My Beloved World

by Sonia Sotomayor

  I have always had a deathly fear of anything that scurries or crawls: bugs, rodents, what have you. It isn’t just the stereotypical fear of a lady standing on a chair, though I’ve done that. The special revulsion I feel goes back to childhood. The giant cockroaches that infested the projects one year—we called them water bugs—brought me to hysteria. How many times had I seen my mother take the whole place apart trying to locate the nest? The very thought of their proximity would keep me awake all night. And so when I realized that the psych lab would oblige me to handle rodents while I studied their reactions, I decided, a little perversely, to make the most of it. Undertaking a course of what psychologists call exposure therapy, I devised an experiment that required me not only to hold the rats but to implant electrodes in their brains.

  It was going surprisingly well at first. I had steeled myself to picking the rats up by the tail and holding their furry bodies as I gave them a sedative injection. Once they were drugged, implanting the electrodes wasn’t so bad. Tracking their behavior was no fun: it meant watching them continuously, without turning away in disgust. But I was doing it. It wasn’t until the final weeks of the semester that everything went awry. I came into the lab one day to find all my rats milling around the same spot in the cage in an oddly intent way. I couldn’t see what the attraction was, but the sight of their frenzied huddle was enough to stir the old revulsion: I certainly wasn’t going to stick a hand in that cage. I found a stick and poked one of them off the pile. He turned to look at me, and in the gap that opened up, I saw the rat they were gnawing at, its abdomen already half devoured.

  The grad student overseeing my efforts intercepted me as I ran out of the room screaming. Trying to contain my hysterics, he explained that cannibalism is normal rat behavior, that it had evolved as a way to control disease in the population and, as such, was a widely recognized sign of plague. Somehow that didn’t help. He suggested I calm down and come back tomorrow.

  The next day my state of mind was no better: the trauma had done its damage. It was horrifying even to imagine handling a rat as I had been doing for months, and no less so to think I had botched a whole semester’s work. Fortunately, my professor took a philosophical view when I explained why I was utterly incapable of seeing my project through. As a psychologist he credited the motive of trying to cure my phobia by means of this experiment, and as a teacher he could see I had been at it diligently from the start. My grade wouldn’t suffer much because of this fiasco. “Your plan was perfectly suited to what the course was intended to teach,” he allowed. “Not every experiment is a success. That’s the nature of doing science.” The nature of doing many things, I might add: success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.

  PART OF my financial-aid package committed me to weekly hours in the work-study program. At the start of freshman year, I was assigned to food service at the commons, but a lingering case of mononucleosis took me off the cafeteria line. I needed a desk job where I couldn’t cause an epidemic. I was eager, too, to explore something new. The food service job was standard student fare in a predictable environment. But when I saw a posting for a keypunch operator at the Computer Center, I was intrigued.

  Computers were a brave new world when I started work there in 1972, and access to their powers was confined to cavernous campus centers. Judith Rowe, head of the center’s social sciences division, was a pioneer; among the first to envision the potential of quantitative analysis in the social sciences, she saw that computers would be the key to realizing it. To advance that vision, she encouraged graduate students to use the computer in analyzing their research data, an effort she facilitated by hiring work-study students like me to do the data entry. One project I worked on was with the historian Vernon Burton, who had discovered a treasure trove of old census records near his hometown in South Carolina. (There is such serendipity in historical research: Vernon had stopped on a back road to buy a soda when he spotted the stacks of ledgers holding up a shelf; he offered to build the shopkeeper some proper shelves in exchange for the ledgers.) My job was to key all the census data onto punch cards and help Vernon run the analysis.

  I’d taken a typing class in high school, figuring that I could always get a job that way if necessary. That was qualification enough to start, as no one beyond the programmers themselves had any computer skills. Under Judith’s guidance I learned a bit about programming and became skilled at keypunching. Because the work was specialized, I earned double what I had been making in the cafeteria. There were other perks too: we could set our own hours and come as we were, in jeans and T-shirts. It was a student’s dream job, and I kept it all four years at Princeton, working there ten or fifteen hours a week on top of other jobs that came and went.

  The mainframe computer housed in the center gave off so much heat that its room was cooled to frigid temperatures, and I wore a jacket and gloves whenever I went down into the basement to feed my stacks of punch cards into the machine. If the program crashed, I had to inspect each card individually to find the error. Often that meant perusing hundreds or even thousands of punch cards for a single mistaken keystroke, a maddening effort. Next to the monitor that showed the jobs queuing to run on the computer was a metal post that seemed to serve no purpose. It was a while before someone explained it to me: after repeatedly replastering the wall, the administration had decided to install the post for the convenience of frustrated students, who invariably needed something to kick when their code crashed.

  Later, in my senior year, I was taking a break from writing my thesis to catch up on a couple of hours of keypunch work when an idea occurred to me: Why not enter the text of my thesis on the same types of punch cards that we were using for data analysis? That way, I could make changes as needed to individual cards without having to retype all the subsequent pages. Judith was intrigued. She thought it was a worthwhile experiment, and she assigned another operator to do the data entry for me. It’s hard to be certain, but I might have submitted the very first word-processed senior thesis in Princeton’s history, and I didn’t even have to type it myself.

  In my freshman year, however, I had cause to doubt that I would be able to write a senior thesis eventually. My very first midterm paper, for American history class, came back with a C, a grade I couldn’t remember getting since the fourth grade. I was flattened, but even worse I had no idea where I had gone wrong. I’d fallen in love with the subject—the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal—pursuing it with everything I had. And the professor had been so inspiring that I wanted to impress her. Nancy Weiss was chair of the department, one of the first women in the whole country to hold such a post; later, as Nancy Malkiel, she would become the longest-serving dean of the college.

  Professor Weiss told a familiar tale: although my paper was chock-full of information and even interesting ideas, there was no argumentative structure, no thesis that my litany of facts had been marshaled to support. “That’s what analysis is—the framework of cause and effect,” she said. Her point was a variation of what Miss Katz had been getting at, though now it was coming across more clearly and consequentially. Obviously, I was still regurgitating information. It was dawning on me that in all my classes I was so concerned with absorbing the facts in the reading that I wasn’t marshaling them into a larger argument. By now, several people had pointed out where I needed to go, but none could show me the way. I began to despair of ever learning how to succeed at my assignments when quite unexpectedly it occurred to me: I already knew how.

  Running into Kenny Moy outside Firestone one day got me thinking about my days in Forensics Club. Suddenly I realized that what had made me a winner on his team was precisely what I needed to do in my papers. I would not have dreamed of opening my mouth in a debate without first mapping out a position, anticipating and addressing objections, considering how best to persuade my listeners. Seeing the task in the context of another I already performed well largely demystified the problem. In my next few pa
pers I would start doing in prose what I learned how to do in spoken words. But before I could do that really well, I’d have to face up to another obstacle: the general deficiency of my written English.

  Whether it is a pregnant pause or even talking with her hands, a debater has many expressive tricks in her repertoire, some of which may cover a multitude of sins against the language. In writing, however, one’s words stand naked on the page. Professor Weiss had minced none of her own informing me that my English was weak: my sentences were often fragments; my tenses erratic; and my grammar often just not grammatical. If I could have seen it myself, I would have fixed it, but what was wrong sounded right to me. It wasn’t until the following year, when I took Peter Winn’s course in contemporary Latin American history, that the roots of my problem were uncovered: my English was riddled with Spanish constructions and usage. I’d say “authority of dictatorship” instead of “dictatorial authority,” or “tell it to him” instead of “tell him.” Peter’s corrections in red ink were an epiphany: I had no idea that I sounded so much like my mother! But my English wouldn’t be as easy to fix as the lack of an argument in my essays. I bought some grammar handbooks and, as part of the same effort, a stack of vocabulary booklets. Over summer vacations spent working at Prospect Hospital, or later at the Department of Consumer Affairs in Spanish Harlem, I’d devote each day’s lunch hour to grammar exercises and to learning ten new words, which I would later test out on Junior, trying to make them my own. Junior was unfazed by my semantic challenges. He was just happy to be out of my shadow in his final years at Cardinal Spellman.

  I CAME TO ACCEPT during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared. That acceptance, though, didn’t make me feel less self-conscious and unschooled in the company of classmates who’d had the benefit of much more worldly experience. Until I arrived at Princeton, I had no idea how circumscribed my life had been, confined to a community that was essentially a village in the shadow of a great metropolis with so much to offer, of which I’d tasted almost nothing. I was enough of a realist not to fret about having missed summer camp, or travel abroad, or a casual familiarity with the language of wealth. I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d have to develop for myself. And meanwhile, there could come at any moment the chagrin of discovering something else I was supposed to know. Once, I was trying to explain to my friend and later roommate Mary Cadette how out of place I sometimes felt at Princeton.

  “It must be like Alice in Wonderland,” she said sympathetically.

  “Alice who?”

  She was kind enough to salvage the moment with a quick grace: “It’s a wonderful book, Sonia, you must read it!” In fact, she would guide me thoughtfully toward a long list of classics she had read while I’d been perusing Reader’s Digest. What did my mother know of Huckleberry Finn or Pride and Prejudice?

  Later, at the Computer Center, I would enter data for a project that Judith Rowe described as a study of how people paid for college. My fingers froze on the keys as I read what I was typing: financial figures of the most well-off at Princeton. This was my first glimpse of trust funds; tax write-offs and loopholes; summer jobs at Daddy’s firm that paid the equivalent of a year’s tuition; incomes in the millions, disbursed a half million here, a few hundred thousand for that poor guy there. Between her own salary from Prospect Hospital and her survivors’ benefits, which would end very soon, my mother’s income was never more than five thousand dollars a year. Nothing could have clarified as starkly where I stood in relation to some of the people among whom I was now living and learning.

  I never deluded myself that I could fill in everything I had missed growing up. Nor did I fail to appreciate that I’d had experiences of my own to prize or that I’d seen some aspects of life of which my classmates were sometimes naively unaware. Suffice it to say that Princeton made me feel that long after those summers spent first discovering the world’s great books, I’d have to remain a student for life. It has been my pleasure to be one, actually, long after the virtue has ceased to be such a necessity.

  Sixteen

  EVERY WEEK, like clockwork, a small, square envelope arrived in the mail, addressed in a familiar, scratchy hand. Inside the envelope was a paper napkin and inside that a dollar bill. Abuelita wasn’t much of a correspondent. She might sign the napkin, or not, but the loving gesture was reliable and steadfast. It meant a lot to know she was thinking of me, and a dollar was no small thing, for her or for me. Once in a rare while she would send a five-dollar bill, and I could see her smiling from seventy miles away.

  Kevin came to visit with an equally reliable regularity. Driving down to Princeton from SUNY at Stony Brook every single weekend, he would make a detour through Co-op City to pick up a care package of fruits and juice from my mother. He would arrive around midnight frazzled and exhausted, still not accustomed to freeway driving, but as the weeks passed, he became more confident at the wheel.

  When I asked my roommate, Dolores, if she would mind Kevin sleeping on our floor, she offered to spend weekends in a friend’s room. I thought that was so generous of her, so graciously thoughtful. She meanwhile was thinking I was incorrigibly wild. She never let on, but later, after we’d gradually warmed to each other and become good friends, we’d have occasion to laugh about our first impressions of each other.

  Actually, I wasn’t wild at all: Kevin and I spent our wild weekends studying side by side. Stony Brook was a party scene, and he was glad of the chance to catch up on work. I offered many a time to come visit him there and save him the drive, but I don’t think he wanted me to see just what a party scene it was. Only once did he accept, and that was on a holiday weekend when the campus was deserted. I could see why he preferred Princeton to the institutional, nondescript concrete of Stony Brook. He fell in love with the environment the same way that I had; later he would find his way back there for graduate school.

  My mother came to visit me on campus once or twice each year. The first time, my cousin Charlie drove her and Junior down, along with Charlie’s girlfriend. Kevin came too, of course. Nassau Inn, where many of my classmates’ families would stay, was unimaginably expensive, so we had a slumber party. I gave Mami my bed and borrowed sleeping bags, mattresses, blankets, and pillows to make the rest of us comfortable on the floor. Charlie had a moment of profound shock in the bathroom, having forgotten that this was a girls’ dorm. I sent him over to the male dorm next door, but their informal policy of sharing the showers with girlfriends was even more shocking to him. He’s talked about it ever since.

  If you happened to visit Princeton on a weekend, the cafeteria food in the commons was a crapshoot. Most of the regular staff was off duty, and students cooked. They laid on steak when there was a football game, but there was no game when my family first came to visit. My mother was aghast at what was on her plate, afraid that I might starve to death, a very bland death, before I could graduate. “I have to take you out tonight, Sonia,” she said grimly after her first bite. I didn’t know what to suggest. The hoagie shop on Nassau Street was the only place in town I could routinely afford. Advice from friends sent us ten miles out on Route 27, to the A-Kitchen and the beginning of a tradition. Just reading the menu downwind from the kitchen, I was jumping out of my skin with excitement, my mouth watering at descriptions of ginger, garlic, and chilies. The prices were right, and judging by the crowd, the fare was authentic. Chinese food of that quality and spiciness was new to me, a far cry from the spareribs and egg foo yong of the Bronx.

  WHEN I CAME HOME from Princeton for a midterm break in my first year, Mami was panicking. She was in the final stretch of getting her nursing degree. The bilingual program at Hostos Community College included
an English writing requirement. It wasn’t as terrifying to her as the math, but it was onerous and she was struggling with it. She conceived the insane plan that I should write her paper for her.

  “No way! That’s cheating!” Facing dire threats that she would quit, I compromised. I agreed to look at what she had written and give her advice. We spent untold hours of my brief vacation at the kitchen table poring over her sentences. “There’s no structure here, Mami. It wanders.”

  “I don’t know, Sonia, I’m not good at embellishing.”

  “Forget about embellishing. What’s the story you’re trying to tell? What’s your theme?”

  “Ay, Sonia, please just write it for me!”

  I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought: Please, Mami, I don’t have time for your insecurities. I have my own to deal with.

  Her final exams were a torture worse than the English papers. Studying was not the problem. She had been doing that relentlessly for two years; she was used to it. But when exams loomed, the tension rose to a pitch higher than human ears could bear, the whips and chains came out, and the self-flagellation began in earnest. “I’m never going to pass,” she moaned. I reassured her. She knew the material inside out. She had been doing these same procedures at Prospect Hospital for years.

  “No, Sonia. I must have had some brain damage when I was small. Nothing stays in my memory.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re going to pass. Do you want to bet on it?”

  “Yeah, I bet I’ll fail.”