Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  We finally find our way past a patch of grass and up a little walk that turns in on itself. Once in the apartment I run to the windows, but they face more buildings just like ours, with little lawns separating them. Where’s the street? Which is the way out? Or the front and back? I cannot see who else lives around here, who is coming or going, or playing, fighting, or drinking. How will I judge my father’s mood if I can’t see him walking or swaying up the street?

  Later, Ma stands lost in the emptiness of the living room full of boxes. My baby brother, Petey, crawls around the floor crying, and my brother Joe, in his too-tight clothes, gently pushes his tin toy car along a wall.

  “Dejen eso.” Ma pleads with both of them to stop. Petey cannot but Joe sits still; and because he has become good at fading away we soon forget he is there. My father runs his finger along my mother’s face from her ear to her cheek slowly to make her feel better but it is not enough and she turns away.

  They tiptoe around, picking things up and putting them down in the same place, to avoid each other’s eyes. I thought we were going to be happy moving away from the bodega and up in the world in a better neighborhood and apartment and all that, but they look sadder than ever. Not like they had made anything better, but like they had just bumped into a glass wall they hadn’t seen right in front of them.

  I look around. The rooms are white with no cracks to get lost or find shapes in. The floors are shiny wood, not covered in rose-patterned linoleum, and the lights built into the ceiling are fluorescent bright so we scurry around like roaches exposed by light and desperate for someplace to hide. For days we unpack slowly and I find the ceramic tropical fish I had given Ma one Mother’s Day.

  “Where should I put this … ?”

  She turns to me, pained by my question. “How should I know where anything goes?” she says.

  One day, after we’d been there awhile, there is a knock on the door.

  “Who?” my ma fearfully asks.

  “You people have to be quiet,” says a pale, thin white man who lives downstairs. “My wife just had a baby and you people have to be quiet.”

  What’s this? How can we be making any noise with my parents skimming around each other like ghosts? Even their fighting has taken on a raspy despair.

  “It’s no use,” I hear my mother say over and over again.

  “Yes, it is …” my father always responds.

  We are all like spirits. Petey cries quietly, monotonously, I become sleepy—the whole family matches Joe in his silence. And in this ghostlike state I float to my new school.

  “Cuidado,” Ma shrieks as I walk out the door. “Watch where you are going! Are you sleepwalking or something?” But her words just bounce off me. I am not awake enough for her to get through to me. I have gotten good at walking, talking, and even eating while being half-awake. After weeks of floating out the front door of my building, then turning left to go right, around the scraggly playground, only to sometimes find myself back where I have started, I have finally figured the way out of the maze and am able to reach my goal—the street from which I see the overpass that will take me to school. There is no beautiful elevated train in this neighborhood, only the traffic of Bruckner Boulevard. Once on the overpass I look down on the traffic, always a tapón, clogged with cars barely moving.

  In school I go along with the herd of kids shifting left and right as they go in and out of classes. If I stay quiet I can feel the movement of the group and go along without thinking. I always find myself between two Spanish girls, Norma and Teresa. Are they my new friends? I don’t know. In class I stare out the window.

  “Sonia.”

  It’s the teacher, Miss Pellman, pulling me back into the classroom. “Would you like to clean the erasers?”

  I replay her words in my mind. If I say no she’ll ask me, “Why not?” Saying yes and then doing it will mean less talking. So I say yes. When I’m finished with the job I get lost picking at a scab.

  “Sonia?”

  It’s Miss Pellman again.

  “Can you hand out the notebooks?”

  Why does she keep waking me up? Why won’t she leave me alone? I hand out the notebooks and a girl trips me and I wonder if I will get another scab to play with where my knee has scraped the floor. Norma (or Teresa) helps me up. When I go to the bathroom Miss Pellman sends Norma or Teresa with me. When we must draw pictures for Pan-American Week, I draw with Norma or Teresa. Norma is white with thick, straight, brown hair and one eyebrow that goes across her forehead. She wears gym socks and Buster Brown shoes. Teresa has skin more like mine, and frizzy hair that has to be controlled with a headband. She has dark circles under her eyes and finely wrinkled thick lips. We cross the overpass on our way home, then go our separate ways because this neighborhood is fake and spread out and unnatural. If it was natural my school friends would be my neighborhood friends. When Teresa, Norma, and I part, I walk a ways with a Negro girl.

  I’m not really with her and she is not really with me but I notice that of all the kids in the school she lives a bit closer to me. One day the hollow feeling in me is so great I talk to her.

  “You know I live right over there …”

  She tries to figure me out but says nothing.

  “Do you want to come and play … ?”

  She says yes and suddenly I’m shy.

  Ma is annoyed when Rhonda comes to the door. Not because she is black, I don’t think, but because there is no time for friendships and hanging out in my house when, despite the boredom, we live like there could be an explosion any minute. Rhonda and I go into my room and she looks around and I wonder if she thinks it odd that there’s hardly any furniture, so I decide to act like the lack of furniture is new to me, too, as I set up a board game. It’s called Girlfriends and played by blonde and red-haired girls on television commercials. The fluorescent light makes Rhonda’s black skin bluish and my brown skin gray—not at all like the creamy pink girls we are trying to be.

  Before the first round is over I begin to feel sleepy and she starts to forget when it’s her turn. “I kind of have to go soon,” she says after a while. The sky gets purple and it is time for my father to come home and Ma hides the knives in the oven and signals to me that Rhonda must go, because you never know what can happen. Rhonda and I hardly look at each other when we say good-bye at the door, then I go back to my room and fall asleep as fast and hard as I can.

  The next morning I dress and start out the door when Ma pulls me back into the apartment. She holds up my pajamas, which have a brownish-red stain on them, as evidence of a crime committed. Ma pushes me into the bathroom, pulls down my panties, and makes me step into a ring of elastic with two fasteners, front and back. I know what this is—I’ve seen it in the bathroom over the years, sometimes drying on the curtain rod like a weak little snake, and sometimes hidden in big box of Kotex behind and under the sink. Grimly attaching a sanitary napkin to the two fasteners and making sure it’s snug between my legs she sends me on my way. I feel like I am wearing a mustard plaster. But mustard plasters are on your chest when you’re sick and can’t breathe. Am I sick down there?

  It hits me when I see Teresa and Norma on the overpass. I have gotten my period. ¡Me cantó el gallo! The rooster has sung to me. That’s how my aunts Bon Bon and Iris talked about it. When somebody got their period they said the rooster sang to them. Even in New York? I’m so happy that anything has happened to me.

  “I got my period,” I crow to Norma and Teresa as soon as I see them. Why is the expression that the “rooster sang to me,” when I’m the one who is crowing all loud and tough and special? No one is singing to me, I am singing to myself.

  “Wow,” says Norma.

  “Did you get yours yet?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “How about you, Teresa?”

  “No,” she confesses like the little girl she is. They both look at me like I might have a disease they don’t want to catch, but I know they do want to catch it and be grown-up at
last.

  At school Miss Pellman knows right away. How does she know everything without me saying? She pats my cheek with her cool, soft hand, squeezes my shoulder, and smiles. The bathroom rules are different that day. Come 10:00 a.m. Teresa and I raise our hands. Miss Pellman gives us the okay to go, then adds, “Why don’t you go along, too, Norma?” The three of us being allowed to go to the bathroom at the same time makes us expand with greatness as we float out the door. Then we are allowed the same bathroom privileges at 11:30 a.m.! The class mutters disapproval, but who cares; my period makes my two friends and me special. I am the queen and they are my ladies-in-waiting. But it only lasts for a few days and after a few months of bloody visits my troubles really begin.

  I am in line to go outside and play at recess. Someone knocks into me and as I sprawl and look up I see the boy who has crashed into me is just as surprised as I am, but right behind him is the angry girl Denise who is always around when I fall. She has pushed him into me. Denise is black but her skin is much lighter than mine and she has a few freckles across her nose. Her hair is divided in many sections with barrettes of all colors.

  “Don’t look at me,” she says, even though there is no one else to look at. My tears push forth but I open my eyes wide to accommodate them so they don’t spill out.

  Denise finds me no matter where I am. Even when I don’t know where I am. Every day she pushes, or pinches, or shoves. Norma and Teresa know and they look on, all wide-eyed and feeling sorry for me, but I think they like the show. I never see Denise’s punches or pinches coming, but even if I did I wouldn’t fight back. For weeks I just crawl into myself like a poked crab.

  One day Norma warns me, “Oh, you are going to get it today …”

  “What?”

  “Denise said she was going to fight you today, after gym.”

  All the other kids must’ve known, too, because after gym, silently in the hallway, my classmates form a circle in which to see the spectacle. Denise moves toward the center of the empty space they make, and everyone, including Teresa and Norma, pulls away from me so I am isolated. All energy drains from me and flows into the floor that I wish would absorb me. I’m scared for my face, my ears, my legs, my chest, and I wish I could put myself in my own pocket and become lint. Denise takes aim and when I think I will be pulverized Miss Pellman appears like a fairy godmother in a Grimm fairy tale! She waves us back into an orderly line and my classmates transform back into little girls and boys and not bloodthirsty fighters and spectators.

  “You’re lucky,” whispers Norma.

  “She never comes this way,” adds Teresa.

  “How would you like to be in a spelling bee?” Miss Pellman asks, as if I just hadn’t been so close to losing my life. I try to focus on her. She is always comfortable, clean, and neat in her thin wool sweaters and skinny belts and suede shoes. Her hair is so nice and brown, held back off her face with a headband. I think her legs are so pretty but she is not, really, because her nose is too long and thin. I can’t think of anything to say, though I know I don’t want to be in a contest.

  “Don’t worry, you just do the best you can, and it’ll be all right.”

  Later, I look at all the words I am supposed to know and am surprised at the way cocoa is spelled with an “a” at the end. It makes no sense. You can’t hear that “a” at the end of the word. Up on the stage in the auditorium on the day of the spelling bee I am nervous and hope I am good enough for Miss Pellman so she doesn’t feel sorry she picked me. My turn comes! I’m asked to spell cocoa. Oh no, it’s that tricky word with the “a” at the end! Maybe I studied it wrong. I can’t be sure of what I know. Maybe I saw an “a” that wasn’t there?

  “Cocoa, c-o-c-o, cocoa,” I spell.

  I am disqualified immediately and later when I have to face Miss Pellman I feel ashamed.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says impatiently.

  Later at recess I stand by the fence thinking about how stupid I am and wonder why I had been afraid to spell cocoa correctly, when suddenly a ball bounces off my head. Who threw it?

  “Ha-ha!” A big, fat boy with white hair and eyebrows and yellow teeth comes toward me.

  “Sorry,” he giggles, looking to retrieve his ball.

  I hold the sore spot on my head and when I catch sight of his soft, white, marshmallow neck, a white-hot fury comes over me and makes me jump on his back and bite. I am yanked into the principal’s office.

  “People eat! People chew!” the principal screams. “Only animals bite! Are you an animal?”

  Then he calls my mother at the factory. When she gets home that night she is furious because she has to take off from work to come into school. We need the money. How can I be so thoughtless? Am I crazy—making the teacher notice me like that!

  A few days later she comes to school, but there is something else on her mind. She half listens to the principal’s complaints about me. Driving home I look at her and it’s like she is making the car move with her own energy, not gas or wheels. Her eyes bug out and her hair is flying back out of the way. We get home and I’m surprised to see Bon Bon packing old suitcases with our clothes. I’m told to pack as well.

  “Pack? Why?”

  “Why do you think? We are moving now, quickly, before your father comes home!”

  How crazy is that? Nothing had happened. No big fight. Just avoided glances and heaviness in the air.

  “¡Avanza!” my mother yells and I hurry as best I can. But move what? The refrigerator? The stove? I push it.

  “¡Muchacha!” She can’t believe how stupid I am. “Put your clothes in this bag!” I wish I could get in the bag myself and throw myself out the window and fall into the maze, where it would take weeks to find me. But we put ourselves in the car and drive to an apartment on Washington Avenue, right near where we used to live on Third Avenue. The building is old and rickety and breaking down, the wooden door frame soft. Inside Joe is fascinated that his toys roll and gather in one corner because the floor has such an angle in it, and though the apartment is tiny—three furnished rooms and a kitchen—Ma gets lost in it. Joe tries to dress himself and puts his right shoe on his left and vice versa. Petey weeps.

  I wonder what my father will think when he comes home and finds us gone. Will he peer around shocked and bewildered, not knowing where to look? My mother is gazing around, surprised and bewildered in this new apartment even though moving was her idea. We settle, not into the apartment but more like into ourselves, each of us separately.

  Then a surprise! A day later Bon Bon shows up with my cousin Zoraida, who now has a brand-new teen name—Sue. With a toddler in tow and a baby in the oven she doesn’t have a place to stay. Bon Bon helps her daughter move in—Ma looks like she got hit in the head with a baseball bat.

  “She’ll take care of Joe and Petey when you work,” Bon Bon assures her.

  Is this good or bad? I look to my mother for how to feel, but I can’t understand her face so I look to Sue. I like Sue. She reminds me of the beautiful actress Kim Novak, tall and with a nice straight nose. Bon Bon gets ready to leave but waits until her little grandson is not looking to suddenly smack him on the legs. Hard. He turns to her, his face contorted, uncomprehending, tears welling up and spilling out all over the place. I stare at Bon Bon.

  “To ward off the evil eye,” she says.

  That night Ma and Sue put the chairs facing each other to make a bed for the little boy and pregnant Sue sleeps on the sofa.

  I share the back room with Joe, and Petey sleeps with Ma. I look out the window. The Fenway movie theater Aurea and I used to go to is across our street, and watching its lights blinking on and off in big, red, neon letters I think I’m not the only stupid one in this bunch.

  Though we’ve moved it’s decided that I finish out the school year in Miss Pellman’s class. It takes a long time to get there even with Ma dropping me off at a convenient bus stop on her way to work. “Just until the school year runs out,” Ma hisses at me. “Then you’
ll go to a school around here.” I half listen, or not at all, to anyone, not even Miss Pellman when she greets me each morning.

  “Sonia …”

  Miss Pellman’s lips are moving. Nice color lipstick, I think.

  “On Saturday … can you come?”

  I wonder how come she is not married. And I think that’s a real good way to be—not married—free to be whatever you want to be—

  “I can talk to your mother if you want to.”

  But do I want to be an old maid like Miss Pellman, a jamona … ?

  “I would like to take you, Norma, and Teresa …”

  Being an old maid would not be bad if I had a job …

  “Sonia!”

  I snap out of it. “What?”

  “I would like to take you, Norma, and Teresa to see West Side Story on Saturday. Would you like that?”

  “West Side Story?”

  “It’s a movie. Made from a musical.”

  My father is not around to automatically say no to me about doing anything that’s fun so the next Saturday we are in Manhattan. Not Grandmother’s El Barrio Manhattan but a Manhattan street full of movie theaters, and they are not like the small, shabby Fenway theater, either, but have big marquees with blinking lights that work. Inside there are tons of excited people and large posters of movie stars everyplace I look. Finding our seats we settle, with Miss Pellman sitting on one side of me and Teresa and Norma sitting on the other. Folks are chewing popcorn and chattering all around but when the movie starts silence falls on the spectators like a blanket from above. The sudden quiet stirs me and I look up from my lap to the screen.

  I see the schoolyards, the fences, the buildings, and candy stores I’ve seen in all my neighborhoods—but here they look different. Sharp, clear, bright, and beautiful. What is this that I am watching?