Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (13 page)

I recognized and accepted the hierarchy based on talent. It was fair, unlike those set up along racial lines. But there was another distinction among the students—more subtle, though not invisible. I was keenly aware of being a poor kid in a school where many were rich. In Brooklyn, most of my classmates came from my neighborhood and lived in similar circumstances, but Performing Arts drew from all over the city. As I talked to other students, the meagerness of my resources was made real. I knew my family was “disadvantaged”; it said so on the welfare applications. But it was at Performing Arts that I saw first hand what being “advantaged” meant.

It meant trips to Europe during vacations, extra classes on weekends with dance masters or voice coaches, plastic surgery to reduce large noses or refine broad ones. It meant tennis lessons and swim meets, choir practice, clubs, academic tutoring, dates. It meant money for lunch at the deli across the street or down the block. It meant taxis home.

Being disadvantaged meant I found my dance tights and leotard in a bin in the guidance office. It meant washing them and setting them to dry on the barely warm radiators of our apartment
and wearing them damp when there was no money to pay the heating bills. It meant a pass so that I could get a free bowl of soup and half a sandwich for lunch. It meant that, if invited to a party given by a classmate, I said no, because there was no money to buy presents for rich people. It meant never inviting anyone over, because I didn't want them to see the wet diapers hanging on ropes strung from one end of the apartment to the other. Or the profusion of beds that left no space for a proper living room.

Advantaged meant being able to complain about having too many things to do, all of them fun, being unable to decide whether to sleep over at Joanie's or to take an extra dance class at Madame's. It meant that papers handed in to the teacher were typed on crisp white pages, not handwritten with a cheap ballpoint pen on blue-lined notebook paper from Woolworth's. The advantage was not talent, nor skin color, it was money, and those of us who were disadvantaged had little or none.

I wasn't the only poor kid at Performing Arts—or in my class. There were many of us. We found each other and hovered on the fringes of the lucky few whose Monday reports of fun-filled weekends intensified our sense that our talent had to take us a long way, a very long way indeed, from where we were.

We learned to act by working on improvisations and scenes from well-known plays. For improvisations, the teacher set up situations, then let us work them in front of the whole class or in small groups. At any time, the dynamics could change; the teacher might send in another actor with different motivations or a conflicting situation right in the middle of our improvisation. Or a loud noise might intrude, or the situation might change naturally as the scene evolved. Besides developing our ability to think fast and concentrate, improvisations helped us work through the nuts and bolts of a scene by allowing us to discover a character's motivations and subtexts to the dialogue.

For scene work we were paired with partners. Teachers assigned plays and scenes appropriate to our talent and personalities, but they avoided typecasting, which was no challenge to the actor. For each scene we prepared “sides,” half-page scripts with one side for our lines and cues written in block letters and the facing page for notes about meaningful subtext, stage directions, or motivation.

We didn't have sets. Wooden boxes with splintery corners created the illusion of a southern kitchen or a Roman Senate, depending on whether we were playing a scene from
Member of the Wedding
or
Julius Caesar.
The rehearsal space was the Basement, actually the ground floor of the school, with lockers at one end and entrance doors and stairways leading up on the other. We staked out areas of the Basement, hoarded boxes to create our set, and worked independently, while the teacher roamed from one group to another watching, questioning motivation, suggesting other ways to block the scene. At the end of class, we might be asked to perform our work-in-progress in front of the group. One-piece school desks/chairs were arranged in a semicircle so that everyone had a front row seat. Sometimes we were asked to perform in gibberish, to demonstrate that acting was more than parroting words from a page, that it conveyed a human experience independent of language.

My first scene was in act 1, scene 1 of George Bernard Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra.
I was paired with Roman-nosed Harvey, who was cast as Julius Caesar to my Cleopatra.

I was thrilled. That summer I'd read mostly biographies. Cleopatra was one of my favorite historical figures, and I'd acquired a lot of information about who she was, what her motivations might have been, what she looked like. As actors, we researched the characters we played, the fictional as well as the historical ones, on the theory that the more we knew about them, the better we could bring them to life on the stage.

I loved the preparation to act. I loved reading the entire play, even if I performed only a short scene from it. I loved figuring out
the character beyond what the playwright had written. I loved designing a costume and scrounging at home for materials from which to make it, since the school didn't provide wardrobe except for the performances at the end of the year.

I found a yellow tablecloth Mami had bought at the thrift shop. “Can I use this?”

“For what?”

“To make a Cleopatra dress.”

“What's a Cleopatra dress?” She pursed her lips, a sign she thought I was asking for a fashion I wasn't allowed to wear.

“Cleopatra was an Egyptian queen,” I explained. “She lived thousands of years ago, and she wore tight dresses.”

“Why do you have to dress like her?” She took the tablecloth from my hand and examined it.

“It's homework. I have to dress like the people in the plays.”

“In a tablecloth?”

“I told you, I'm making a dress out of it.”

“It's got an
achiote
stain,” she pointed out.

“That's why you might not want it anymore.”

“I'll make it for you,” she offered, still suspicious. I envisioned Mami's idea of a Cleopatra dress, nothing like what I imagined.

“We're supposed to make it ourselves,” I lied.

“All right,” she conceded, “but let me see it before you finish, in case you need any help.” She wanted to make sure it wouldn't be too revealing.

I cut and sewed a tubelike dress so tight it required that I walk sideways, like an Egyptian hieroglyphic figure.

“
Ay, mi Dios
,” Mami gasped when she saw it.

“You look like a banana,” Edna volunteered.

“Shut up,” I screamed.

“Shut up yourself.”

“You're not wearing that in public,” Mami said.

“It's only in school, Mami, for a scene in a play. I'll show you a picture.” I minced to the bedroom, followed by my sisters' and brothers' giggles. To pick up the costume book I'd left on the floor,
I had to bend slowly from the knees. I took tiny steps back and opened the book. “Look, these people are Egyptian. See how they wear their clothes close to their bodies?”

Edna, Delsa, and Norma looked over Mami's shoulder at the picture, then at my dress.

“They didn't walk very far, did they?” laughed Norma. I sent her a hateful look, and she stuck out her tongue.

Mami studied the illustration, which showed the dresses to be transparent, which the damask wasn't. “I'm supposed to make it look like what they really wore.” I tried not to sound desperate. “I'll only wear it in the classroom, in front of other students and the teacher.”

“What are
they
wearing?”

I ignored her sarcasm. “My partner made a costume from a sheet, and another girl made hers from a drape.” If I kept to the materials, maybe Mami wouldn't focus on the fit. “We'll be graded,” I lied, “on how much our costumes look like the real thing.”

“At least you can't see through it,” Edna offered.

“Not that she has anything to show,” Delsa snorted and slapped Norma five.

“You'll have to let it out,” Mami said. “The seams are straining.”

“Okay.” I wouldn't do a thing to the dress. There wasn't enough fabric to let out, and Mami would never see me in it, as I'd wear it only in school, as Cleopatra. I looked in the small oval mirror over the dresser in the room I shared with Delsa. She was right, there wasn't much for me to show. Still, I didn't look like a banana. Bananas don't have breasts, and I did, even if my
nalgas
were flat and I had no hips. I raised my hands in a posture like the hieroglyph pictures I'd seen, and thought I looked pretty close to what Cleopatra might have looked like. At fifteen, Cleopatra was soon to be queen of Egypt, while I had to argue with my mother over every little thing. I wondered what it was like not to have a mother, and a chill raced up from my toes to my head. I had to
walk to the door and peek out to make sure Mami was still there before I could be warm again.

The drama department taught the Method developed by Stanislavsky in his book
An Actor Prepares.
Method actors explored their deepest selves for the emotional truth that informed the moment lived on stage.

I refused to venture into my deepest self, to reveal my feelings, to examine my true emotions publicly. If I did, everyone would know I was illegitimate, that I shared a bed with my sister, that we were on welfare. The result was that I was accused by my peers of “indicating,” the worst sin a Method actor can commit on stage. To “indicate” meant to pretend to be in the moment by going through the motions, rather than to actually live it.

It was humiliating not to be a good enough actress to fool my teachers and fellow students, but I simply couldn't abandon myself to the craft. I didn't have the skills to act while acting. Because the minute I left the dark, crowded apartment where I lived, I was in performance, pretending to be someone I wasn't. I resisted the Method's insistence on truth as I used it to create a simulated reality. One in which I spoke fluent English, felt at home in the harsh streets of New York, absorbed urban American culture without question as I silently grieved the dissolution of the other me, the Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican girl most at home in a dusty, tropical dirt road. I created a character that evolved as the extended improvisation of my life unfolded, a protagonist as cheerful and carefree as my comic book friends Betty and Veronica, Archie, Reggie, and Jughead.

One day I returned from the library to find a woman and a girl about my age surrounded by my sisters and brothers, sipping coffee and chewing cake around the kitchen table.

“Guess who this is?” Mami grinned.