Cecilia is next in line. She is more argumentative than Maria. She loves to argue and uses words to get what she wants. She acts like a lawyer even as a teenager. Tony is the oldest boy and likes to be in charge. I look like a female version of him. He is the most athletic of us, though none of us are exactly jocks. Estela is grumpy in the mornings but she has this gentle side when she deals with me and she deals with me a lot. She sleeps in the bunk bed above me. She makes up stories to tell me—murder mysteries and tales about Sinbad the Sailor. She is a Renaissance kid. She paints and sews and is good at science and math at the same time. She is the smartest person I know.
The four of them set a fast pace at Smithtown High. My mom tells them to stick together, watch out for each other. It’s easy for the four of them because they are close in age and naturally together. Some girl in Estela’s second-grade class tortures her. Maria walks in and asks the teacher if she can talk to the kid. In a whisper she basically tells the kid she’ll kick her ass if she messes with Estela. Problem solved. A goofy neighbor boy says something racist on the bus. The four of them hang out the windows heckling him: “You flunked first grade, you idiot.”
There are something like twenty-seven hundred kids surrounding the O‘Briens and the four of them represent more than half the black population. But they have each other. Mom teaches them comebacks. They practice on each other. The only place they are lonely is in class. A teacher says something nonsensical about Africa and no one is there to dispute it. Another teacher stages a debate about apartheid and wants one of us to take the “pro” side. Then class would end and there is another O’Brien—there is Maria or Cecilia or Tony and Estela in the hall or all four of them on the bus.
They all descend on our great front lawn, where the raspberries grow among the wildflowers. They explode through the front door of our eighteen-hundred-square-foot house, disappearing into one of the five tiny bedrooms carved from this box. Forests and horse farms and beach surround us. We make forts in the brambles and I ride a horse named Strawberry who lives across the street. Dad gathers up kids from the neighborhood for a game of baseball. He always takes the weaker side, so Orestes and I often get to play with him because we’re the youngest.
Our little neighborhood is perfect for us. There is a Quaker Meeting House down the road where I sometimes babysit the kids. There are a few rentals around us, something rare in this upper-class part of town. There is wealth around us even though we are solidly middle class. Vast parcels of land surround us like a moat. There are enough tall blue spruce that the neighbors can’t tell my mom is raising pigs and geese. We use a barbecue fashioned from a pile of loose bricks. The ivy hides the fading paint color. But life is good. We walk just a quarter mile to the beach and learn to swim and boat and not harass the horseshoe crabs. Once a year a fox scrambles for its life and a string of hunters on horseback follows aggressively behind. Because of my mother’s insistence that we do everything as a family, the four big ones drag Orestes and me along to everything. There is enough laughter in our tiny world to lift a sunrise.
Then suddenly, in what seems like an instant but was really a few years, they are gone. The four of them go off to college, one by one. Out of the house. Away from Smithtown and all its constraining homogeneity. There we are, Orestes and me, with our oddball names, all by ourselves. Hard to threaten somebody or cough up a comeback when you’re all alone. No cavalry for us. Orestes and I barely see each other, even in the halls. He is a little quiet. If some kid grabs his lunch bag, I’d grab it back. That is the extent of our opportunity to express solidarity, but we are very close at home.
Shevoy is still there. She has these glass blue eyes but they are hidden behind some proper glasses. Her cousins used to throw her in the ocean back in Bermuda to teach her to swim, so she knows survival. Shevoy gets her feelings hurt just like I do. She doesn’t know why, either. We have our pain in common. Kids walk up to her and say, “Hi, Soledad.” She says “Hi” back because she figures she’s talking for the three of us, me, her, and Orestes. Shevoy is an advocate of not picking fights. Shevoy figures no one is going to defend us. I like that strategy so I sign up for it. We know that no family invites us over unless they have a conversation about it first. We figure it out when younger siblings sometimes let it slip that we’re the black guest.
But it’s not like that when Shevoy and I go see each other. I sleep over at her house sometimes. She is an only child and I feel special when I’m with her. She has this tiny front living room and her parents let us camp out on the couch. We look out the window and giggle at the neighbors. Her mother makes these terrific crab sandwiches on white bread. I’ve never had crab and I eat two and three sandwiches at a time. Shevoy’s mother says not to worry about other people because we all have each other. We do what our parents tell us to do. We worry about the person we’re becoming inside. And we giggle through the night, together.
School gets challenging. The four older kids had set these expectations of Orestes and me. They had been tracked for college. They were considered bright as a group. That was their good legacy. Then there was the other expectation, that we’d stick our noses in a book and keep to ourselves. My sisters had warned me about what was coming. “A guy would be crazy to date a black girl in that school,” Cecilia remembers. Maria and Cecilia didn’t date. They didn’t go to prom and it was never expected that they would.
I vaguely remember some conversations about whether Tony should ask out the one black girl. Mom had warned us, “A guy may like you but he may not be comfortable dating you.” We are actually pretty fair-skinned in the broader spectrum, though we don’t think of ourselves that way. We are black in our heads, and Latino, but it’s nothing we talk about or work to define. We look black, or at least we don’t look white. I find it odd later when some black folks would suggest we weren’t black enough. Black enough for what? We grew up in Smithtown in the 1970s. We were black.
It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I realized that school would just always be difficult. Because I am not white I accept the expectation that I can’t ever have a boyfriend. Plus, I have these strict parents. And I am this nerd who can’t stop moving, taking AP classes in biology and physics. It dawns on me that my race isn’t a good thing, or even neutral. I try to push past that thought. I tell myself my mother will kill me if I go on a date anyway. I am smarter than the boys, so who cares? They aren’t going to find me cute because in this town I am not ever going to be considered cute. No one rejects me. It is so far out of the realm of possibility that rejection would have required an inkling of hope.
My mom keeps telling me I’ll date in college. Another reason I have to study, as far as she is concerned. I dive headlong into books, rush off to after-school activities—student government, track and field—rip through my assignments and bypass any temptation to stop and socialize. Things happen around me, dances and sports events; chatting and laughing erupts in the hallways. I have friends and I charge ahead. Kids can be mean to anyone.
There is a girl named Angela Cinqmani. With a name like that I figure she must be a Latina. She is short and curvy and by third grade she has an enormous chest. Boys practically fall over a railing trying to get a look. She says a teacher tells her to dress more conservatively and that makes her mad, so she flaunts what she’s got and she taunts people. But she struggles. She is constantly absent and spends a lot of time in detention. She works jobs at a local factory just to get away, she tells me later. The guy she asks to the prom goes instead with her best friend. She hates Smithtown, but never moves away. I figure a lot of people have it bad for lots of reasons.
As I get older I begin to move toward things instead of away from them. I am student government president in the eighth grade. I run the quarter mile and the high hurdles for the track team and I’m good. I win medals. I am AP Physics, AP English, AP Biology, and AP History. I join the do-gooder arm of the Rotary Club, called Interact. I play the flute and piccolo. I wear a red and white military
-style band uniform and I love the feeling of being part of the marching band. Other than the fact that the uniform is wool and it’s hot, I feel great when I’m performing before a crowd. After struggling some, I am an excellent student just like my siblings. I find ways to fill every space, book every moment of time. I find a weird comfort in racing from one thing to the next, conquering, achieving, dominating, commanding. It makes it easier to ignore unpleasant remarks, to be too busy to realize you don’t belong. No time for the chance encounter in the hallway. No time to date should anyone ask. No time to think about why, just moving fast.
In the back of my mind there is this question mark that travels with me—Is it race? Or is that person just a jerk?—and it annoys me that the question takes up any space in my head. But all I can do is keep going. I will not let any teenager’s stupidity or ignorant mouth spoil it for me. I refuse to allow anyone to rob me of the promises of my wonderful middle-class existence—the well-kept lawns and suburban box houses of Smithtown. I have too much to lose. So when nonsense gets in the way, I learn to push it aside. Very little stops me, and I’ve been blessed with a terrible memory. Even when people insult me, I opt to forget it. And I do forget it. But my mom remembers everything and pro-actively dismisses the bad stuff. She likes to say: “We all live with so many people and work with so many people that if we fight with them every day we won’t get anywhere.” I have places to go. I can’t let myself get stopped.
America is a wonderful land of opportunities—if you’re in a position to take them. I don’t think that requires as much luck as it does strategy. My parents found ways to get what they wanted for themselves—a family, education, and a way of life. They picked a place to live where their kids could as well. What they couldn’t have themselves as children, they tried to give to theirs. Smithtown was their storied American dream: Immigrant parents get an education, work hard, plant a flag in a suburban wonderland, then have a pile of kids, whose achievements sparkle like sun-spots on an asphalt driveway.
My parents positioned us well to enjoy all of life’s possibilities. I learn to seize them. I get a plan, then work hard and side-step adversaries. I hope for the best. Life can derail your highest ambitions. I try not to make things harder by holding myself back. I keep a fast pace. I fight distractions and fading hope. Achievements happen in forward motion. I don’t encounter anything that truly sets me back. But mostly, I am never in a position for something truly bad to happen to me. I live a wonderful middle-class American life, and my parents never let me be at risk. My last days in Smithtown are filled with sunny afternoons and lazy evenings, of my siblings’ raucous laughter and my mother’s black beans, of my dad’s constant smile and his get-up-and-go. I pack to leave a house with warmth in the air and positive energy, a place where the tallest blue spruce outside our front door is our annual Christmas tree. It is a place where a family thrived. I feel like this home life is within reach to just about anyone if they just work hard and try. At least, that is the promise of America.
But before I leave Smithtown to venture off into adulthood, I learn one last lesson about where I stand in the world. I borrow my mother’s car. I’m eighteen, young enough that borrowing the car still comes at a price. I have to pick her up at school. She is the language teacher. She walks around in this gigantic purple hat with little skunk stripes. She is very comfortable with her race and everyone has become accustomed to her Cuban accent. This is one very proud black lady. I am very proud to be her kid. She has this torturously slow walk, but on this day I don’t mind.
We walk around the halls saying “Hi” to everyone, until something happens that brings us both to a stop. A teenage black boy is running madly through the halls of this nearly all-white school. He comes to a halt when he comes upon the school administrators, who just happen to be in the hall. Their faces are clear. This kid does not belong. My instinct is to keep walking. The kid just stands there with this startled look. My mom stops, which means I stop. “I imagine he was probably scared with so many adults around him,” my mom would say later. “So I did what had to be done.” And that was to stay and watch. But I suddenly feel in a rush. This is not our business. One of the administrators is my former principal and my mother’s boss. The broad shiny halls close in around us. “It’s okay, Mrs. O’Brien,” he tells her. “We have it under control.” He obviously wants her to move on.
“That’s okay,” she says. “I’m just going to stay here for a while.” She is five feet two. She clutches her macramé handbag and just stands there. The power of her immobility is awesome. I am entranced. The men are growing very uncomfortable. The boy’s eyes shift from the men to my mom and back. I can almost feel his sense of relief. She isn’t leaving him. This important black lady is fulfilling her unspoken obligation to watch after this trapped black boy. The principal reaches over and gives him a pat on the back. “Don’t run in the halls,” he says.
I am intrigued by my mom’s subtle power play. She is teaching me a lesson without saying a word. Sometimes you have to make things your business, as uncomfortable as that may feel. My mother transforms the moment. Her presence says, “Yes, I’m the black employee so this is my business.” She gives me the same body language my sister Estela had given me years ago at the photo shop. Then we turn on a heel and walk. I am in motion once again.
CHAPTER TWO
GETTING STARTED
I start my freshman year at Harvard just before my September birthday. I’m eighteen. I’m stunned by the wealth of many of my new classmates. People drive Saabs and vacation in Switzerland. Mom and Dad mail me a Seiko watch. I live in Straus, a dorm like all the others on the Ivy Yard. It’s brick, like everything else. It has tall windows with tiny little squares and white lintels. Three alumni who are heirs to a department store fortune built it. Their parents sank with the Titanic so they named a dorm after them. There are fireplaces in the suites. I’ve never lived away from home before. I’ve never lived in a big city. I am so small-town that my first night at school I’m afraid to cross the street to Harvard Square. I do it anyway. I am the fifth O’Brien to walk these yards. I decide I’m going to study medicine like my sister Estela. I am supposed to be here. But I don’t totally feel like I belong.
I get a job. My family is middle class so I have to work to pay for everything. I sell clothes. The clothing store is Rogers of Harvard Square. It’s only women’s clothes, stuff a professor’s wife might wear. They sell cashmere sweaters and velvet wraps. I love it there. I love the feel of a job. I like rushing in and checking off a list of things to do. I love the feeling of work. I love working hard. I do catering on the side. I get to see the inside of people’s houses. I also edit stacks of scientific abstracts. I don’t understand a word but you don’t have to—you just have to understand grammar. I love the writing. I babysit. I’m premed so I become a certified nurse’s aid for the summer. I make just over $6 an hour. That’s great money. Everyone else is earning just over $3. I work at a pharmacy. I feel on my way to being a doctor.
I begin to make a place for myself. I develop the social life I’d never had. I try out for the lacrosse team. I join the running club at my house. I play rugby until I tear my ACL, ending my career in competitive sports. I volunteer to work with kids at a school across the street. I get to feel comfortable with myself in college. Being multiracial is suddenly cool. A new world opens up for me. The place seems big but I make it feel small. There are kids from everywhere. My rooming group includes an Asian girl from Michigan, a wealthy Tex-Mex girl from Laredo, a lawyer’s daughter from Scarsdale, New York, and a girl from Berkeley. I go to parties for the Black Students Union and get rushed by the black sorority. College allows for diversity. I can be half black here and still be considered one of the family. The fact that I’m different is just okay. Difference is suddenly a plus. It was clear that no one in high school found me attractive. In college, I’m suddenly exotic and cute! I date for the first time—white guys, Asian guys, Puerto Rican and black guys. I start t
o slow down.
I learn to choose good friends. I assign high value to nice folks, low value to the pretentious. The place is full of people who will later put their college on their business cards. People live large. Some of them think being here makes them better, better than other people, on their own way to better. I don’t feel better than anyone. It’s not how I was raised. I am a middle-class kid from a Long Island suburb. My parents are immigrants. Paying all these college tuitions is tough. I don’t relate when folks say we’re special for being here. Not me. I know I am not. I am here because I had strong grades. They like strong grades. I was a woman and they needed women, a person of color and they wanted more people of color. Three other O’Briens have blown through here, one is still here, and there is another on the way. I am not here because I am special. I am not special at all. I am just here.
Estela is the one still at Harvard when I get there. She is also premed. I take lots of science classes, studying at all hours. I become a candy striper, the old-fashioned way to get a taste of medicine. Then I take organic chemistry with Estela. I can get through. But she really gets it. She can figure out how to deduce formulas. I have to stuff this crap in my brain. I have to memorize everything. It’s not fun. It’s frustrating. I realize I can’t apply to medical schools and condemn myself to a life of this. I just don’t have a passion for practicing medicine.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 3
