When I Was Puerto Rican (40 page)

On the way home, I walked with another new ninth grader, Yolanda. She had been in New York for three years but knew as little English as I did. We spoke in Spanglish, a combination of English and Spanish in which we hopped from one language to the other depending on which word came first.

“
Te preguntó el
Mr. Barone, you know,
lo que querías hacer
when you grow up?” I asked.

“Sí, pero,
I didn’t know. ¿
Y tú?”

“
Yo tampoco
. He said,
que
I like to help people.
Pero,
you know,
a mí no me gusta mucho la gente.”
When she heard me say I didn’t like people much, Yolanda looked at me from the corner of her eye, waiting to become the exception.

By the time I said it, she had dashed up the stairs of her building. She didn’t wave as she ducked in, and the next day she wasn’t friendly. I walked around the rest of the day in embarrassed isolation, knowing that somehow I had given myself away to the only friend I’d made at Junior High School 33. I had to either take back my words or live with the consequences of stating what was becoming the truth. I’d never said that to anyone, not even to myself. It was an added weight, but I wasn’t about to trade it for companionship.

A few days later, Mr. Barone called me back to his office.

“Well?” Tiny green flecks burned around the black pupils of his hazel eyes.

The night before, Mami had called us into the living room. On the television “fifty of America’s most beautiful girls” paraded in ruffled tulle dresses before a tinsel waterfall.

“Aren’t they lovely?” Mami murmured, as the girls, escorted by boys in uniform, floated by the camera, twirled, and disappeared behind a screen to the strains of a waltz and an announcer’s dramatic voice calling their names, ages, and states. Mami sat mesmerized through the whole pageant.

“I’d like to be a model,” I said to Mr. Barone.

He stared at me, pulled his glasses down from his forehead, looked at the papers inside the folder with my name on it, and glared. “A model?” His voice was gruff, as if he were more comfortable yelling at people than talking to them.

“I want to be on television.”

“Oh, then you want to be an actress,” in a tone that said this was only a slight improvement over my first career choice. We stared at one another for a few seconds. He pushed his glasses up to his forehead again and reached for a book on the shelf in back of him. “I only know of one school that trains actresses, but we’ve never sent them a student from here.”

Performing Arts, the write-up said, was an academic, as opposed to a vocational, public school that trained students wishing to pursue a career in theater, music, and dance.

“It says here that you have to audition.” He stood up and held the book closer to the faint gray light coming through the narrow window high on his wall. “Have you ever performed in front of an audience?”

“I was announcer in my school show in Puerto Rico,” I said. “And I recite poetry. There, not here.”

He closed the book and held it against his chest. His right index finger thumped a rhythm on his lower lip. “Let me call them and find out exactly what you need to do. Then we can talk some more.”

I left his office strangely happy, confident that something good had just happened, not knowing exactly what.

“I’m not afraid ... I’m not afraid ... I’m not afraid.” Every day I walked home from school repeating those words. The broad streets and sidewalks that had impressed me so on the first day we had arrived had become as familiar as the dirt road from Macún to the highway. Only my curiosity about the people who lived behind these walls ended where the façades of the buildings opened into dark hallways or locked doors. Nothing good, I imagined, could be happening inside if so many locks had to be breached to go in or step out.

It was on these tense walks home from school that I decided I had to get out of Brooklyn. Mami had chosen this as our home, and just like every other time we’d moved, I’d had to go along with her because I was a child who had no choice. But I wasn’t willing to go along with her on this one.

“How can people live like this?” I shrieked once, desperate to run across a field, to feel grass under my feet instead of pavement.

“Like what?” Mami asked, looking around our apartment, the kitchen and living room crisscrossed with sagging lines of drying diapers and bedclothes.

“Everyone on top of each other. No room to do anything. No air.”

“Do you want to go back to Macún, to live like savages, with no electricity, no toilets ...”

“At least you could step outside every day without somebody trying to kill you.”

“Ay, Negi, stop exaggerating!”

“I hate my life!” I yelled.

“Then do something about it,” she yelled back.

Until Mr. Barone showed me the listing for Performing Arts High School, I hadn’t known what to do.

“The auditions are in less than a month. You have to learn a monologue, which you will perform in front of a panel. If you do well, and your grades here are good, you might get into the school.”

Mr. Barone took charge of preparing me for my audition to Performing Arts. He selected a speech from
The Silver Cord,
a play by Sidney Howard, first performed in 1926, but whose action took place in a New York drawing room circa 1905.

“Mr. Gatti, the English teacher,” he said, “will coach you.... And Mrs. Johnson will talk to you about what to wear and things like that.”

I was to play Christina, a young married woman confronting her mother-in-law. I learned the monologue phonetically from Mr. Gatti. It opened with “You belong to a type that’s very common in this country, Mrs. Phelps—a type of self-centered, self-pitying, son-devouring tigress, with unmentionable proclivities suppressed on the side.”

“We don’t have time to study the meaning of every word,” Mr. Gatti said. “Just make sure you pronounce every word correctly.”

Mrs. Johnson, who taught Home Economics, called me to her office.

“Is that how you enter a room?” she asked the minute I came in. “Try again, only this time, don’t barge in. Step in slowly, head up, back straight, a nice smile on your face. That’s it.” I took a deep breath and waited. “Now sit. No, not like that. Don’t just plop down. Float down to the chair with your knees together.” She demonstrated, and I copied her. “That’s better. What do you do with your hands? No, don’t hold your chin like that; it’s not ladylike. Put your hands on your lap, and leave them there. Don’t use them so much when you talk.”

I sat stiff as a cutout while Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Barone asked me questions they thought the panel at Performing Arts would ask.

“Where are you from?”

“Puerto Rico.”

“No,” Mrs. Johnson said, “Porto Rico. Keep your r’s soft. Try again.”

“Do you have any hobbies?” Mr. Barone asked. Now I knew what to answer.

“I enjoy dancing and the movies.”

“Why do you want to come to this school?”

Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Barone had worked on my answer if this question should come up.

“I would like to study at Performing Arts because of its academic program and so that I may be trained as an actress.”

“Very good, very good!” Mr. Barone rubbed his hands together, twinkled his eyes at Mrs. Johnson. “I think we have a shot at this.”

“Remember,” Mrs. Johnson said, “when you shop for your audition dress, look for something very simple in dark colors.”

Mami bought me a red plaid wool jumper with a crisp white shirt, my first pair of stockings, and penny loafers. The night before, she rolled up my hair in pink curlers that cut into my scalp and made it hard to sleep. For the occasion, I was allowed to wear eye makeup and a little lipstick.

“You look so grown up!” Mami said, her voice sad but happy, as I twirled in front of her and Tata.

“Toda una señorita,”
Tata said, her eyes misty.

We set out for the audition on an overcast January morning heavy with the threat of snow.

“Why couldn’t you choose a school close to home?” Mami grumbled as we got on the train to Manhattan. I worried that even if I were accepted, she wouldn’t let me go because it was so far from home, one hour each way by subway. But in spite of her complaints, she was proud that I was good enough to be considered for such a famous school. And she actually seemed excited that I would be leaving the neighborhood.

“You’ll be exposed to a different class of people,” she assured me, and I felt the force of her ambition without knowing exactly what she meant.

Three women sat behind a long table in a classroom where the desks and chairs had been pushed against a wall. As I entered I held my head up and smiled, and then I floated down to the chair in front of them, clasped my hands on my lap, and smiled some more.

“Good morning,” said the tall one with hair the color of sand. She was big boned and solid, with intense blue eyes, a generous mouth, and soothing hands with short fingernails. She was dresssed in shades of beige from head to toe and wore no makeup and no jewelry except for the gold chain that held her glasses just above her full bosom. Her voice was rich, modulated, each word pronounced as if she were inventing it.

Next to her sat a very small woman with very high heels. Her cropped hair was pouffed around her face, with bangs brushing the tips of her long false lashes, her huge dark brown eyes were thickly lined in black all around, and her small mouth was carefully drawn in and painted cerise. Her sun-tanned face turned toward me with the innocent curiosity of a lively baby. She was dressed in black, with many gold chains around her neck, big earrings, several bracelets, and large stone rings on the fingers of both hands.

The third woman was tall, small boned, thin, but shapely. Her dark hair was pulled flat against her skull into a knot in back of her head. Her face was all angles and light, with fawnlike dark brown eyes, a straight nose, full lips painted just a shade pinker than their natural color. Silky forest green cuffs peeked out from the sleeves of her burgundy suit. Diamond studs winked from perfect earlobes.