Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  I put on a housedress like my mother and do the laundry! Then I want to serve him rice and beans and kiss his hands. Where on earth did I get that idea that it was sexy to do that with a boy? I hope it was from a Sophia Loren movie and not from my mother! Wherever I got it, I don’t like it.

  And it gets worse. I start going to church with him because that’s the place all young ladies in love go to be with their boyfriends so we can bump our breasts against their arms accidentally-on-purpose on the way there.

  “It’s quits!” I tell him one day when I’ve had enough.

  “Why?” He is astounded.

  “Don’t think I am ever going to clean up your vomit,” I tell him.

  “What?”

  “Your vomit! I don’t play that …”

  “But I don’t even feel sick … ?”

  “It’s quits anyway.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, it’s over!”

  “But what’s the matter?”

  “Never mind, it’s just quits,” I answer.

  And I run like the wind.

  Ay, Dios mío … !” My mother comes home crying, distraught.

  My heart jumps and I look for my father behind her. But he isn’t there; it’s something else.

  “What happened?”

  “Your sister is living with a man!”

  I am relieved now.

  “You idiota, she’ll get pregnant and he’ll leave her!”

  I think it’s romantic. My sister has changed; she’s grown her hair long, wears casual clothes, everything is looser about her, somehow. She’s even quit her job and her neat-looking roommate and blond furniture to live on the Lower East Side like a poor person again. I decide to visit her and her boyfriend. The streets I walk along on the way over from the train are filthy, garbage everywhere, bodegas galore. It reminds me of my old neighborhood on Third Avenue. Why live here? I wonder. She graduated high school and has a good job as a keypunch operator for Eastern Airlines. I enter the building and there’s a girl trying to get up the stairs ahead of me. She has a baby in one arm and is dragging a four-year-old up the stairs with the other hand.

  “¡Avanza, zángano!” She screams at a little boy to hurry up. He tries to, but falls, so she smacks him on the head. He howls, the girl’s mother comes out of an apartment in a housedress and rollers, and I can see through the door even more kids crying on saggy sofas decorated with dirty lace.

  “¿Qué pasa?” yells the mother.

  “Here.” The girl tosses the baby to her and then threatens the little boy, smacking him on his butt. “I’ll give you a reason to cry!” Finally they all tumble into their apartment, where I hear their muffled troubles go on. I wonder again, why live here?

  Entering my sister’s apartment I’m still surprised at how long she has let her hair grow. A man is at the door. “Come on in …” It’s her tall white boyfriend from Mississippi, Bill. “Have a seat.”

  I like him right away because he has an easy, drawly way of talking.

  “How’s Ma?” asks my sister.

  “She’s worried … I guess.”

  “She should worry about herself …”

  “Yeah … I guess.”

  There are books on cinder-block bookcases, and lots of plants, and posters, records, and colorful candles that drip wax onto Chianti wine bottles, nothing at all like the apartment I had just peeked into next door. Classical music is drifting all around me as she settles down and continues to work on a mobile of tiny plastic airplanes. Bill looks around uncertainly. “I’m heading out for beer,” he announces and leaves. There is a big cat lounging on the metal panel covering the tub in the kitchen and I remember my mother cooking my father in a similar one, so long ago.

  I am left with this new sister who asks me carefully, “How are things?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure …”

  “Good, because I was afraid you were losing your spirit.”

  “My spirit?”

  “Yes, and Joe and Petey, too.”

  “They are losing their spirit?”

  “Yeah …”

  I wonder if I should change my shoelaces.

  “You guys should look out for each other,” she adds.

  I can’t stand my brothers, but I am afraid to say so.

  “Especially Joe. Because he is in the middle of you three.”

  I hear the children cry next door.

  She pauses, then adds, “Ma’s not a saint, you know. She has problems …”

  I look at the mobile Aurea’s building and how carefully balanced it all is.

  “She lives that way because she wants to, you know …”

  The little plastic planes are all the same but they are different colors, and she’s managing to make them go in all different directions.

  “Ma made her bed, and now she has to sleep in it.”

  One misplaced plane could send it all to hell.

  “You can’t help her, you know …”

  I hand her the next plane and wonder how she’ll hang it without them all crashing into each other.

  “Here’s five bucks. Go find a dance class somewhere.”

  I take the five dollars and feel guilty I am jealous that she cares about Joe and Petey, too.

  White neighbors who have small children named Dylan and Donovan come over. Later, more friends stop by. They are all Americanos. Are they hippies or beatniks? They smoke and drink a lot of beer while they play guitar and sing songs around the kitchen table.

  It’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

  What mines? What people dying in Appalachia of black lung disease? They drink more beer.

  Tura lura lura

  Tura lura lye

  Tura lura lura

  That’s an Irish lullaby.

  What sad songs they sing. But the sadder the songs the happier the beer makes them. Dinner is spiced ham-and-cheese sandwiches, which I eat in the jungle of plants hanging in the living room, sitting on the mattress on the floor, careful not to get mayonnaise on the Indian bedspread, and listening.

  “Women around here have babies to prove their femininity, not ’cause they want them …”

  “Black people and white people are much closer in the South. I mean, they are actually in each other’s lives. Here in the north the black man might be free but totally isolated … !”

  “You can’t compare Faulkner to Hemingway …”

  “Why is Baldwin always left out of the equation … ?”

  “At least the English introduced the concept of legal systems to the New World. In South America the Spanish introduced machismo, belligerence, and an idiotic religion.”

  “Play some Miles, will you … ?”

  I wonder what all they are talking about. Who is Faulkner … and Baldwin, and all the others? What kind of talking is this that is not really an argument? This talk has no winners or losers, only exchanges. I want to know what Vanessa would make of all this and can’t wait to bring her around.

  “Wait’ll you see, Vanessa. It’s a cheap apartment. I’m sure we can get one when we graduate high school. I’m going to be a secretary and you’ll be something, too,” I tell her on the train over. “Wait until you see. We can decorate it with books and plants …”

  We get out of the train station and head east. Vanessa picks up a cigarette butt from the street and smokes it. At my sister’s she stands around blankly.

  “Look at this book! Look at this macramé! Look at this …”

  “Can we go soon?” she asks.

  “But listen to this African woman who sings by clicking her tongue … !”

  But Vanessa is bored and her silence urges us to go. On the train I feel stuck and frozen between two places, two worlds, two ways of seeing things.

  “Come over, we’ll make a dress for tomorrow,” she says when we get to our building.

  “Later,” I say, deciding on going my own way, to my side of the buil
ding. In the apartment Joe is wheezing on the bed and Ma tells me to sit with him at the window. My father comes home, sees what’s going on, and tries to help the situation.

  “¡Mal rayo te parta!” he screams up to God, shaking his fist.

  Joe hunches over more and adds a moan to his rattling.

  “Cálmate,” warns Ma excitedly.

  “Calm down,” she says. But I can’t tell if she is trying to calm Joe or my father.

  Joe’s chest heaves up as his stomach deflates to almost touch his spine. I count his ribs. My parents argue in the living room. I close the door to the room so my brother can rattle in peace. Finally my raging father and my supplicating mother take Joe to Lincoln Hospital. When they return it’s my mother who is raging, exasperated with the list of foods Joe should avoid.

  “Peanut butter,” my mother shrieks. “What Puerto Ricans eat peanut butter?”

  I hear them talking into the night, and the next day, and the next. I gather through innuendo and some eavesdropping that someone is going on a trip. Who? It’s Joe. He’s going to be sent to Puerto Rico.

  “For how long?” I ask.

  “Till he gets better,” my mother emphatically states. “If he stays here he’ll die for sure.”

  So far the existence of Puerto Rico has been like background noise, a mostly bad place of a hunger and sadness that inspires beautiful songs. But all of a sudden Puerto Rico is front and center and is going to save Joe’s life.

  “Who is he going to live with?” I want to know.

  “With my father …”

  I can’t believe it. “You are sending Joe to be with your father? I thought your father was a mean sinvergüenza.”

  “Not just my father, my father and his wife, who is nice. You know, when I was your age I went to see them and I wanted to look good so I made a skirt with a kick pleat in the back. Before I could even say ‘Hola,’ he slapped me so hard for wearing that skirt I fell off the porch.”

  “And that was nice?”

  “Let me finish. His wife was there and she said, ‘Dionisio, you should not have done that.’ ”

  “That makes it okay?”

  “Never mind,” she snaps.

  And so she dresses Joe in a little suit and sends him to that other world I have always heard so much about, Puerto Rico.

  Get out of the bathroom!” screams Ma.

  But I can’t. I am so beautiful and sexy I can’t tear myself away from the mirror. I have even grown to love my breasts because they are soft and curvy and their size makes my waist look tiny. “Wait a second,” I yell back. “Almost done,” I say before taking a deep breath, closing my mouth, and applying enough hair spray to choke a goat.

  “Come on … !”

  I give myself one last spritz and open the door. Ma rushes in.

  “What the hell …” she says, waving her arms around in the fog of hair spray. “AveMaríaPurísima, you’re going to go blind!”

  “Ma, should I cut my hair?”

  “What?”

  “My hair …”

  “Your hair? Were you looking at your hair all this time? We’ve got to go! Are you crazy? I can’t believe you’ve been combing your hair all this time! Your father can’t start the car, you know!”

  “What do I care?” I mutter under my breath.

  “Mira …” she warns me, but before she can go on my father comes in the door wearing three sweatshirts. He looks through me and I wonder why he doesn’t have a coat. The sweatshirts are short in the sleeves, and ride up and stretch across his belly.

  “We got a dead battery … I gotta get a boost …”

  They start to argue and I look into the mirror to make sure of my existence then follow them, tumbling out the door and into the car, as my father fumbles around under the hood of our clunker and the jalopy helping us. Sitting in the rear I stare at the back of my father’s head, his ears sticking out, and I remember how he used to wiggle them to make me laugh when I was little and I scratched his back, acres wide. Now the lines in his neck are deep and undulate between his outbursts of rage and bewilderment at his faulty car. His sweatshirts are ripped and frayed at the neck. He does not wear gloves though it’s cold out, and his bare hands seem too thick to curl around the steering wheel. I wonder how he manages to play guitar. These thoughts linger all day at school and that night, desperate to relieve myself of a gnawing desire to understand my father, I ask him to teach me to play guitar.

  “What?” he says, surprised.

  “I want to play.”

  He looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. Then his eyes focus.

  “You?”

  “Yes, me. I want to play.”

  Awkwardly he teaches me three chords. So I begin practicing and even buy the Joan Baez songbook, but I don’t really want to play her songs, the songs my sister and her friends sing about people working in mines and dying of black lung disease, or lovers named Mattie Grove beheaded by Scottish kings for sleeping with Scottish queens. I want to play Puerto Rican aguinaldos. We’ve got songs about starving workers and murderous lovers, too. I practice playing and singing four lines of an aguinaldo about people crashing each other’s Christmas parties, until the tips of my fingers form callouses a bit like my father’s. When I think I’m good enough to have somebody listen I wait for Pops to come home in an okay mood and I sit in the living room and play and sing.

  En esta parranda

  Venimos cantando …

  “Let me have that guitar,” he says, taking it out of my hands. “It’s not even tuned.” He tunes it and begins to play and sing himself. I wait, but by the time he gets to the second verse of his song, he has forgotten me, and I wander over to the window wanting to jump out of my skin, bothered with hopes and wants that I would go after in a minute because I am not afraid—but I can’t go after something I can’t even define, now, can I? I look out and up, hoping that Larry is there, but he hardly comes to the window now.

  “Come and eat!” Ma yells.

  “I don’t want to. I’m not hungry,” I yell back.

  She comes into the room. “Growing pains,” she says smugly, “AveMaríaPurísima,” and leaves.

  And that sends me over the top. Who is she to use psychological babble when she’s the one who hides knives in the oven when it gets dark on Friday nights and my father isn’t home yet?

  The months drag by and one day at school I am so annoyed by a tune I can’t get out of my head, I do my nails.

  “How many of you are going to the World’s Fair?” the teacher asks us while I furtively apply the first coat. “It’s not far, just Queens, you should all get your parents to take you.”

  Lisa and I look at each other.

  “What a great idea. Why don’t we ask them to take us to the moon while we’re at it?” I whisper.

  We snicker as I put on the final coat of polish and walk around the classroom to dry them. The tune from Swan Lake I heard the weekend before at my sister’s house is still driving me crazy and before I know it I blurt out, “Hey, Teach, who wrote Swan Lake? Tchaikovsky or Toscanini?”

  “Who?”

  “Tchaikovsky or Toscanini?”

  “How do you know about those people?”

  “I don’t. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “It was Tchaikovsky. Toscanini is still alive and he is a conductor and a composer.”

  “Oh …”

  “So tell me, how do you know about them?”

  “My sister told me.”

  Teach is astounded. “Come help me unpack paper supplies.”

  I begin to help him every day, and I don’t mind because it gives me something to do and he’s trapped enough to answer all my questions. I want to know something about Hamlet. Aurea played a record of it for me the weekend before and all I can remember is how emotional I thought it was, though the actor had the most nasally voice I had ever heard.

  “That’s Richard Burton you were listening to.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I’m
not sure I get his problem.”

  Teach tells me how Hamlet doesn’t know what to do about suspecting that his uncle killed his father in order to marry his mother.

  “Shakespeare must’ve been part Puerto Rican to come up with that one.”

  The next day I help him some more.

  “You want to know something?” he says out of nowhere.

  “What?”

  “Of all the kids here, you will be one of the few who won’t get pregnant or end up on drugs.”

  Suddenly I am angry. Why is he telling me something about myself? How does he know what I am going to do? Let him unpack his own damn stuff. And I go to the back of the class with Lisa and Dolores to put on eyeliner and talk about how much we hate the Beatles.

  “What a stupid song that is … ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ” says Dolores.

  “Yeah, the guys I know want to hold something else,” cracks Lisa.

  We laugh.

  “They’re going to be on television Sunday …”

  “Who?”

  “The Beatles!”

  “Forget about them,” I say. I’m itching for something but I don’t know what, and I add, “Let’s figure out a way to go to the World’s Fair,” but my friends ignore me.

  I’m setting my hair in rollers while I watch The Ed Sullivan Show, figuring I can sit through the Beatles until the acrobats come on. But the Beatles don’t come on—they explode on the screen with a shimmering freshness and promise of possibilities and new things to come. I almost poke myself in the eye with a hairpin. The phone rings right after the Beatles sing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” It’s Lisa.

  “Oh my God, Sonia!”

  “I know … !”

  “They were …”

  “I know—I can’t believe it.” My hand shakes, I am so excited. Suddenly it’s absolutely necessary we go to the World’s Fair.

  “Lisa, let’s go to the World’s Fair.”

  I hear her pause on the other end of the line. “When?”

  “Tomorrow! We’ve got to go tomorrow.” I try to steady my voice but unexplainable tears threaten to betray me.