Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  But the sight of a rock I dream of climbing makes me forget my troubles. We pass it every day on my way to school and every day I wonder about climbing it. It is almost half a block long and reaches way up into the sky, and I’m sure that before it was covered with broken bottles, crumpled paper bags, dog doo-doo, and sticky white balloons, dinosaurs climbed it, reaching to eat the leaves on the trees that grew on top. The mountain of rock seems taller and my desire grows bigger each time I pass it.

  That morning, I get ahead of Genoveva and figure I can climb to the top before she catches up with her slow-moving, nose-picking, stopping-to-talk-to-whomever-will-talk-to-her way of walking. I run to the top but just when I am about to take a peek at the whole wide world she notices.

  “¡Muchacha … !”

  Too late—she is upon me just before I reach the top.

  “¡Véngase!”

  Too bad. Not today. I climb down and trudge to school, but my mood is immediately lifted by the sight of my new friend Marion Uble. She has a white-blonde pixie hairdo and white, white skin and I love her as we jump rope facing each other.

  Johnny over the ocean

  Johnny over the sea

  Johnny broke a bottle and he blamed it on me.

  I told Ma, Ma told Pa

  Johnny got a beating and a ha ha ha

  Johnny jump on one foot, one foot, one foot

  Johnny jump on two foot, two foot, two foot …

  Then the rope gets tangled and we trip all over each other and laugh. Running inside when the bell rings we get to our desks and compare penmanship papers. We are both perfect. Yesterday she taught me a way of counting by marking dots on the paper, which was really the same as counting my fingers, but I didn’t say anything. At the end of the day when her skinny, frizzy-blonde-haired mother picks her up and Genoveva picks me up I feel bad that my own ma has to work and can’t be there.

  When we get to the outcropping Genoveva says she has to stop off in a store. I see my chance and I take it. Up I go and make it to the top. It’s all different but the same from up here. Oh my God, can that be Crotona Park I see way over there? The rooftops are all connected to one another … maybe that’s my friend Marion Uble’s house? She lives on Fulton Avenue right across the street from Crotona Park … if that’s her building, which is connected to another building, which is connected to another and another and is finally connected to mine … we might actually live in the same building. I mean—if being connected made you one … can’t you say it’s just one big building that we all live in? I think so. Oh my God! I think I see her yellow hair and her red coat. Yes, it’s her and her mother getting home! I’ll wave! “Marion!”

  Then I hear Genoveva shriek.

  “Get down. You going to break your head; I’m going to tell your mami.”

  Ma never hit me, or slipped her chancletas off her feet to throw at me the way other mothers did, but she was angry with me for falling asleep in the closet. Back at her house Genoveva fixes me the can of Franco-American Ravioli my mother had left for me.

  “Eat that and just sit quietly until your mother comes home!” she says, plopping it in front of me. Though I’m hungry and there is never enough food I eat slowly, wondering what my mother will say … but now I feel tired and stretch my arm out on the table and rest my head … and from this angle … I notice that the … the ravioli looks like a cracker. Was a ravioli really two wet saltines stuffed with meat and pressed together along the sides with a fork? Looks that way …

  I fall asleep and wake to my mother calling to me from the door.

  “Véngase.”

  Disoriented, cheek stuck to the plastic tablecloth with spit, I disengage and go to her. She looks happy and pretty again, like she always looks after a day out of the house. I get a big smile and hug.

  “She went all the way to the top of the rock. She could’ve broken her neck!”

  I push my head into my body like a turtle. But my mother says, “¿Quién sabe? Maybe she’s going to grow up to be an explorer.”

  Me? An explorer? I immediately change the direction my head was going in so that when my mother reaches out her hand to pat it, I stand so much taller I am able to meet her halfway.

  “There are three kinds of people in the world,” says Mrs. Whitman, the teacher, banging on a diagram of world populations with a pointer. It is Brotherhood Week and she is teaching us about all the people in the world we should like. “Now listen,” she adds, glaring, then scratching her white, patchy elbows. Bits of dry skin snow down onto her belly as the pointer jabs around crazily. “The three kinds of people are white, yellow, and black.”

  Marion and I look at each other and at everybody else. She looks embarrassed that she is the only one mentioned in the list of possible humans. Juan has straight hair and creamy skin and Lourdes has browner skin and curly hair. Juan raises his hand.

  “What about brown people? Aren’t there brown people?”

  Mrs. Whitman expands with righteous indignation at the nerve of him asking a question and she sputters, “No, there are no such things as brown people.”

  Juan looks straight ahead and mutters something. Mrs. Whitman flies to his side, pointer held high in the air.

  “What? What did you say?”

  He cowers, then whispers, “Nothing.”

  And she laughs, saying smugly, “I didn’t think so.”

  And then one kid laughs, and then another, then another, until the whole class laughs at Juan.

  “Moving on,” says Mrs. Whitman. “There are also three classes of people: rich, middle class, and poor …”

  I wonder where my family and I stand. Surely we are in the middle class. Poor people sleep in the street like Moncho, outside of Don Joe’s bodega, and never have anything to eat like those people in Puerto Rico who live over shit rivers in El Fanguito. We sleep in beds and eat something every night. At two forty-five it’s my turn to help Mrs. Whitman with her outside shoes. They are black and thick with a strap that holds in her rebellious feet.

  “Not too tight,” she scolds painfully. I look up at her.

  “Mrs. Whitman, am I in the middle class?”

  “Oh …” She gasps, annoyed. “No, you are poor. Very poor, just like everybody else in this school,” she adds, pointing to her shoe. “Now loosen that strap; you’ve made it much too tight.”

  That night I tell my mother what Mrs. Whitman had said and I ask if we are poor or not.

  “We’re doing all right,” she sniffs, turning her face away.

  The school year goes quickly. It’s finally summer again and Marion is all set to come to the lake with us. Marion’s mother uses a lot of “r”s when she tells us that it’s okay for Marion to come. And it is a special trip because we are going with Caguas y Paula and their eight children.

  “Why is he called Caguas?” I ask Ma.

  “Why do you think? Because that’s where he is from.”

  “Is his wife, Paula, from a place called Paula?”

  “No, that’s just her name.”

  Caguas is white and regular size and Paula is big and round with really dark skin and they love each other so much they have eight kids that are all a color between them. I like to go to their apartment because they are always laughing and being nice to each other, even though their kitchen has such greasy walls they glisten. Going to the beach with them means that there will be lots of roast pork, and rice and beans, and whole watermelons! All the big kids help the little kids as they walk in size places carrying their picnic stuff to the car.

  When we get to Lake Welch, Marion and I head for the water right away and after playing in the sand and getting wet again we go up to, we think, Paula for a towel.

  “Paula, ¿dame una toalla, por favor?” I say.

  And the big, round, dark woman turns around to me slowly, and smiles, and says in a warm, syrupy voice, “Chile, I don’t know whatchu sayin’.”

  Marion and I back off, looking for our own group, but I keep wondering how it was poss
ible that I could I have thought that that black woman was Paula. Paula is Puerto Rican and everyone knows that Puerto Ricans aren’t black. Right? Later, after watermelon, Marion and I go back to the water’s edge.

  “¡Muchachas! ¡Sálganse del sol!”

  Ma wants us to get out of the sun, Marion because she was turning too red and me because I was turning too dark and we wouldn’t want anyone to mistake me for being a Negro.

  Biting into the food feels like I am eating my own tongue. But it’s not my tongue—it’s some poor cow’s tongue I am cramming down my throat. I am home with my father because I am sick and he is not on a roofing job because it’s raining. We eat the disgusting food he loves—cuchifritos, pickled pigs’ ears and tongue, and morcilla, or blood sausage. I eat it so he’ll like me better, carefully chewing around the one hair the cook missed on the sow’s ear.

  The phone rings and I know it’s his boss because my father suddenly gets nervous and forgets how to speak English. When he has to write something down he panics because there is no handy pencil and he digs around all the kitchen drawers, reaching as far as the phone cord lets him until he finds a discarded Maybelline eyebrow pencil of Ma’s, to finally write some information on the wall. Then he surprises me: “Let’s go—we gotta go to Yonkers to la casa del boss.”

  I put on two sweaters because I’m cold even though it’s summer and we drive to his boss’s house in Yonkers, and when we get there I think it’s worth it because I have never seen such a beautiful house except maybe for Dick and Jane’s house in my school reader. Big bushes heavy with pink flowers caress our car as we turn into the driveway. My father rings the doorbell and a tall white man with long, stringy arms, blond hair, and wet blue eyes answers.

  “Chico, come on in.”

  Chico? Who is “Chico”? I look to see if there is someone behind us. My father is called “Bonifacio Manzano,” or “Pepe.” I have never heard “Chico.”

  The man eyes me, smiling. “How come you’re not in school?”

  I look at my father.

  “Oh, this is my daughter, Sonia. She don’t feel well.”

  “Well, come on in, Sonia,” says the boss.

  I walk into the living room and sink into the carpet up to my ankles.

  “Would you like a cookie?” It’s the boss’s wife, who looks exactly like her husband except her lips are covered with coral-orange lipstick, with a little lipstick on her yellow teeth, too. Her long toes are painted the same color orange, and are so trapped in white, shiny leather sandals they cross like fingers wishing good luck. My words stick in my throat, even if I did know how to answer the cookie question.

  She laughs and shows me into a living room full of big plants, where I sit in a chair so soft I watch my dark thin legs sink in until they are almost gone. My father and his boss go through sliding glass doors just like people do in the movies, onto a patio where the boss sits as my father stands. How come we don’t live like this? I think. Are we not in the same world? How can they work together and live so differently from each other? I watch the boss talk and my father smile, trying to keep up. They come back into the room where I can hear them but my father is less animated now, watching his boss carefully, and giving him the expected reaction almost moments before he needs to. By the time we get home I feel worse, with feverish thoughts on fire in my head. How come my father is so scared? Why was he tripping and falling over every broken English word that came out of his mouth? I go straight to my bed to lie down and the next thing is Ma, purse dangling from her arm, feeling my face then pulling her hand back because I am so hot. My throat is on fire, but my head is in a wonderful place because I have Ma all to myself. She wraps me up in clean, dry sheets, slathers me with mustard plasters, gives me soft foods like mashed potatoes and chicken noodle soup as the days go by.

  “Ma, my head is part of a calendar like in a movie showing time going, going …”

  “¿Qué … ?”

  She looks alarmed so I don’t go on. How can I explain that I feel like I’m in a black-and-white movie, the part where they show time passing, with pages of a calendar blowing away? My head is one of the calendar pages about to go into the future or back into the past and I am not afraid. Ma wrings her hands like actress Joan Crawford.

  That night I sleep until the whiskey smell of my father wakes me, but I don’t move in case I am still in a movie. He sits by my bed and begins to cry. I peek and can see half his face in shadow, and as he tries to hold it all in, the sobs burst forth, faster and harder. He heaves great gulps of sad air, until he can’t anymore.

  Many weeks later when there is no work for a long time because it’s rained so much he comes home in a black mood as Joe and I finish dinner.

  “Go to bed.”

  “But it’s still daylight … ?”

  “Don’t you talk back to me! Go to bed! Both of you! Now!”

  We go to bed but Joe and I can’t sleep on account of it is still bright outside.

  “Hey, Joe,” I whisper, “want to play trampoline?” Joe never talks but he wants to jump. We jump a little at first, then higher, and higher, and higher, and higher until my father gallops into the room like the horse Fury on TV. His ears back, his nostrils flared, his eyes wild. Tall and muscular as a comic-book avenger, his stance wide, his head squared, belt held high in his hand, he lets it unfurl on my legs.

  Later after crying until my eyes are sticky shut and I sleep, my thigh goes through a transformation. A magnificent bruise appears by morning, outstanding in size and color with rings of black, purple, red, and yellow.

  All day, looking at my prize, I wait, looking out the window, imagining being in the spotlight of my mother’s eyes, the center of her attention, even getting sympathetic sighs, like she got from neighbors when she was hit. But Aurea comes home in an unexpectedly great mood—smiling, even. She plays Nat King Cole singing “Love Is the Thing” before putting on a pot of beans to simmer. Cole’s sweet honey voice and the burbling beans warm up the apartment. Aurea drapes a pink scarf over our lamps, making soft light. Her activities divide my attention between the atmosphere and my thigh.

  “Wanna play cards?” she says.

  I can’t believe my ears. Playing cards with my sister in the middle of this suddenly heavenly apartment is almost more than I can bear. Only friends play cards. I want to jump up but my leg is sore. We play a round of cards and grin at each other and it feels so delicious I want to share more.

  “You want to see something?” I tease.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  I show her my thigh—she gasps, her face turning dark. Standing up, agitated, she begins to pace, flicking the deck of cards from one hand to the other.

  “What’s the matter?” I say, stunned by this quick turn.

  When she doesn’t answer, I wonder what I have done wrong. How had I managed to ruin the moment? I have spoiled everything! How can I have been so stupid! We were playing cards! I want to play cards! What about the cards? But she doesn’t want to play cards anymore. She wants to take me to the police station.

  “Put these clean panties on,” she commands.

  “Can we still play cards?” I ask, slipping in my sore leg first.

  She doesn’t answer me. Our game has changed to scary. We are on a secret mission now. Ma comes home and I know to be silent. My sister says nothing important and tells Ma we are going to buy some candy.

  But my sister’s timing is off. We run into my father downstairs.

  “Where do you two think you are going?” he shouts.

  “We’re going to get some candy …”

  He must suspect something because he says, “No, you’re not. Get upstairs, both of you!”

  They argue. Flor comes out of Don Joe’s bodega to watch. Don Joe himself comes out and tries to interfere. One of the red-haired Cabeza men sits in his windowsill in an undershirt, his feet on Don Joe’s awning, watching us like some red, hairy gorilla. The whole neighborhood is watching. I scream for M
a, who finally and painfully looks down on the show from the window.

  Maybe he pushes Aurea toward the building—I don’t know, but she leaps up at him, shoving him back with all her might, and I feel small on the sidewalk and I am pretty sure I hate him.

  But something good happens. Aurea so detests being at home that she goes to the Fenway movie theater every night and takes me with her. She loves the movies, and we are safe in the darkness, and I give her sidelong glances each time I want to see joy.

  Soon there is work again and my father is out of the house and there is no school so I have to stay at a neighbor’s for the day. She is a square block of a woman in a housedress we don’t know very well but she lives right next door; and it won’t be a regular thing anyway. She greets me wearing her husband’s hand-me-down shoes, her hair in pigtails. I watch her tuck her two babies into bed for their naps, then stand around waiting to be told what to do.

  “You just sit in that chair,” she tells me, pointing to a chair against the wall that I go sit in. I can just see into the bedroom where the babies are.

  “Do not move from that chair.” She smiles, getting into the bed with them.

  I sit in the chair and wait. There is a clock and I’m happy that it ticks and tocks because it gives me something to listen to. The train zooms by outside. Smiling inside, I tell myself this babysitter is better than the one with the twelve-year-old son who always wanted to play “getting married in the Old West,” which I liked to play because I got to make believe I was wearing a wedding dress and being helped into a wagon by my new husband—but I didn’t like it when he snuck his tongue into my mouth. At least at this sitter’s house all I have to do is sit in a chair.

  I hear soft snoring. My feet don’t quite reach the floor so I make believe I am a ballerina and I go back and forth along the length of the chair on my tippy-toes. The dance I make up is very long and I add to it by making believe I am leaping out of the chair, landing on my toes, and sliding back to my place as smoothly as if the floor were slick as ice. My dance is long and I go through it several times but they still don’t wake up.