“Hi there,” they say in unison, taking my coat. Their eyes can’t help flicking over me and I realize I am overdressed in a skirt and stockings and they are wearing blue jeans. Smiling back like a fool I ask where the bathroom is. It’s a splash of color with red, green, blue, and yellow towels all draped neatly over the racks. Opposite the toilet at eye level is a chart (I figure) of French verbs and their conjugations. I rinse my hands but don’t know if it’s okay to use one of the towels so I flick my fingers around and dry my hands on my skirt.
“Everything come out all right?” asks her little brother.
He has a cold and sits on the sofa with a red nose and an angry look on his face.
“Don’t be a little jerk,” says my friend.
“Enough,” says her mother. “Let’s go.” Then to me, “We won’t be back late—just out to The French Institute for a lecture on Paris during World War Two.”
“We’re all going this summer,” says her dad, helping her mother on with her coat. I can’t imagine my father helping my mother on with her coat.
As soon as they leave, the little boy commands me, “Put on the television, will you?” I am at a loss because I am figuring I have to turn off the music first. Reading my mind, he says, pointing, “Just hit that switch over there.” I follow orders then stand at attention, waiting for his next command. “Now turn the television on!”
As we watch I am struck with drowsiness and cannot keep my eyes open. When I momentarily nod off, he scolds me sharply, “Hey, you’re not supposed to fall asleep, you know!” And I feel like I’m the little kid and he is the older one. Thankfully, next on TV is The Ed Sullivan Show. The Temptations are on and I love their close harmonies and the smooth moves they make to accentuate the lyrics of the song. But the little boy sneers, “Why do they have to do all those dance moves when they sing?” as if the performers disgust him with the ridiculousness of their steps. I am embarrassed that I don’t have an answer and that this little kid has made me feel dumb. When my friend and her parents return I am anxious to leave. “Wait,” says Chute Smoker. “I’ll walk you to the train.”
Once outside she confides in me. “I just wanted to get out for a smoke! Listen—next Saturday I have the place all to myself. I’m having a sleepover party. Can you come?”
“No … I …”
“Oh come on, it’ll be fun.”
“I don’t know …” I say, grasping around for an excuse. “I can’t sleep over,” I finally blurt out. “I have to take care of my little brother … give him breakfast.”
“What? How old is he anyway?”
“Eight.”
“So—can’t he pour his own Cheerios?”
I duck down into the train station so I don’t have to answer.
The teacher announces she is going to cast us in roles that are similar to our personalities, and I’m embarrassed I’m cast as the drab, shy character Amy in the play One Sunday Afternoon. Is that how she sees me? As the dreary one? The part of the beautiful, flirty, vivacious character Virginia goes to my scene partner, Mariel, who is a vision in beige, with champagne-blonde satiny hair that hangs to her shoulders, and white, beige, or gray soft turtleneck sweaters, and wool miniskirts. I compare her look to mine. Watching Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke inspired Vanessa to make me an outfit, so I’m wearing a purple blouse and matching purple garter and I feel like I’m wearing a costume while Mariel wears real clothes. We are supposed to practice our scenes, but I can’t stop looking at Mariel’s tiny feet encased in soft, caramel-colored leather boots. She sees me looking, so, trying to tuck my big feet under the chair, I say, “I like your boots.”
“Oh God, I know, thank you, I like these boots, too, I got them at Bendel’s. God, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to wear shoes again much less boots! You’ll never guess what happened to me last summer. I was on my boyfriend’s motorcycle and we were charging around Main Street in East Hampton and the bike didn’t have a muffler on it and we saw a cop car and you’ll never guess what I did. Oh my God, I tried to stick my toe in the exhaust pipe so it wouldn’t make any noise and I burned it! I had to wear a bandage on my toe for a week!”
We spot the teacher coming our way. “Shhh … here she comes!” And we start practicing our scene about two turn-of-the-century girls waiting for blind dates.
“What happened?” is the teacher’s only remark when we finally perform.
“I thought my own nervousness would come through as the character’s nervousness,” I say lamely.
Her face falls. Then she says, “You have no energy, Sonia. You must go to the theater, Sonia, so you can see how actresses move.”
Is she kidding? Go to the theater? I don’t have any money to go to the theater. And even if I did I wouldn’t know what to see. But I can practice having energy, so at home on Saturday I make myself fried eggs and greasy bacon sandwiches. That’ll give me the boost I need!
“Get out of the house while I set off a roach bomb,” says Ma. “Stay out as long as you can so the smell don’t make Joe sick.”
I eat, then Joe and Petey and I escape while Ma’s on her roach warpath. Walking ahead or behind my brothers I practice being peppy and just bursting with vitality. But hours later when we get home Joe gets sick anyway. Ma stops sweeping up the roaches and sits with him at the window. His stomach almost touches the back of his spine as he tries to suck in air. I’m skipping around the apartment on roach detail, sweeping them up and tossing them into the trash, when my father comes home.
“What the hell!” he sputters, in a rage that Joe is sick.
Joe breathes in deeper. Ma goes to my father.
“¡Cálmate!”
But he will not be calmed. He lashes out, shouting that he would like to grab God by the neck and strangle Him for giving us such bad luck. I do jumping jacks as they talk about taking Joe to Lincoln Hospital again—this is the third time this week Joe’s gotten sick, with Ma calming Pops as he rages. Or is it Pops raging, Joe getting sick, Ma calming? Whichever order of events it is, Joe’s attacks have more energy than any mojo I can come up with.
Things start out the same way the next year.
“What animal should I be?” I ask the teacher. This teacher is the young and pretty one who auditioned me. She is still very tiny, dressed in black and large pieces of silver jewelry, with caramel lipstick as the only hint of color.
“Any animal with energy,” she sighs. “How about a rabbit?”
“Yes, okay, a rabbit.” We are to make our own costumes. I tell the pretty teacher I’ll make my costume purple and green.
“Hmm … how about soft pink and yellow?” she says, and I know she is alluding to my garish taste.
So I go to the Central Park Zoo and examine the behavior of a rabbit but all it does is squint. I squint in class and the teacher throws her hands up in despair because I didn’t hippity-hop.
At home, Ma is cleaning and singing “… in the still of the niiight …” when I complain to her. “How are you at playing humans?” she jokes, going back to her song. I feel tired and don’t know if I’ll ever be good at playing humans and even wonder if I really want to be an actress.
But my thinking changes after seeing a senior actor whose performance is so wonderful I am swept into the story going on, on the stage. Suddenly I want to be able to do that as well and I get a chance to try when I am assigned a scene from a play called Street Scene. Not only that—my scene partner is the school’s beloved romantic poet, Melvin. I play the daughter of an Irish drunk who accidentally kills his wife. We sit down with the teacher, and I start out feeling calm and fine reading make-believe lines about why the murder happened. Words that say people shouldn’t depend on each other for everything. Not stuff like food or furniture but things we need inside our hearts or some such stuff like that and really, to tell you the truth, I don’t even know what all that stuff means. Except I wonder, even as I’m reading, if it’s things like love or loneliness? Like if we don’t feel loved we shouldn’t expect someon
e else to love us? Or if we’re lonely we can’t expect someone else to make us feel better by hanging out with us. That we should know how to love ourselves, and hang out with ourselves somehow. But really, I think again, I don’t know what all the words in this play mean but in the middle of that thought, which is in the middle of that speech, I am hit with an emotion so strong and unexpected it’s like the smack of a rifle butt on the back of my head and I start to blubber. Embarrassed at my sudden incoherent, out-of-control behavior Melvin looks at his boots and the teacher regards me as I try to pull myself together. Every character in this play is like someone I know.
“Maybe this isn’t the right time for you to work on this scene,” she says carefully, as if talking to a lunatic.
“Why not? It’s perfect for me,” I answer. I can’t believe it! First I don’t have energy and now I’m too emotional.
“Perhaps you can’t handle it at this stage of your life,” she adds soothingly. “Let’s look at some other scene for you to work on,” she adds.
Once again I’m thrown off course.
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free …”
That summer I find myself singing at the top of my lungs with a group called the Urban Arts Corps. It’s a job I got through the school to bring theater to kids in poor neighborhoods, and I love it, but what I love even more is this song, though my heart breaks and my tears come every time we sing it.
I look around at my fellow singers in the rehearsal hall: Some are students from Performing Arts like me, some are our alumni, some are young actors from Harlem, and some performers are even from the South. Our leader is Vinnette Carroll, a great big woman with a booming voice, who has come to Performing Arts to teach. She watches us with tiny, twinkly eyes made even smaller by her thick glasses, in her man sandals and shapeless dress, still looking cute because of her bemused smile and hair worn in a childish pouf on her head. I liked her even before I learned she is a magician who makes theater out of thin air. We read a story called “The Lottery” about small-town folk who ritualistically stone one of their own. In the climactic moment the poor victim fights for her life, screaming, “It isn’t fair, it isn’t right!” as we mime bashing her head in. In Miss Carroll’s hands, those screams have something to do with civil rights.
We perform a skit that requires white people, so what do we do when there are no white people in the group? We make signs that read HONKY or CRACKER and have the white characters wear them. It makes me laugh as hard as I did when Vanessa and I discussed our purple gums. It still feels good to look something scary in the face and laugh.
Still, the best part of this job is the music. When we get to sing, “… I wish you could know what it means to be me …” I don’t know why I cry, but I do.
That September Melvin makes the first move by inviting me to his house. But I’m too nervous to go alone so I bring Vanessa. I don’t wear purple blouses and garters anymore—I’m into wearing Indian saris since Bill, now my sister’s husband, has become a merchant seaman and he brought me one from Calcutta.
“How do I look, Vanessa?”
“Like an idiota,” she laughs.
And I laugh along with her but I wear it anyway.
Melvin lives in the East Ninety-Sixth Street projects. We walk in and have to get past his mother, who is in the kitchen cooking.
“Hi, Mrs. Hall.”
“Hello—he’s in the back.”
We go past her normal-looking living room with a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kennedy on the television set into the other world of Melvin’s hippie room, and I’m glad Vanessa is with me because Melvin’s best friend, Oscar Rodriguez, and a ballerina are there, too. Is it a party? The room is fragrant with incense. There are posters of Bob Dylan and Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix. Melvin’s bedspread has an Indian paisley print on it, and I think I match it perfectly in my sari. Melvin is so beautiful with his dark, dark skin and his slim hips in tight corduroy pants. His spiral poetry notebook is as worn and used as Don Joe’s credit/debit composition notebook back on Third Avenue. Melvin sits on his bed; his jacket is thrown on a chair, his brown boots peek out from under the bedspread. He is so cool he can say hello to us in his stocking feet. Oscar Rodriguez strums on a guitar. Vanessa pulls out a joint.
“Okay …” says Melvin. Now we are getting somewhere.
We smoke it. Melvin reads a poem about the universe or something.
“Wow …” I say dreamily. “I love it.” But I don’t really know what he is talking about. Vanessa giggles. Oscar plays his guitar then invites Vanessa to go for a walk. She giggles as they leave. Melvin reads some famous poet I never heard of—like I have ever heard of any poet—and I make believe I’m listening but I’m really fantasizing about what perfect couples we make. I see us—me and Melvin and Vanessa and Oscar—going on dates to the zoo, with Oscar holding hands with Vanessa and me holding hands with Melvin, then coming back and listening to Simon and Garfunkel. Then, when Vanessa and I get our own apartment, they can come over for dinner.
The next day at school I ask Oscar what he thought of her.
“She’s stupid,” he says.
“No she isn’t!” I am furious. “She just doesn’t speak English!”
“No,” he answers. “I was speaking Spanish with her. She’s stupid.”
“You didn’t mind smoking her joint.”
“What does that have to do with anything, Sonia?”
“You think you’re so hip. Well, she’s hipper.”
Two days later she comes over to my house with a joint. We smoke it. A Beatles song drifts through my brain so I sing, “… I am the walrus … I am the walrus …” Vanessa grins at me. “Hey, Vanessa, what do you think that song means?”
“¿Qué?” She starts giggling.
“You know—that Beatles song … I am the walrus … what do you think it means?”
“¿Qué se yo? How should I know?” she says.
I go on, “You know, Vanessa, as soon as we graduate we can get jobs as secretaries. What do you think?”
“Sí, sí …”
She pulls out a bag of cookies. “¿Quieres?”
“Sure,” I say, stuffing my mouth. “Will your mother have any trouble letting you move out?”
“¿Ah?” she laughs.
“Your mother …”
“Let’s go make a dress for you to wear tomorrow!” she says, pulling me out of the apartment.
I decide to fall in love with someone else. He is an underclassman. His parents have an apartment in a luxury high-rise on Fourteenth Street and are never home. I visit him for long days on weekends in my new look: hip beatnik. Black turtleneck sweaters, pointy black suede shoes with a low heel and a Pilgrim buckle, black tights, and a plaid skirt. My hair is parted in the middle and I pull it back into a tight bun like a ballerina.
“If my parents died today,” he says after we roll around on his bed for an hour or two, “all this would be mine. Just imagine, it could happen, their plane could be crashing right now and I would inherit this co-op.”
I look out the window on to the neighborhood. We are on the west side of Fourteenth Street, but I know if you go to the east side of Fourteenth it will be a whole different story, with Puerto Rican restaurants galore that serve the kinds of food my father likes, cuchifritos, pigs’ ears and tongues, and blood sausage called morcilla. It’s the kind of food that turns Ma’s stomach whenever he brings it home. Mine, too, really.
“Come,” says my boyfriend, pulling me away from the window and onto the bed again to continue his fantasy of home ownership. “All this could be mine!” After a day spent making believe he is independently wealthy I make my way home on the subway.
The next time we meet he takes me to a restaurant called Serendipity. It’s famous and beautiful and expensive, and I am thrilled that we come across a classmate dining with her whole family. She eyes me enviously as I sit with a date and she is stuck with her mom, dad, and bratty little sister.
One
day at school he invites me to a party. All that week I work on a special dress because I want to look good. It’s lime green with a square neckline and bell sleeves and I wear it with white fishnets and beige shoes. When I get to his apartment he is wearing gray pants, a cream turtleneck pullover, and a double-breasted blue blazer with brass buttons. I am excited about the party but shocked when we get there. It is all boys. And they are all prettier than me. They all have long bangs they flip around, and sweep off their brows with their delicate middle fingers. They point and giggle that their friend has brought a girl with him.
“Who is your friend?” says one seductively.
“This is Sonia …” says my boyfriend sheepishly.
We dance and I can’t believe all the boys dance with each other and I think I see some of them kissing. I have never even read about stuff like that!
We are quiet on our way to the subway where I will go uptown and he will go down. I don’t know words to ask the question on my mind.
The next time we meet I decide to take him to a restaurant on Fourteenth Street and plan it out carefully.
“I want to show you part of my culture,” I say coyly, dragging him east toward the Puerto Rican section of Fourteenth Street, where we can have our choice of cuchifrito joints. San Juan Cuchifritos, Dos Hermanos Cuchifritos, Cuchifritos del Caribe. I pick the one with the grimiest window and most flies dancing around the bare bulbs warming pigskin cracklings on display.
“Come on in. We eat this stuff all the time at my house,” I lie.
I order pigs’ ears and tongue and black blood sausage. When the food comes he looks like he might throw up and I feel triumphant at his look of distaste. I’m proud that I am tougher than he is, and prove it by stuffing my face. But later when I am alone on the train home, my victory doesn’t taste so good at all. Plus—my stomach is turning and I’m the one who feels like throwing up.
Becoming Maria Page 17