Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (35 page)

The next morning I woke to the smell of fried eggs and coffee. Margie bustled in the kitchen while Nestor read the paper and sipped his
café con leche.
I ducked into the bathroom to wash up. On the counter top a Water Pik gleamed white and clinical on the shelf next to the sink. I was afraid to touch it, because I didn't know what part of Margie or Nestor's body the tiny hose went into. It looked marital, as intimate as the cottony tampons wrapped in white paper. When I came out, Nestor was finishing his breakfast.

“I better get ready for work,” he said, moving toward the bathroom. Margie set a plate in front of me neatly arranged with two fried eggs, a slice of ham, toast cut into triangles. Then she sat at the table and nibbled on a piece of bread, chatting about what we would do later. It was hard to concentrate on what she said because of the sounds coming from behind the bathroom door. The hum of electrical appliances, gargles, running water were a counterpoint to Margie's plans to walk to the park, have lunch at a local diner, shop. When Nestor came out, a fresh, clean scent of peppermint and orange saturated the room. Margie accompanied him to the door, where they kissed and muttered endearments. Once he was gone, Margie went into the bathroom, and the buzzing and gurgling resumed.

“Don't you wash up after every meal?” she asked when she came out, and I mumbled yes, which wasn't true, but I knew I should. “You can use the Water Pik if you like,” she said. Still afraid to touch the hose, I pushed a button; water squirted out of it in a stream like a baby pissing. “Do you know how to use it?” she called from the kitchen, and I was thrilled that my older sister was about to impart adult knowledge. She came into the room, unhooked the hose, squirted water inside her mouth, the way the dentist did when he fixed my cavities. I was disappointed beyond words, which must have shown because, halfway through her demonstration of the proper technique, she crossed her eyes, curled
her lips into a weird grimace, and let water dribble down her chin. Our eyes met in the mirror, and we set each other off in a fit of giggles that lasted the better part of the morning because, every time I looked at her, she put a finger in her mouth, hummed and gurgled, crossed her eyes, and pretended to brush her teeth.

We talked a lot about our father, whom she hadn't seen in years, but with whom she corresponded. I had lived with him many more years than she had, and she was surprised to learn that he sang well, and that he wrote poems and
décimas.

“His handwriting is so tiny,” she laughed, and showed me a sheet in his slanted script, each letter neatly drawn, the accents over the is nearly horizontal. It was Papi who gave her our address. “He loves your letters,” she told me, which made me feel good and guilty at the same time, because I never wrote as much as I should have.

Over the next few weeks, my sisters and I took turns spending time with Margie and Nestor. They came to visit, and we went home with them. Or she met one of us at the train station, and in a couple of days they'd both return with us to Brooklyn and have some of Mami's good cooking. She once wrapped her arms around Mami and muttered that she wished she were her mother. Mami repeated the comment every time one of us was especially annoying or disrespectful, to let us know other people appreciated her when it seemed that we didn't.

One Sunday afternoon, Nestor informed us that they were moving to Miami. “Of course, you're welcome to come see us there,” Margie offered. That was unlikely. If we had any money for travel, our goal was always Puerto Rico, where none of us had been in seven years. When we hugged goodbye, I knew it would be a long time before I'd see Margie again.

In mid-August, I received an invitation to the premiere of
Up the Down Staircase
at Radio City Music Hall, to be followed by a
party at the Warwick Hotel. Almost all the actors who had played students in the classroom were there, dressed up. We were asked to come early so that we could be photographed on the grand staircase. Like me, many of the other students had never been inside Radio City, and we tried our best not to appear too amazed. But once in the upholstered seats of the theater, I couldn't help myself. I gawked at the high ceiling, the gilded decorations, the hundreds of seats sloped toward the enormous stage. For the first time I saw the Rockettes' precise kick line, the long legs that moved as one, the tappety-tap that seemed to come from every corner of the room.

Once the movie was shown, it was difficult to concentrate on it, because my fellow actors and I cheered or giggled every time we saw ourselves or one another. At the party, we exchanged stories about what we'd been up to since the movie wrapped. Sandy Dennis had won an Oscar for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
?, and the rest of us did our best to make our paltry accomplishments sound equally splendid.

My performance would not earn any awards, would more than likely not be noticed. But seeing myself on the screen renewed the desire to stand before an audience. After more than a year of office jobs and uninspiring college courses, I longed for the nervous excitement before the curtain rose, the hums and rustle of an expectant audience, the applause.

Once more I scoured audition notices in
Backstage
and
Show Business,
and on the bulletin boards of the International School of Dance, where I took classes. I had visions of dancing with an established group like Matteo's, but I was soon discouraged. While I'd come a long way as a dancer in four years, my competition began as children. They could take classes every day, could devote their lives to dance. Many of the traditional beginner dances, like Allarippu, had become second nature to them, and they'd moved on to more complex choreography that required a wider range of expression and technical expertise.

I went to dance class whenever I could afford the time or
expense, practiced at home even when my family complained that the jangling ankle bells and atonal Indian music drove them crazy. Every time I considered dropping out of college and using my money from temporary jobs to support my art, I rebuked myself for being self-indulgent and unrealistic. An artist should sacrifice for her art, I knew that. A part of me loved the romance of being a starving artist. But the voice that spoke loudest asked what chance an undertrained Puerto Rican Indian classical dancer had of supporting herself.

Our house on Glenmore had a finished basement as well as a second floor, where Mami set up the kids' beds. We had room to spare, Mami said. Maybe that's why one day her cousin Lólin appeared at our door on the arm of the man she had eloped with.

Lólin was thin, with dark soulful eyes and a quiet manner. She was delicate and graceful, wore her long hair down, a wide black ribbon between narrow shoulders. She spoke in a hushed, kittenish voice, made frequent use of the Spanish diminutive, as if she could make herself smaller through speech. It didn't surprise me that she introduced her “husband” as Toñito rather than Antonio.

He was as slight and quiet as she was, with nutmeg skin, dark hair, Taíno features. They came with few belongings and no money, but they were obviously in love. Every time he looked at her, she blushed and dropped her lids. When she did look at him, her gaze was like a caress, soft and slow and full of meaning.

Mami wasn't thrilled to have them at our house. She liked Lolin, but she wasn't comfortable with a handsome, lusty young man—not our brother—in his undershirt near me and my sisters. I was nineteen, Delsa seventeen, Norma sixteen, Alicia fourteen, Edna thirteen. We knew what Lólin and Toñito did at night in the room in the basement that Mami assigned to them. And although they did their best to be discreet, it was difficult to ignore the soft
moans and whispers coming from their room, the way her hand stroked his thigh when they sat together, the way his arm kept her close when they watched television.

Mami's aunts and uncles, cousins—Gury, La Muda, and Margot—and other relatives who rarely showed up at our house all came to see Lólin and Toñito as if they were the main attraction at a circus. In Puerto Rico, Tío Pedro was not happy with his eldest daughter's choice of husband. The many telephone conversations I overheard were pleas for him to be flexible, to accept Toñito, to respect Lolin enough to allow her the consequences of her decision. But Tio Pedro was stubborn. The aunts and uncles, the cousins, Mami and Tata sat at our kitchen table for hours, discussing what to do. From time to time, the romantic chords of a guitar were heard from the basement, where Toñito strummed love songs while Lólin reclined on her side.

The relatives complained that Toñito was irresponsible, because he showed up with nothing to his name but that blasted guitar. They predicted the relationship couldn't last. Lólin was used to comfort, they noted, since Tío Pedro was a merchant who provided well for his family. She was temporarily blind to Toñito's charm, they suggested, and as soon as she realized what a laggard he was, she'd crawl back to Puerto Rico to ask her father's forgiveness. Of course, it was assumed Tio Pedro would never forgive her or accept Toñito, so the gossip was tinged with compassion for poor, misguided Lolin.

My sisters and I watched the drama. For years Lolin and her sister Tati had been held up as examples of “good” girls, and here was Lolin, having eloped with a good-looking guy who, by all accounts, had no skills with which to support her. And in Puerto Rico, Tati, who was younger, had already married, borne a son, and been abandoned. Tati, who was so pretty, lively, and always carefree, was now a tragic figure. Lólin's disobedience didn't conform to her mild, serene nature. The female aunts and cousins still used Tati and Lólin as examples—only this time they were negative models.

About Tati they said, “See what happens when a girl is too eager to get out from under her parents' care and protection?” Lólin's defiance they blamed on her docile ways. “All this time she was the perfect daughter,” they mused. “
Pero llevava la música por dentro
.” When they said that Lolin carried “the music inside her,” they looked at us hard, to let us know that if we were too well behaved, they suspected we were up to no good.

When Tío Pedro relented and Lólin and Toñito returned to Puerto Rico, the relatives shook their heads and suggested it was Tío Pedro and Titi Sara's overprotectiveness that had caused so much trouble for their daughters. Had they been more permissive, Tati might have waited to get married, thereby avoiding abandonment at a young age. Lólin would have met many men and not fallen for the first
manganzón
to make eyes at her.

My sisters and I were advised to learn from their mistakes, to place ourselves between Tati's impatience and Lólin's audacity. It was a path with no precedent in our family. Each aunt and uncle, each adult cousin was a model of impulsiveness and contradiction. Not to mention Mami and Tata, who both spouted rules they didn't live by and were prime examples of the aphorism, “Do as I say and not as I do.” Tata warned us not to smoke or drink as she sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. Mami talked about church weddings for us, then used herself as an example of how tenuous nonsanctified unions were.

“But Don Carlos was married to that woman, and he divorced her to be with you,” I started, and she shushed me.

“That marriage was over long before he met me,” she said, which was true, but that wasn't my point.

“Get an education so that you can get jobs in offices, not factories,” Mami frequently advised us. The next day she showed us a beautifully stitched bra. Her face flushed with pride, she went over every seam, pointed out how tricky it was to get the double needles to turn just so, how delicate the fabric was to work with, how unusual the new closures. She made useful and lovely things
with her own hands. When she was laid off, she lamented that her skills were not enough to support her children.