The Noise of Infinite Longing (19 page)

The flight was long, from morning to late afternoon. Nothing to do but pace up and down the aisle, follow the stewardesses back and forth to the galley, watching them load and unload the trays, their hands steady, not spilling a drop while the plane rocked and bumped. They had sprayed hair, like glued straw, pinned up and bundled under

their peaked blue caps, and when they handed out boxes of Chiclets they wore smiles that seemed as if invisible tape was holding back the corners of their mouths.To me they looked like Doris Day, all blond, all athletic, and tall.They puffed the head pillows and spread the gray blanket over my legs, hoping I would sit still. I couldn’t sit still for very long, last-minute scenes playing over and over in my mind.

Roland had said,You’ll change.You won’t be the same when you come back.

No, I said, so sure. It’s just a big pajama party.

I kept my mother and aunt awake, babbling about nothing, just to keep my eyes from drifting toward the window and the terrifying depth of gray blue outside as the plane cut through cushions of clouds.

New York came slowly, after the brown coastline of the mid- Atlantic and the bleak coal-tinged skies of the New Jersey flatlands. The city seemed to rise out of nowhere all at once, filling the sky, its buildings like immense gravestones, rectangles and spheres, punc- turing the low-drifting clouds of that late afternoon. The plane flew directly over Manhattan, slowly dropping altitude, its shadow crawl- ing on the roofs far below. We swerved away, leaving the skyscraper city behind, its jagged profile to our back, and we landed.

My mother’s friends were waiting there, and they drove us through some of the most dilapidated neighborhoods I had ever seen. That’s where poor Puerto Ricans live, I heard Mirta say. Mirta lived with her husband, a doctor, on Long Island. She seldom came to the city, to this part of the city. I stared at boarded-up buildings, garbage piles, the litter of Harlem. I had seen the barrios and caseríos of the island but nothing was as ugly and forlorn as those streets in

the Bronx, as miserable as those people sitting on stoops.

My mother kept shaking her head, Why do they come here? In Puerto Rico, they have sun and trees with fruit and the sea, people

don’t go hungry, and there’s no cold weather.

Then we turned down Central Park and the city of the movies, the one I had seen on TV, which I had imagined since I was a child, appeared before us.

We had three days in New York, and we walked everywhere, down Fifth Avenue, up Madison, to the stores with names I had known since childhood. I was speaking English to everyone—the English I had learned in the island’s Catholic schools. Sure of myself, I spoke to the bellboys, to the waiters and the concierge. I made reservations at restaurants, I gave directions to cabdrivers. I no longer had to imagine New York like
The Naked City
or black-and- white postcards of dark streets in gloomy night fog.

It was there around me.

I saw a life I wanted, cafés and beautiful women, theater, books, music.

W

e arrived at my new school by bus, a daylong trip from New York through Newark andTrenton, barren cities, wastelands, blackened factories and warehouses of broken windows, treeless streets, muddy skies. We traveled by fields of corn and autumn- orange farms, the land of the Amish in Lancaster County (I was studying a travel book, and mother was providing the captions: Those people in the distance in black frocks riding buggies, those are the Amish). The bus dropped us off in Lancaster, and we hired a car to take us out to the school.The town of Lititz had one traffic light, and it had an old inn named after a general, with fieldstone fireplaces and creaking wooden floors and braided rugs. There wasn’t much else to the town. A movie house with a large lobby and a fading maroon carpet, an ice cream parlor attached to the town pharmacy,

a pretzel factory. The Moravian church, built of dark gray stone, granite, and large panes of stained glass, was the most imposing structure in town.

There were no neon signs, no buses or noise, and nothing painted in coral shades, nothing in the sea blues and canary yellows of the homes in the island.

The homes were painted gray or vanilla, with butterscotch shut- ters and olive green and gray blue doors; the store signs were hand- painted and hung on whitewashed poles or nailed with brass tacks to brick facades. What my mother called picturesque. Linden Hall had a weathered white sign perched on two carved poles with the school’s name and the date it opened, 1746, America’s oldest board- ing school for girls. The sign was designed, or preserved, to make it look historic.The lettering on the sign had the serifs and curlicues of old script, with a touch of gold leaf.The church and the school edged the town square, the church surrounded by green lawn and shedding trees, with the school standing like a bookend at the far end of the green.

The school had three-story buildings set close together in an L shape. They looked like big homes I had seen in American movies, with shutters, paned windows, porticos, gables, slanted roofs. Fifty acres of cut grass surrounded the buildings, a campus of sloping lawns, apple orchards, trellises and rose gardens, clipped hedges, and pebbled paths. Coal was burned to keep the school heated, and by early fall, with the leaves beginning to drop off, the smokestacks came to life, venting rolls of steam, spitting charcoal chips.

The school went from grades six to twelve, and had no more than two hundred students, girls who came from the steel towns of Penn- sylvania and the north and south shores of Long Island, from the sub- urbs in Westchester, New York, from places I knew from watching

I Love Lucy,
suburban towns where mothers drove paneled station wagons and made peanut butter sandwiches, where fathers wore felt hats to work and carried briefcases and took the train at the com- muter stations in Larchmont, New Rochelle, Rye. They came from Connecticut, from New Jersey (Cranbury, Saddle River, Hopewell), from Delaware and Maryland; they were the daughters of pediatri- cians and optometrists and lawyers and stockbrokers, families with split-level houses and columned redbrick colonials, with cleaning ladies and washing machines, and mothers who played bridge on Wednesday and golf on Saturday, people who sent their children to summer camp and country day school.

The day I arrived, my roommates were already settled in, their
Webster’s
dictionaries and textbooks on the shelves, their clothes in their closets, their desks (the two by the windows) arranged. They jumped up when we entered the room, introducing themselves, shaking hands with my mother and my aunt, inquiring politely about our trip with the feigned curiosity of girls taught to please adults. My mother was charmed, laughing and telling her stories.

Linda, the tallest, smiled and nodded, trying to understand my mother’s English, but said little, picking lint off a sweater on the back of her chair. She had a soft body, heavy around her waist. Her light brown hair hung limp, pulled off her forehead with bobby pins. She came from a small town in New Jersey, and carried that kind of shy- ness. Sandy, my other roommate, was totally different: blond and tan, with a big smile that showed off straight, glowing teeth. She was a girl who knew she was pretty, who got the boys and was always voted president of her class. She had lived all her life in a town of clapboard homes, placid neighbors, and Sunday school, near theWye River, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She spoke with exclama- tion points, charged with excitement.

My mother and Tití planned to stay a few days in Lititz, and

before dropping me off at the school, they had installed themselves at the inn, in an enormous room where the wood-burning fireplace was already lit, delighting my mother, who wanted to ward off the chill of September.

The first couple of days, girls continued to arrive in Buicks and Lincoln Continentals. There was laughter and banter, girls running up the stairs two steps at a time, sliding down the banisters, banging desk drawers, slamming doors. There were parents everywhere, flocking into the dining hall, gathering in our rooms, parading through the dorms, having tea with the headmaster and the dean. On the third or fourth day, the school had a picnic to welcome parents and students—hot dogs and hamburgers and potato chips, and homemade cakes mothers brought. My mother walked about intro- ducing herself to the teachers, starting conversations with the other mothers, whileTití, her silk scarf wrapped around her neck, her sun- glasses poised on her head, stood quietly with me under a tree.

My mother nearly always could find something to say, but in her heels and flouncy skirt, she looked out of place around women in plain khaki skirts and tennis shoes, women whose conversation ran to children and homemaking. My mother pretended not to notice, turning to me instead, exclaiming, Nena, es tan bonito! La gente es tan fina! It’s so pretty! The people are so friendly!

My room was on the third floor of the main building.We dressed and studied there and slept in an attic with dormer windows and linoleum floors. Our beds were separated by thin wooden partitions. We had no bedside tables, bed lamps, or rugs, nothing but a single bed on a metal frame. The brochures had not shown this, and I thought I saw a disappointed look on my mother’s face while she and Tití made my bed, saying nothing. I thought of Angeles and our bed- room back home and the pictures on our walls and the bedside table with my books.

On the first morning after my mother andTití were gone (as they were leaving me, my mother was crying, leaning out the car window, forcing a smile, and I turned my back on her, running off to my room), I woke up before the bell rang.The sky was still dark, and the windows had a frost on them. I lay in my bed, the silence pressing down. I got up and made the bed and, with my arms around me to keep me warm, I sat on the rim of the bed for a long time, not know- ing what else to do.

The bell rang at six-thirty every morning.We shuffled out of bed, and the girls ran down the stairs to the bathroom, dropping pajamas on the floor, shaving armpits, pushing one another into the showers. I moved slowly around them, keeping on my pajamas until I was in the shower stall. I knew right away that was an odd thing to do around girls who thought nothing of walking around naked no matter what their shape—flat chests, heavy breasts, large thighs, big bottoms. We had cheerleaders, athletes, party girls, girls in glasses, girls who stuttered, girls in braces, and girls who cried a lot, smoked in the dorm, and skipped classes.These were girls who had paper routes when they were kids and now spent summers as camp counselors or bagging groceries or playing guard at the local pool, not so much because they needed the money but because keeping busy and filling their résumés with hobbies and extracurricular activities was what people did in America.

The school had few foreigners. One was a senior from Colombia who had grown up inWashington, D.C. She was stocky, with a broad face, tightly waved copper-colored hair, and wide hips; her father was an official in the Embassy of Colombia. She was eighteen years old and already engaged.There was a girl from Hawaii, part Polyne- sian, maybe Japanese, with a wiry, pin-thin frame, who rarely spoke to anyone but sprung easily to the head of the gym class. And there was a tall peroxide blonde with Anita Ekberg lips (thick, pouty), who was the daughter of an American oilman working in Saudi Arabia.

I was anAmerican foreigner, more foreigner thanAmerican. I spoke English with an accent, so charming, they said, even as they made me repeat everything I said. My clothes didn’t quite fit me, a Peck & Peck aqua sweater that became too tight, tweed skirts that seemed too long. I had no tartan skirts and no knee-high socks, Peter Pan collars and cir- cle pins, like my roommate Sandy wore with a charcoal gray crewneck thrown around her shoulders or knotted at her waist. I had my virginal innocence and island insularity, and listened in shock to sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls, just two or three years older than I, who smoked and drank and had sex with their boyfriends on weekends. These girls didn’t hide in the closet to change clothes or put their hands on their mouths when they spoke, as I did.

I sat on the edges of conversations. I watched them, and I watched myself trying to become like them.

The girls had seen Carmen Miranda movies and had heard
West Side Story,
and that’s what they thought life was for Puerto Ricans— song and dance and gang wars. Once, I danced the mambo for them, and they crowded around me wanting to learn. But it was impossi- ble because they couldn’t move their hips. I didn’t tell them that, that the music was going somewhere their feet couldn’t follow.

So I became the Carmen Miranda of the sophomore class, Chita Rivera in
West Side Story,
fitting the picture they had of me. I knew the history of their country, but about all they knew of mine was Colum- bus and
West Side Story
—and not much of Columbus at that.They had no reason to give it a thought. Are the beaches pretty? they asked, and in a short time I learned to expect nothing else, and by rote, I recited the few facts they seemed to care about:

My father is a doctor. My mother is a lawyer. I have four sisters and one brother.The island is an American commonwealth. I am fourteen years old. I have a boyfriend. His name is Roland.What an American name!

I wrote home every week, and every week I had a letter from my

mother. She had such a fluid slant, the handwriting I had seen so often when she signed the documents in her office. (I wondered, did she write her letters to me sitting at her desk, with the sun shining through the window behind her?) She always wrote the same thing, about everyone we knew, and everyone was well and they all missed me. Occasionally, she sent me clippings—Tití at a function, my mother speaking at the Colegio de Abogados—and the inconse- quential news of the island. She wrote about Castro and the revolu- tion in Cuba, and what a great man he was, but we got no news- papers at the school and to me Cuba was a dreamy image of those nights we spent in Habana when I was a child.

The weeks passed and the months of autumn came, and the sky took on the gray of the north and the cold came through our win- dows, and the radiators were turned on, their pipes boiling hot, and soon there was snow. I no longer needed to translate from Spanish to English in my head before speaking and writing it. I didn’t think and dream in Spanish anymore. I hardly spoke it. I rarely spoke about Puerto Rico or my family, and there were fewer mornings when I lay in my bed with the silence pressing in on me.