Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (28 page)

The owner of the house, Doña Lila, lived on the second floor with her two sons, one of whom was a couple of years older than me. Neftalí was slender, with a dark
café con leche
complexion and startling green eyes. He was the handsomest man I'd ever seen, and his deferential manner, soft voice, and tender smile made me flutter and tingle whenever he looked my way.

My sisters and brothers noticed I liked Neftalí.

“How come you don't sit around the house with your hair in curlers any more?” Hector asked.

“Yeah, and you go up and down the stairs twenty times a day,” added Alicia.

“You used to pay us to take the garbage out when it was your turn,” Raymond complained.

“Come on, Negi,” Norma begged. “I'm not making any money from you.”

Neftalí came upstairs frequently, joined the domino and gin rummy games around the kitchen table that competed with laughter from the television set in the other room. He was a terrible player, which made him fun to play with, since we wagered on every game. He came on Sundays, like Delsa's and Norma's boyfriends. He liked to read, which I appreciated, but his favorite books were serial science fiction novels, which I didn't understand. He was a high school graduate and talked about going to college. In the meantime, he worked in the garment center, pushing carts
loaded with newly made clothes from the factory where they were made to the warehouse from where they were shipped. He said it was like lifting weights and let my younger brothers dangle from his bent arm to show off his biceps.

“You're in love! I knew you didn't mean it when you said . . . you know,” Alma blushed, “about your virginity going to the highest bidder.”

“I'm not going to have sex with him or anything,” I protested, but I blushed too, though for a different reason. For days I'd fantasized about kisses from Neftalí's
café con leche
lips. And more than once I'd let my hands skitter across my body, imagining they were his. “Anyway,” I continued, “we haven't even been alone yet. Mami doesn't take her eyes off me whenever he's around.”

Which was true. But it was also true that Neftalf didn't show any interest in being alone with me. There were plenty of opportunities. He could have walked with me when I went on one of the many errands I volunteered to do for Mami. He could have waited for me at the train station when I came back from work. He could have come up while Mami was at work and the kids and Tata watched television. But he did none of that. He seemed content to join my family, to gaze at me from time to time with his unnerving green eyes, to gamble lavishly against the hand dealt me in gin rummy.

“He'll act when the time is right,” Alma guessed. “He knows your mother expects things to be done a certain way.”

“I wish I knew if he liked me, at least.”

“He wouldn't visit so much if he didn't like you.”

But I wasn't so sure. If he liked me, he should show it. He should send flowers, hire mariachis to serenade me, bring me chocolates, write poems. He should do something romantic that proved he cared about me in a way he didn't care about anyone else. When he did nothing, I followed the advice in
Sex and the Single Girl
and played hard to get. If I heard his step up the stairs, I disappeared into my room. I paid my sisters and brothers to do my errands again, so that I no longer went past his door four or five times a day. I stopped announcing when I'd be home.

One day I came back to find Doña Lila at our kitchen table. “He's not violent,” she murmured between tears. “He never hurt a fly.” Mami and Tata huddled by her, rubbed her shoulders, made humming sounds meant to soothe. I thought one of her sons had been accused of killing somebody and silently prayed that it hadn't been Neftalí.

“A
Neftalí lo llamaron del servicio
,” Mami answered my silent question, but I had no idea what she meant by “Neftalí was called by the service.”

“He's been drafted,” Delsa interpreted.

Mami and Tata rubbed Doña Lila's shoulders, tried to convince her that just because Neftalí was drafted didn't mean he'd go to Vietnam. But none of us believed that. More than once Mami thanked
Dios
and the
Vírgenes
that Hector was only fourteen. She and Tata prayed out loud that the war would end before he was old enough to be drafted and sent to what we feared was certain death.

It was hard to make sense of what was going on in Vietnam. The images were so incongruous. We watched news reports of soldiers having a great time, soldiers who laughed and made rabbit ears behind one another's heads as sober newsmen talked about casualties. We saw the landscape, lush and tropical, the long beaches lined with palm trees that reminded us of Luquillo, on Puerto Rico's northern coast. Cheerful soldiers, picturesque rice paddies, reporters who leaned manfully against army trucks, spoke into the camera while behind them young men in fatigues cavorted or carried one another in stretchers. It didn't seem real.

But here it was, my first potential boyfriend, about to go to war. It was too much like the radio
novelas
I'd listened to as a child, where the handsome hero went to war, while the beautiful heroine stayed home, wrote soulful letters, and fended off suitors not nearly as worthy as her beloved. I was torn between feeling sorry for Dona Lila and the romance of a boyfriend in a faraway country fighting for democracy.

That night Neftalí came upstairs, and I didn't hide. Don Julio and Don Carlos, both of whom had fought in Korea, told him
what he could expect in basic training. “They'll make a man out of you,” Don Julio joked, and Neftalí smiled shyly and looked my way.

The next day I made sure to take the garbage out, and there was Neftalí at the bottom of the stairs, with his family's trash.

“Will you wait for me?” he said, so softly that I heard “Will you weigh it for me?”

I looked at him with what must have been a stupid expression because he came closer and repeated his question.

“I'll write to you,” I responded.

“I'll speak to your mother,” he said, “to make it official.”

I'd been waiting eagerly for pledges of love from Neftalí and the tingles and flutters that accompanied thoughts of him were now tremors and shivers. “What do you mean, official?”

“
Tú sabes
,” he murmured with a shy smile, and leaned over for a kiss.

I backed away. “No, I don't know.” This was not the way I'd imagined it. He was supposed to get down on one knee, to say he loved me, to offer a diamond ring, at least to use the word “marriage” in a complete sentence. It wasn't right that he expected me to propose to myself as we stood in a dim hallway holding bags heavy with trash.

“What's the matter with you?” he said, an edge to his voice so familiar, it could have been Mami's.

I slid past him out the door to the barrels. “What's the matter with
you
?” I wanted to ask but didn't. I was sure he didn't know any more than I did. I felt like crying. He came up behind me.

“I thought you liked me,” he whined, and the sound grated.

“I don't.” I couldn't stop myself from being mean. A few minutes earlier he'd been a dream, and now I was telling him I didn't like him. What
was
the matter with me? I ran into the building, up the stairs, into my room, buried my face in the pillow. I sobbed as if Neftalí had done something terrible, when all he did was love me. Or did he? Why didn't he say it? I was confused, unable to understand why I'd responded as I had. I was ashamed.
He'd stood on the sidewalk holding the garbage, looking at me as if I'd lost my mind. Which is what it felt like. I was crazy, nuts,
loca.
Who'd want to come anywhere near me?

“Neftalí hasn't been up to see us in a while,” Mami said a few days later, her eyes searching for a reaction. I shrugged my shoulders.

I stepped past Neftalí's door on my way to work and back on tiptoe. A part of me hoped we'd cross in the hall, and we'd talk and I'd apologize, but I didn't know what to say after that. So it was a relief when, after a week, Doña Lila came to say that Neftalí had gone to visit relatives in Puerto Rico before reporting to basic training. She watched me as she made the announcement, and there was resentment in her eyes. But she never said anything, and neither did Mami, and neither did I. There was nothing to say. I played out the scene with the trash bags in my head hundreds of times, trying to find a reason for my behavior. But it was no use. I'd behaved badly and couldn't forgive myself.

My month deadline to get an acting or dancing job came and went, and it was clear that I'd have to find another line of work. I answered a classified ad, and the week before Labor Day I was met at the door of the personnel office of Fisher Scientific by Mr. Kean, who had the characteristic turned-out, shoulders-back, lifted-from-the-hips posture of a former ballet dancer. He asked me to fill out an application, then took me into a small room with a typewriter on a small table. From a shelf by the door, he picked up a kitchen timer, a spiral-bound book, and a sheaf of paper, which he set next to the typewriter.

“We have openings in typing,” he said, “so let's see how fast you do it.” Mr. Kean watched as I put the paper in the typewriter and lined it up so that the edges were even. He opened the spiral-bound book to a random page, placed it next to the typewriter, set the timer, and said, “Start.”

I typed as fast as I could, but I'd had no practice since the course at Performing Arts and made so many mistakes that when the bell rang, I was ashamed to show Mr. Kean the page.

“I see,” he marked the mistakes in red. “Don't feel bad,” he assured me, “not everyone was born to type.” He laughed, and that made me feel better. “Let's see what else we can find for you.” He led me to his desk in a corner of a room full of desks that reminded me of the welfare office. He riffled through a box of three-by-five cards, pulled out a couple, read the notes scribbled on them, then dialed a number. “Don't worry,” he said. “There's a job in the mail room.”

We took a rickety elevator to a room the width and depth of the building. Rectangles of fluorescent light fixtures cast bluish light over everything and everyone. The room was a labyrinth of gray metal desks in rows. Wide aisles divided the purchasing department from international sales from the noisy corner where typists sat, clickety-clacking for eight hours a day broken by two fifteen-minute coffee breaks and a half-hour lunch. At the far corner, in front of a row of dusty windows with a view of rooftops, was the mail room. It wasn't a room at all, but a section divided by a long table flanked by file cabinets in a horseshoe, with just enough room between them to make a passageway into the work area. Under the windows there were two more tables, and at the end a wooden desk with an armchair. Mr. Kean knocked on the table as if it were a door. A stately blonde woman stood up from behind one of the cabinets where she'd been putting folders away.

“Come in, dear,” she smiled. She had an aristocratic air perfectly appropriate in spite of the setting. Mr. Kean introduced us, and Ilsa Gold interviewed me standing up, even though there were chairs under the tables by the window. Mr. Kean led me back to his office, where his phone rang, on cue, the minute we reached his desk. “You're hired,” he announced in such cheery tones that I was certain he was as happy for me as I was for myself.

Ilsa explained my duties. I was to open the mail in the morning, sort it, distribute it, pick up outgoing mail in the afternoon, run it through the postage meter, and get it ready for the mailman, who came by at the end of the day. In between, I was to retrieve and file documents in any of the fifteen cabinets that formed the horseshoe of our office. By the end of the first day my fingers were shredded with paper cuts. The next morning, I showed up with Band-Aids on every finger. Ilsa looked at me curiously but didn't say a thing.