Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (12 page)

Now that Mami was working again, she had a telephone installed. “With you going to the city every day,” she reasoned, “we need a phone so you can call if you get lost or
algo.”

Evenings we sat around the kitchen table discussing the
“algos”
that could happen. They appeared in daily newspaper reports of the crimes committed in the city, illustrated with grainy black-and-white photographs that electrified the imagination. We reenacted the more colorful events of the day, adding details not reported, but which we were sure existed. The day a suspected drug dealer was found hanged in his jail cell, Hector unhooked his belt, tied it loosely around his neck, held it up, stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes, and made hacking noises as his body shook in paroxysms that made us laugh until our eyes teared. When we enjoyed ourselves too much at the expense of the dead, maimed, or victimized, Mami stopped our parodies. “That poor man's mother,” she'd sigh. Or, “How she must have suffered before he killed her.” Her comments shamed us for a moment, but they didn't stop us from doing the same thing again the next day.

When crime threatened near, however, when Don Julio was mugged, or when our neighbor Minga was pushed into traffic and her handbag snatched, we didn't laugh. We huddled closer to Mami and to each other in speechless fear, visualizing the dangers outside our door, certain that the only safe place in the world was the four walls that enclosed us, small and vulnerable, in our mother's shadow.

Performing Arts High School was organized by departments: Dance, Drama, and Music. It was possible to tell students' majors by looking at them. The dancers had muscular calves and barely touched the floor when they walked, their feet turned out from
their hips like the hands of a clock at twenty past eight. The musicians carried black cases in a variety of shapes, drummed their fingers during academics, listened intently to the silliest prattle. The drama students were the worst listeners but the best talkers. I had the impression, when talking to other drama students, that during their brief silences they were just waiting their turn to hear themselves speak.

We were assigned homerooms, each divided roughly equally among music, dance, and drama students. Our day was split between our majors and academic classes. We had to maintain a high average in both, or we'd be asked to transfer elsewhere. Mrs. Schein, my homeroom teacher, congratulated us for our success in a process she said was highly competitive. “You demonstrate artistic as well as academic potential. By admitting you to Performing Arts High School, we're showing our faith in you as artists and as scholars.”

I was flattered and inspired by her words, most of which I understood because she spoke in a deep, modulated voice, every word enunciated clearly.

“There is a dress code,” she informed us. Boys were not allowed to wear jeans to school, and girls could not wear pants.

“What if it's a really cold day?” asked a girl with ratted hair and more makeup than the teacher.

“You may wear pants under your skirts, but in school you must take them off and wear a skirt or dress.” Muted protests followed, but faded as Mrs. Schein continued. “You may not leave the school wearing theatrical makeup. It's unprofessional.”

Professionalism was an important concept at Performing Arts. Most of the teachers were working actors, dancers, and musicians. They took themselves seriously as artists and expected us to do the same. “You have a gift,” they each said at different times, “and it is our job to help you develop your talents, but it is also our responsibility to prepare you for the real world.”

None of us, they stressed, should expect to become overnight successes. It would take an average of ten years after we graduated
from high school for our talents to be fully developed and recognized in “the business,” and at least that long before we could make a living from our art.

The ten-year wait depressed me. How could I tell Mami that I faced three years of high school and ten years of struggle before I could support myself? I expected that, upon graduation from Performing Arts, I'd get a job as an actress and earn enough to help Mami. But according to the teachers, graduating from Performing Arts was only the beginning.

“The only people who make it,” they never let us forget, “are those committed to their art, willing to sacrifice for the privilege of performing for an audience. You can expect to be ‘starving artists' for a while before you're discovered.”

When I told her what the teachers said, Mami was horrified. “I'm not working this hard to send you to a fancy school so you can starve,” she warned. We both envisioned legions of actors, dancers, and musicians filling out forms at the welfare office as we'd done so often.

“I don't care what
monerías
they teach you at that school,” Mami made clear. “As soon as you graduate, you better get a job.”

We drama students were required to study dance so that we could develop a sense of how our bodies moved in space and prepare ourselves should we ever, in spite of our dramatic aspirations, get work in a musical. Although the school had high-ceilinged, wood-floored, well-lit, mirrored dance studios, they were reserved for dance majors. Actors danced in the lunchroom. The benches on the tables collapsed into the tops, and these were then pushed to one end of the room and stacked, leaving the tiled floor free. If we danced after the lunch period, we sometimes had to sweep crumbs off the floor.

It was a good thing that the lunchroom had no mirrors, for most of us weren't used to the outfits required for dance classes.
Girls wore black footless tights, a black scoop-necked leotard, and a dance skirt that had to cover us to midthigh. We danced barefoot, as did the boys, who wore black tights and a white T-shirt. The first day, we skulked into the lunchroom, the boys with hands crossed in front of the bulge enhanced by the required “dance belt,” we girls hunched over our breasts, hugging ourselves.

Our dance teacher, Miss Lang, led us through what was for many our first formal dance class. Gawky and uncoordinated, we giggled as she demonstrated how to leap across the floor, toes pointed, head up, back straight. “Right foot out, left arm up,” she sang, as she beat a rhythm on her hand drum that most of us defied with ungainly hops and turns. At the first class, it was clear that we needed to develop muscles we didn't know existed before we could execute graceful leaps or pirouettes that wouldn't land us sprawled on our behinds. The following week, and for many weeks thereafter, Miss Lang's dance class took place mostly on the floor, where she coached us through rigorous stretches that left us pained and sweaty. Students grumbled that we were actors, not dancers, and that we shouldn't have to take that stupid class, but I loved dance. I loved the open space before me in the lunchroom/ studio. I loved the weightless feeling as I leaped across the floor. I welcomed the dull aches after class, the stretched muscles that vibrated for hours, the rush of blood to my face, arms, and legs. It was the only time I was warm, the only time in the Brooklyn winters when my body moved the way I remembered it moving in Puerto Rico—free, open to possibilities, unafraid.

Most of my classmates were New Yorkers born and raised who spoke with the distinctive accent of the neighborhood where they'd grown up. Our teachers claimed they could tell what borough we came from simply by listening to us speak. In Brooklyn, for example, “I am” sounded like “Oyem,” “here” sounded like “heah,” “bathroom” was “batrum,” and “in there” was “innair.” I spoke
Brooklyn English with a Puerto Rican accent, a variation in a place where the goal was to get us to speak eastern standard speech.

Accent eradication was important, we were told, to widen the range of parts we could play. An actor must be versatile enough to change the way he or she spoke to fit the character being played. Standard speech laid the foundation for other accents, including, if necessary, the one we had when we first walked through the doors of Performing Arts High School.

My voice and diction teacher was King Wehrle from Kansas.

“You need a name that stands out,” he told us when asked whether he was born King. “I changed mine when I came to New York.”

He listed famous actors who had traded in their unimpressive names for the ones everyone remembered: Archibald Leish/Cary Grant; Eunice Quedens/Eve Arden; Betty Joan Perske/Lauren Bacall; Frances Gumm/Judy Garland.

“Do you believe a guy named Marion Morrison could get a part as a cowboy in the movies?” Mr. Wehrle asked. “No. He had to become John Wayne!”

When considering a change, Mr. Wehrle suggested we pick names with few letters, easy to fit on a marquee, easy to remember, and American, not foreign. “Anne Bancroft,” he said, “not Anna Maria Italiano. Tony Curtis, not Bernard Schwartz. Kirk Douglas,” he intoned in his most distinguished announcer's voice, “not Issur Danielovich.”

So, in addition to having to wait ten years after graduation to make a living in my art, I also had to find a new name, since Esmeralda Santiago was clearly too long to fit on a marquee, hard to remember, and definitely foreign.

If I looked at Performing Arts strictly along racial lines, Mami was right; it was a school where almost all the students and teachers
were white. In my tenth-grade class there were 126 students: fourteen black, three Puerto Rican, and two Asian. Two of the twenty-four teachers in the arts majors and two of the twenty-three academic subject teachers were black.

But as I walked the wide halls of Performing Arts High School, what I saw was not a school for
blanquitos.
Although it was true that those of us with dark skins were in the minority, the hierarchies set up along racial lines that I'd come to accept in junior high school weren't as marked. At Performing Arts, status was determined by talent. The elite of the school were the students who played the lead roles in scenes, or solo instruments in chamber concerts, or danced a solo or virtuoso pas de deux. The rest of us, whose talent had yet to develop, watched the stars of the school with a mixture of awe and envy.
They
wouldn't have to wait ten years to “make it” in “the business.”