Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  “That’s great, that’s great,” he says, “but your hands …”

  “My hands?”

  “Make them fists. Like you want to punch someone.”

  I do.

  I plot my journey to the audition carefully so there is no getting lost and on the day I still give myself plenty of time. Climbing up out of the subway darkness and into the light of Forty-Second Street I absorb energy and purpose all around and want to latch on to it. People walk—no, they step, they march, they stride to where they want to go. At Forty-Sixth Street a statue attracts my attention and I see that it’s George M. Cohan and I remember how much I loved Yankee Doodle Dandy, the movie about him starring James Cagney. Cagney was so tough he could tap dance and not look silly. I recite lines from the movie in my head: “My father thanks you, my mother thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you!” It doesn’t matter to me that the real man and the actor are blended in my mind; I’m glad to be standing where something big happened.

  I walk uptown some more and notice that lots of stores have GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE signs plastered all over them and I’m attracted to the ones selling “real Irish lace.” I think I should buy Ma a nice cheap lace tablecloth before it’s too late. As I walk on I see a picture of an actress outside of a theater that I know is not a movie house. She has a tattoo of a heart on her shoulder, short hair, and a cute, tough look on her face. Is that a real person? I wonder. Is she in that theater dancing around like James Cagney did in Yankee Doodle Dandy, every night?

  Right next door to the theater is a nightclub—I think—I can’t be sure because the windows are painted black. A man comes out in a tight paisley shirt, wearing gold chains, and hands out flyers of sexy girls as he invites anybody to come in and see them and even get a free drink. I can tell by the clock up in the sky on a big building that I have time to walk around some more so I find myself in front of Manny’s Music looking at all the congas and maracas and wondering if Tito Puente went shopping for timbales there. Right there, right in front of me, he might have walked! I keep going and suddenly find myself in a different world. This is one of Jewish people—not the downtown world of knishes but a world of diamonds and jewels! Store window after store window is full of glittering things.

  There is so much of everything around here, lace tablecloths in going-out-of-business stores, congas and maracas at Manny’s Music, and now diamonds everywhere. So many things I am tempted to look around even more when I realize it’s time to audition. I have to run, I’m not sure where I am—but suddenly I’m there, right in front of the school! Neighborhoods can be as big as a street around here, so you can go from one world to another in seconds.

  The High School of Performing Arts has a stone facade and a huge, red, arched door. Inside it smells like minestrone soup. Monitors help me find the audition room along a dark hallway with a linoleum floor and institutional green wainscoting. It reminds me of the old part of P.S. 4 when I lived on Third Avenue. There are other kids—white ones, black ones, but no Puerto Rican ones that I can see. Everybody looks nervous—some even have their mothers with them. We eye one another, but all I can think of are the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE signs and how, if I want to buy nice napkins for Ma, I should do it quickly. Will they have gone out of business by the time I finish my audition?

  I take my seat and wait, thinking about what a great neighborhood, or bunch of neighborhoods, this is and how I would never get bored if I went to school here.

  A girl comes out of the audition. Her mother looks at her expectantly. They meet and whisper urgently and I hear them say they’ll get a bite to eat and talk about it. The girl looks like she is going to pass out as her mother holds her hand and wipes her brow. What a chicken. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. A banging door in the night and a wild-eyed father—that’s something to be afraid of, not this.

  When it’s my turn I think about my mother’s advice when things get tough: “Close your eyes and keep on going.” I enter a regular classroom with chairs pushed against the wall. There are a few teachers but I only notice a tiny one dressed all in black with big jewelry and fluffy black hair, because she is so pretty. We say hello, blah, blah, blah … and I finally sit down and go into my monologue and do everything like I’ve practiced. Squishing up my face and bunching up my fists like the teacher told me to. Then they tell me to wait. Outside I think about whether or not somebody ever took me out to lunch like that girl was being taken. Yes, I have been taken out to lunch a few times, but it wasn’t to make me feel better, it was just to eat. And then there was the time Bon Bon was in the hospital for a few days and Uncle Eddie took his son, Little Eddie, and me to eat at a diner three nights straight, but I also remember Ma taking me to the last Automat in the city before it closed down. We put a nickel in a slot and got a piece of apple pie …

  Then they call me back in. The pretty little one speaks with a melody in her voice: “Do you know what an improvisation is?”

  “No.”

  “Acting without a script. Making it up as you go along.”

  “Like making believe?”

  “Yes,” she goes on. “Make believe you are outside a movie theater waiting for a friend who is late.”

  I make believe I’m waiting for my sister outside of the Fenway and entertain myself by finding a tissue in my pocket, tossing it up, and keeping it in the air until my sister gets there. I am lost in the tissue when the teacher stops me.

  “Ever go to the theater?”

  “No, but I heard it on a record.”

  “What did you hear?”

  I know this will surprise and impress them because they will not expect a Puerto Rican from the Bronx to say:

  “I like Hamlet—on the record.”

  She perks up. Stirs a bit. I think I got her.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “My sister has a recording of Hamlet by Richard Burton.”

  Again they stir. Silly, really, the whole world knows who Richard Burton is. But I am lucky they can’t believe I know who he is.

  “What did you think?”

  “I think I liked Richard Burton’s voice. Like I could almost see the spit coming out of his mouth. I bet people got spit on if they sat close, or even the other actors—I’m sure Richard Burton spit on one of them.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think that if he can make me feel so much on a record, it must really be great to see him in person.” I’m not lying. He does make me feel sorry for Hamlet sometimes, but I don’t tell them about long, boring parts of the record that put me to sleep, knowing that isn’t what they want to hear.

  On my way home, as I step down into the subway, I am sorry that I have to leave the light and sparkle and excitement of Forty-Second Street to go back, back, back into the dull darkness of the Bronx.

  Weeks later I find out that I have been accepted.

  My sister and her friends are very happy for me. “We knew you’d get in,” they all say. Ma is happy, too.

  “You got in?”

  “Yep!”

  “You go, go, go, baby!”

  I am glad Ma wants me to go, even though I can tell she has no real idea about where I’m going. And I am happy, too—and all I can think of is that now I will be able to leave the Bronx every day and come up in the light of day in Manhattan and that I should buy Ma a lace tablecloth from one of the stores that is going out of business!

  We are spread all over. My friend Rita goes to Central Commercial High; Vanessa goes into a special ed class in the local high school because she thinks it’s fun to pull the emergency cord on the subway when there is no emergency.

  “Why do you do things like that, Vanessa?” I ask her.

  “Because my friends dare me to,” she reasons, laughing.

  And I can’t help laughing along with her.

  Yvonne runs away with the farting boyfriend, and Lisa and Dolores recede into my past double-time as I take the number six train to the High School of Performin
g Arts and my Bronx slips away one train station at a time as I fly to planet PA.

  Getting off at Forty-Second Street and Grand Central Station, taking the shuttle to Times Square and walking to Forty-Sixth Street, I notice the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs are still on display though months have passed since I first saw them. Seems to me they would’ve been out of business by now. There are so many kids smoking outside the school, with some girls sucking in the smoke so deliberately their mouths form square chutes, I think it’s really the Professional Smokers School I’m going to.

  Musicians stumble around with instruments and sheets of music jammed and wadded into their briefcases, but the dance students really stand out. Ballet dancers are thin and float around on duck feet, while the modern dancers live closer to the ground with concave stomachs and thick feet encased in wooden clogs. All the dancers have long hair they wear naturally—be it straight, curly, or frizzy. There is one Puerto Rican dancer boy from the Bronx who is so happy to be a student there he practically floats on pointe all the time. We are all happy to be here and wonder who will remain because we’ve been told over and over again that we are all on probation and can be thrown out any minute. The threat of being banished to our neighborhood schools hangs over all of us like smog.

  Almost immediately I get sucked into the swirling vortex of smart-ass kids who make outrageous statements. There are two Vanessas in our homeroom. “Which one is Vanessa Washington?” someone asks. “Who do you think?” answers a boy named Melvin. “The black one, with a name like Washington!” And I think, Washington is a black name? But Melvin should know; he himself is as black as can be. He is always writing in a spiral notebook, and when I find out he’s writing poetry I can barely keep my eyes off him and his slim waist and the way he dresses in jackets and pants of corduroy and brown boots.

  I even hear shocking talk in the bathroom.

  “I’ve got to cram a tam.” A goofy-looking girl grins at me as we adjust our hair in the mirror.

  I thought virgins couldn’t use those things. But I say nothing—just look on dumbly as she grins at me one last time before going into the stall just as another girl comes into the bathroom carrying a viola.

  “Is that you, Holly?” the tampon crammer asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you coming into the city this weekend?”

  “You bet—anything to get out of Brooklyn,” replies Viola Girl.

  What city are they talking about? New York? I thought Brooklyn was part of New York City. Why do they call Manhattan “the city”? When they head out together I hear them say “masturbate” before breaking into giggles and I don’t know what’s so funny because I don’t know what that word means, and I have to repeat it—masturbate, masturbate, masturbate, over and over again in my head so I can write it down and look it up later. Rushing into Spanish class, I scribble it on my notebook, m-a-s-t …, but before I’m done more sharp and clever kids spiral around me. One sings:

  The sun shines east

  The sun shines west

  The sun shines north

  But my mother does it best!

  I got the Oedipus blues.

  And everybody in the room laughs. What is that song about? “My mother does it best?” Does what best? What I’m thinking—something that has to do with sex?

  “Atención, estudiantes. ¡Pongan atención en sus tareas!”

  It’s the teacher, Miss Bruzio, who is pretty and wears red tights and conducts the whole class in Spanish and I understand all that she is saying. In the Bronx all the kids born in Puerto Rico knew much more Spanish than I did, but here I think I can rule.

  “¿Quién fue el gran liberador de Suramérica?” asks Miss Bruzio.

  “How should I know who the liberator of South America was?” quips a girl. “Zorro?”

  I suppress a laugh as I get ready for Miss Bruzio to yell and scold and discipline but the opposite happens. She laughs along with everyone before moving on to the next topic.

  In English class there is a red-haired girl who is not into fun and games and joking around. She was in a fire and has scars on her face and arms and is always so boiling mad I wonder if she didn’t cause the fire herself through internal spontaneous combustion. She writes a poem called “The Cloak” and reads it to the class. “ ‘Are the challenges I take like a cloak too big? Are they too big for me to hold up around the shoulders, and so long as to trip me up?’ ”

  Someone coughs. Fire Girl stops reading.

  “Continue,” says the teacher. He doesn’t wear red tights like the Spanish teacher but has the habit of absentmindedly stretching a rubber band around his glasses while listening. Fire Girl shrugs and sits down.

  “No,” she says. “I don’t want to read it anymore. People aren’t listening,” and she folds up the precious paper and puts it away safe from everyone. I look to see if the teacher will yell and call her fresh and say, “Just who do you think you are?” but he doesn’t. He actually looks embarrassed and practically snaps the rubber band right onto his own nose.

  Lunch gives me time to regroup and think and ponder and watch as I eat my tuna-fish sandwich from home in the main locker room/lobby/acting class area that throbs with music as we eat with the entire student body dancing all around me like we’re on American Bandstand on television, only these kids throw in some pirouettes. After lunch I remain in the lobby for class. The acting teacher explains an assignment. (She is not like Miss Pellman—this one doesn’t notice me at all.) We are to find a personal prop and manipulate it as if we were alone with no one watching. Over the next few days we sit in a semicircle, performing and observing. It’s Fire Girl’s turn. We watch her write in a notebook. The teacher is not satisfied.

  “Is there something else you might do that is private?”

  “My poetry is very private,” she says.

  But the teacher wants more. “Do you ever put on makeup?” she presses.

  Fire Girl seems to diminish. “Well …”

  “Let’s do this,” the teacher continues. “Let’s make believe you are putting on makeup to go to a dance.”

  Fire Girl begins to apply imaginary cream to her face. Her hand begins to shake. Suddenly tremors roll through her body, ending in quiet streams of tears. The teacher, alarmed, hands her a tissue but Fire Girl stands up, walks to her locker, collects her things, and waltzes out the door. We never see her again. The school didn’t throw her out—she threw the school out.

  My turn. I decide to make believe I am making my brother a sandwich, like I used to do before heading out to Crotona Park. Putting my hair in a ponytail, though it’s not my best look, and wearing a kid’s white T-shirt, though my breasts strain against it, I begin, when the teacher stops me.

  “I don’t know what you are doing.”

  I freeze even as I feel heat flooding my face and hear blood rushing around my head.

  “And in that T-shirt … ? I don’t know … what you even look like. Are you trying to be some frontierswoman?”

  I am so lost I can barely fumble back to my seat. Another girl gets up and her private moment is sorting though her grandmother’s jewelry. She picks up a brooch, feels its weight, and holds it to her heart.

  “Very good,” says the teacher, excited. “You loved your grandmother very much, didn’t you?”

  Alarmed that I didn’t catch that myself, I wonder if I will ever be able to perform that way.

  Finally, at the end of that round of exercises, the teacher says, “I want you all to go home and write an essay about your hopes and dreams.” This is what I write:

  My mother’s childhood during the Depression in Puerto Rico makes Oliver Twist’s childhood sound nice. My mother told me many sad stories about how poor she was in Puerto Rico. So she came to this country, but she’s poor here, too. Still we are really, really, poor. I have an older sister and two younger brothers. One has asthma and my parents sent him to the very place they suffered the most. Some people think home is a good place no matter what. Not me
. My father drinks and beats up my mother every chance he gets. I wish my parents would get a divorce so I can come from a broken home—these are my hopes and dreams.

  The next day the teacher notices me and involuntarily seeks me out with each glance she gives the whole group. I am happy to be noticed but sorry that it is because of my life at home and not because of me.

  Over the next couple of weeks I watch out for kids with red-rimmed eyes because they would’ve been put on probation, and I am shocked when I see Puerto Rican Dancer Boy from the Bronx weeping in the hallway. He does not turn away from me when I see him, as if he is just as shocked as I am about what is happening.

  At least he knows why he cries. My own tears are always below the surface and float up when I least expect them to: reading a passage about the Civil War in English class, losing a pencil, singing a song in class with Chute Smoker.

  “Are you okay?” Chute Smoker asks me later outside as she expertly turns away from the wind to light her cigarette.

  “Yeah, yeah …”

  She looks at me as she blows smoke out of the side of her mouth and doesn’t say anything else and I think that’s why I like her.

  “Listen, can you come over and babysit my brother, the little jerk, Sunday night? I have to go somewhere with my parents. My mom will pay you.”

  “Well …”

  “Come on, say yes. It’ll be easy. He’ll probably fall asleep early anyway, he’s such a jerk. It’ll be easy money.”

  “Well …”

  “Come on,” she urges, sucking up her smoke.

  On Sunday I go to her address on West End Avenue and Eighty-Sixth Street and am surprised I can’t tell what kind of neighborhood I am in because there is a little bit of everything—white, black, Jewish, Puerto Rican. I’m really impressed that her building has a doorman and even more impressed when the elevator opens on a floor that only has one door. Hers!

  “Hey,” she says, grinning when she sees me.

  Her apartment is a museum, or a library, or a church, or someplace that has floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and paintings on the walls, and African masks that look for real. They have a whole wall of long-playing albums and a speaker system with two big speakers facing an L-shaped leather sofa. The music I hear is a cool and jazzy trumpet. Chute Smoker’s parents have longish hair—the mother wears a necklace of great huge coral beads; the father peers at me through big black-framed glasses.