterically. I was afraid she would bring down the flimsy partition walls.
A client of Pavia & Harcourt’s who’d become a very close friend, Elaine Litwer was a gutsy and street-smart survivor of extreme poverty and a colorful family from the Lower East Side. She talked nonstop, was never wrong, and suffered no fools in wielding her merciless wit. Many weekends we’d prowl the shops and hang out like a pair of teenage girls.
“Sonia! My God! Who buys your underwear? Your mother?”
“As a matter of fact, in this case, yes.”
“We have to fix that right away!”
Any offense I might have taken at Elaine’s uncensored mockery was offset by a discreet satisfaction at the thought of Mami’s having, for once, been knocked off her pedestal as a fashion authority. I was happy to let Elaine help me choose some age-appropriate undergarments.
This was part of a much bigger project. Elaine was teaching me to shop, to recognize what looks good on me, how color works with skin tone, the drape of a fabric, how the eye follows a line. Alas, it was one subject in which I was not to prove a quick study. But little by little I developed confidence in my own judgment, and Elaine, bless her, found a way to make this process fun. Until she took me in hand, I’d hated shopping and confined myself to mail-order catalogs rather than suffer the smirks of salesgirls and the taunts of full-length mirrors. And even when I did something right, my mother’s idea of encouragement was scarcely encouraging. Any compliment would be immediately qualified: “That looks nice, Sonia, but now you need to paint your nails.”
But to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t all my mother’s fault. Dressing badly has been a refuge much of my life, a way of compelling others to engage with my mind, not my physical presence. I’m competitive enough that I’ll eventually withdraw from any consistently losing battle. Elaine gave me the precious gift of showing me that it didn’t need to be that way. I am a woman; I do have a feminine side. Learning to enjoy it would not diminish any other part of me.
She looked at me with her wide-eyed, wicked grin. “I would never in a million years have chosen that for you, Sonia, but it looks great on you. You see? You’re becoming your own person.”
NOT EVERY RELATIONSHIP ENDS with such mutual respect and dignity as Kevin and I somehow salvaged from our youthful mistakes. I would discover what it is to go down in flames romantically, disappointment that shakes your foundations. The despair would pass, but until it did, friends came to my rescue, just as they had after my divorce. Being left alone in my misery was never an option. Elaine’s taking me shopping every weekend was part of a campaign undertaken in the aftermath of one ill-fated romance. Alessandro and Fe, too, have been known to jump into the breach of a breakup: “Mama says you must come to Ibiza with us for vacation.”
One remedy for heartache I concocted on my own was learning how to dance. I scheduled the lessons, rolled up the carpet, and committed myself to learning salsa. No longer would I sit there like a potted plant watching others on the floor. The gawky, uncoordinated Sonia would make peace with herself in motion. I may never have a natural rhythm, but I know that the knees make the hips move, and I would learn to read a partner so well that I can now follow like an expert.
I still can’t sing to save my life—a slight hearing impairment doesn’t help matters—but after unnatural amounts of rehearsal to memorize where each syllable falls, I can now get up onstage at a holiday party and hold my own in a musical skit.
I finally learned how to swim, too. Okay, maybe not with athletic grace, but I can swim twenty laps without stopping. I can jump off the boat with the best of them, and no one will ever need to rescue me. I never imagined that even later in life I would learn to throw a baseball, but really you never know. During my first term on the Supreme Court, I practiced twenty minutes every afternoon for weeks so I could be ready to throw the first pitch at Yankee Stadium. Not from the mound, of course, but I did send it straight down the middle. Exercise of all kinds has been a joyous discovery, and I’ve even biked a century tour. It would take years, but now when I look in the mirror, what I see is really not bad. It’s true, I love food too much; my weight goes up and down. But when time permits, I actually enjoy the effort of keeping it off.
One reckoning with my physical self would prove harder than all the others. I had been a smoker since high school, burning through three and a half packs a day for much of my life. I made my first serious attempt at quitting in my final year at law school: every time I felt the urge, I ran around the block, often with Kevin and Star chugging alongside in solidarity. Going cold turkey during exams may sound like a needlessly brutal rigor, but in retrospect it seems less perversely self-punishing than lighting up again two years later when Kevin and I split. There would be further attempts, using various methods, including hypnosis, but nothing worked for good until I saw little Kiley holding a pencil between two fingers, blowing imaginary smoke rings. The guilt of endangering the health of a loved one is by far the best motivation I’ve discovered.
I checked into a five-day residential program and even wrote a long love letter, saying
farewell to what had been my most constant companion for so many years. It was another heartbreak, but I comforted myself by imagining that if I were ever to become a judge someday, I couldn’t very well be calling a recess every time I needed a cigarette. And it worked. I remain a nicotine addict, a fact that inspires a certain compassion for the addictions of others, but I haven’t had a cigarette since. I no longer worry about slipping, but I do fantasize that I might indulge one last smoke on my deathbed, just as Abuelita did.
FERRARI WAS a client of mine, and I was invited to take one of the original Testarossas for a spin. The twelve-cylinder was a marvel of technology that Ferrari had developed for the racetrack, packed into the fastest street-legal car ever built: zero to sixty miles per hour in under five seconds, and a price tag of about a quarter of a million dollars.
Negotiating hills, winding through fields and scattered woods, I was fearless, even as I thrilled to the feeling of such vast power under perfect mechanical control. As the hills rose and fell and the woods blurred past, other scenes appeared to my mind’s eye like so many glimpses in the rearview mirror. I remembered our useless car in the projects, my anger that Papi wouldn’t drive … A dozen or more of us piled into Gallego’s jalopy for a picnic, like a crazy guagua … Kevin lying on his back at the curb all summer long as I read aloud to him from the manual … The relief I’d felt that first time when, eerily, I got the clutch to engage, and I knew I’d be able to drive my things home to Mami’s in Co-op City … Then Abuelita calling out to everyone, ¡Vámonos de parranda!—a joyride at midnight! It was broad daylight, but for a long moment as the road rolled under the Testarossa, her smile didn’t fade.
Twenty-Nine
SOMETIMES, no matter how long we’ve carried a dream or prepared its way, we meet the prospect of its fulfillment with disbelief, startled to see it in daylight. In part that may be because, refusing to tempt fate, we have never actually allowed ourselves to expect it.
In 1990, I flew to London with Alessandro, Fe, his parents, and his sister for a Boxing Day celebration. When I got back to work after the Christmas holiday, my office looked like the office of someone who had been let go. The towers of paper that normally obscured my desktop had vanished, exposing a dark polished wood grain I’d all but forgotten about. Upon it sat only one document for my attention: an application form for the position of a federal district court judge. This was obviously Dave Botwinik’s doing. I grabbed the form and charged the short distance down the hallway to his office.
“Dave, come on.”
“It’s from Senator Moynihan’s judicial selection committee. They vet the recommendation he makes to the president. Fill it out.”
“Are you crazy? I’m thirty-six years old!”
“Humor me, Sonia. They’re looking for qualified Hispanics. You’re not only a qualified Hispanic but eminently qualified, period.” He promised to give me back my files if I filled it out, which I promised to do before counting the pages: it was endless. But Dave would not be deterred: he volunteered his assistant as well as my own, plus the help of a paralegal, whatever I needed to get the job done. I had long suspected that Dave Botwinik’s ambitions on my behalf were partly a displacement of ambitions he’d once had for himself. Until then, I’d just ignored it whenever he raised the topic. But this time he was showing a whole new level of determination, and he was not the only one on the case.
A few weeks earlier, I had shared a cab with Benito Romano after a PRLDEF board meeting. Having served as interim U.S. attorney when Rudy Giuliani quit the post to run for mayor, Benito had himself been approached by a colleague on Senator Moynihan’s search committee. He had declined the offer, he said, but given them my name.
“Why not you?” I asked.
“I have a wife, Sonia. I have kids. How am I going to put them through college on a judge’s salary?” It’s a very real problem that has discouraged many a talented person from considering the bench. The pay cut I would suffer as a young partner wouldn’t be as severe as a more experienced lawyer’s, and having no children spared me the impossible choice. But this calculus didn’t alter my feeling of reaching for too much too soon.
Even with help, the application took the better part of a week to complete. I had to account for every jot of my adult life, it seemed, as well as furnishing current addresses for each landlord, supervisor, judge, and legal adversary who had ever crossed my path. At least the financial information was easy; I still had little to report on that front. Beyond the summary of professional experience typical of job applications, this document would be the starting point for an investigation scouring my past for any ethical lapse. But I wasn’t daunted by that. I soon realized that, perhaps more than I would ever have admitted, most of the choices I’d made over the years have anticipated this very moment.
I heard back from the senator’s committee very quickly after submitting the application, the interview scheduled within a couple of weeks. If I still couldn’t take the whole business quite seriously, I nevertheless prepared as if my life depended on it. When I had gone for recruiting interviews at Yale, it never occurred to me to do research in advance or rehearse the answers to likely questions. The entire culture of the law school was geared to the law firms that were the most sought-after recruiters, to answering the very sorts of questions most likely to come up in such an interview, and to knowing those one ought to ask. Years later, having waltzed into an interrogation for a very different sort of position at a federal agency in Washington, I would realize, only too late, that it was not the sort of cakewalk a Yale JD could expect interviewing with a big Manhattan firm. I would never make that mistake again.
So I prepared as thoroughly as I would have done for a criminal prosecution, reading whatever I could find and seeking out colleagues and any friends and family of theirs with the least experience of the judicial nomination process: What kinds of questions could I expect to be asked? What objections might I need to rebut? I was no longer afraid of the obvious one I myself first anticipated: “Aren’t you too young to be applying for this position?” I’d certainly presumed so, but a bit of digging revealed I would not be the youngest to hold it. Becoming a judge in one’s thirties was uncommon but not unheard of, and I would have the names of those exceptions at my fingertips. And also one ready truth: although wisdom is built on life experiences, the mere accumulation of years guarantees nothing.
Judah Gribetz, a childhood friend of David Botwinik’s and longtime adviser to Senator Moynihan, chaired the committee, with whom I met in the conference room of a downtown law firm. I was facing some fifteen people around the table, most but not all of them men and lawyers. One of the few I recognized was Joel Motley, son of Constance Baker Motley, the first African-American woman to be appointed a U.S. district court judge. As questions flew at me from all sides, the answers were flowing easily, and I was pleased with how well I’d prepared. Then Joel asked one I’d never predicted. “Don’t you think learning to be a judge will be hard for you?” I took a breath to gather my thoughts, and then the answer poured out: “I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me. None of it has ever been easy. You have no idea how hard Princeton was for me at the beginning, but I figured out how to do well there and ended up being accepted to one of the best law schools in the country. At Yale, the DA’s Office, Pavia & Harcourt—wherever I’ve gone, I’ve honestly never felt fully prepared at the outset. Yet each time I’ve survived, I’ve learned, and I’ve thrived. I’m not intimidated by challenges. My whole life has been one. I look forward to engaging the work and learning how to do it well.”
When the discussion turned technical, my trial experience held up very well under scrutiny. As a state prosecutor, I’d tried many more cases than an attorney working in the federal system would have done. We talked at length about the child pornography and Tarzan Murderer cases, and I explained those investigations and the legal strategies employed. What about the areas where I lacked experience? There was much abo
ut criminal law at the federal level that I would need to learn, though my work at Pavia & Harcourt had included several hearings and a trial in federal court on trademark cases; I was at least familiar with the differences in the evidentiary rules. More important, I’d studied the resources that a novice judge would inevitably rely on—the readings, the seminars, the Federal Judicial Center. I might not know the procedural particulars as well as some, but I knew perfectly well where the issues lay. I cited the new Federal Sentencing Guidelines as an example. You can always look up answers to specific questions in specific situations, I said, so long as you have enough experience to know that a question exists. Learning the rules isn’t hard when you’re aware there’s a rule to learn.
We talked about my community service, which I knew was especially important to Senator Moynihan. My work at PRLDEF was clearly a point in my favor, as was the Campaign Finance Board and my other pro bono activities. As I sat there fielding questions, I dared to believe that the interview was actually going very well. With each question, I could see the pitch coming toward me as if in slow motion. I was relaxed but also alert, centered but agile, ready to move in any direction. If I was not picked, I knew it wouldn’t be because I had blown the interview. And that sense alone made the experience worth it.
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