Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  The next day I wear the outfit Vanessa and I made—a large T-shirt-shaped dress with a handkerchief belt—and I see Puerto Rican Dancer Boy from the Bronx standing around outside the school. He’s dyed his curly black hair white-blond and he looks like he is trying to peer into the school through the bricks with his wild red-rimmed eyes, he wants in so badly. Before he disappears altogether I see him outside the school now and again like he has nowhere else to go, and I wonder how come he is out and not me?

  The gown I’m wearing is white and slim with a green sash at the waist, and when I look up from the seamstress fussing around the hem I am shocked at the Sonias staring back at me from a three-way mirror because they are beautiful; I’m embarrassed to feel that way about myself. My hair cascades down and I am surprised at how grown up I look, though I’m not yet, really—only fifteen. At eighteen my cousin Carmen is the real woman ready to be married, and through the whole preparation for the wedding I feel that I have my nose pressed up against the future that I hope will be mine. We have been getting ready every weekend for the past month. Ma is in the lead for three reasons: She is the maid of honor, she can navigate around the Italian dress shop ladies because these are the kind of women she works with, and she’s the only one who drives. Uncle Eddie has some big part in it as well. I am a bridesmaid along with whatever friends Carmen has left who haven’t been “wronged” yet.

  On the wedding day we all dress in Carmen’s house on Elder Avenue. It’s crammed with so much Italian-style mirrors and plastic-covered furniture I think there must be a water fountain with cement babies spouting water somewhere in the kitchen. Carmen insists we all wear a beehive hairdo or big fat curls piled on top of our heads and has asked a few of her friends to come over and beat and tease our hair into shape. I hate my hairdo, remembering how much better I looked with it falling down around my shoulders, and it makes me feel even more self-conscious when I meet my wedding partner. But no matter—all the bridesmaids’ partners are in their twenties and interested in the older girls. Carmen is demure and shy and sacrificial and I study her so I can be the same way when it’s my turn to get married.

  It’s the perfect wedding. No basement Puerto Rican social club serving rice and beans and greasy pork shoulders with green bananas for us—we go to Sorrento’s, the fancy Italian party rental space that serves chicken in white sauce. Knowing my partner thinks I’m a kid, I decide to make my partner laugh by speaking with an exaggerated Puerto Rican accent.

  “Joo like eet een dees place?” I think I’m hilarious, but Ma shoots me a look that tells me to knock it off, so I watch my uncles’ suspicious looks at the chicken dish served floating around milky white sauce, as pure as Carmen herself. I know she is untouched because she passed Manny’s virgin test.

  “How did you test her?” I had asked.

  “Well, I tried to have sex with her—telling her that we might as well—after all, we were getting married.”

  “And what happened?”

  “She hit me.”

  “She hit you!”

  “Well, yeah—not hard but still a slap—that’s when I knew she was the woman for me.”

  “What if she had gone ‘all the way’?” I remembered that term from True Confessions magazines.

  He looks at me like the answer is so obvious he can’t believe I’m asking.

  “What do you think? I wouldn’t have married her.”

  Six months later I am standing on the landing of a semiattached house at the edge of the earth. There are wild animal sounds and huge birds I come to know as egrets flying all around. Somehow my mother has managed to put a down payment on a brand-new home in a new development in the upper Bronx. It’s so in the middle of nowhere you have to take two buses, a train, and then walk an additional five blocks to get to it.

  The house has stairs leading up to three bedrooms, just like houses on television that actresses sweep down on! I feel like I’m making a grand entrance each time I go to the kitchen downstairs. My parents take the largest room, my brothers share another, and I get my own. No more sharing rooms with brothers I don’t like that much. Privacy at last. I don’t know how Ma did it, but she was probably inspired by Uncles Eddie and Frank, who had already moved up in the world by buying houses. The day we move in Bon Bon sprinkles sugar in all the kitchen cabinets and drawers for good luck.

  But something goes wrong with us almost immediately. Right after dinner, on the very day we move in, when Ma wants to sit and enjoy her stupendous accomplishment, my father dresses to go out.

  “Where are you going?” Ma asks.

  “I’ll be back soon,” he answers.

  And the look on her face is so full of disappointment I have to look away, to give her privacy. Later she sits outside on the tiny cement landing and stares at the sky, looking for answers, and I am bewildered as well that a house didn’t make us live happily ever after. The next day the kitchen drawers and cabinets are crawling with ants eating Bon Bon’s good-luck sugar sprinkling.

  Ma gets rid of the ants in time for my sweet sixteenth birthday. I ask some old friends from Southern Boulevard, and some new ones from Performing Arts. The morning of the party I set my hair in curlers and polish my nails. When my nails and hair are perfectly done, I put on my bridesmaid gown from Carmen’s wedding and sweep down the stairs to greet my uncle Eddie, who gives me a hug, a kiss, and sixteen roses before going into the kitchen to drink coffee with Ma. As I wait for guests to arrive, I work on my señorita performance of being the ripe prize the world is dying to pluck.

  I have never acted better. My smile radiantly shines through me as I look out the window into the distance. Not since Juliet waited for Romeo is waiting so beautifully done, and I sustain this performance even after hours have passed and it is clear to me that no one is coming. Not even Vanessa.

  I take off my dress and join Ma on the landing of our steps outside.

  “So, Vanessa, where the fuck were you?”

  It’s a week later and I’m standing just inside a storefront on West Farms Road, now made into a makeshift apartment. Vanessa doesn’t answer and I add, “What are you, a Gypsy?”

  Vanessa shoves me the way she used to but we don’t burst into laughter as quickly anymore—there is sourness behind her perfect cheeks. “Shhh …” she says, indicating her mother in the back room. The front windows are covered with black curtains. (I think the Gypsies used red.) There is a dresser inside the door and a double bed just a few steps in. Past that there is a kitchen and a cot. I wonder what happened to the white-and-gold Louis XIV furniture that was stuffed in the Southern Boulevard apartment. Her mother enters from the back with the biggest, meanest Mexican-looking dude I have ever seen, exactly like the pistoleros in the Mexican revolution movies Ma used to take me to. He has thick, wavy hair, a drooping mustache, and wears burgundy cowboy boots with red stitching! I look at Vanessa’s blank face.

  “You like it?” says her mother, Irena, sprinkling perfume on her soft black coat tossed on the bed. She is getting ready to step out with her man, who impatiently eyes us.

  “Take care, Mama,” says her mother, kissing Vanessa on the lips. Vanessa’s mother calls her “Mama,” which I have always thought is weird. Then, carelessly tossing on her big coat and latching on to her big man’s arm, she steps out the door. Vanessa smiles at me weakly and I feel sorry that she is to be left alone in a store, like something for sale.

  But maybe Vanessa wasn’t alone too much, because weeks later she joins my sister, her husband, and me for dinner at the house. Ma is stirring the pot when Vanessa drops the bomb!

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant …”

  My sister, Bill, and Ma turn their eyes inward and don’t register me no matter how hard I look from one to the other. The blood rushing through my ears cancels out all other noises, but then Vanessa doesn’t say much more and just sits there like this is all happening to someone else. I think about all the plans we made. “I thought we were getting an apartment,” I s
ay weakly. She still doesn’t respond.

  Ma gets up and refills our water glasses. My sister cuts into her plantain. Bill seems interested, but only as an audience member, not as a participant.

  “There’s ways to get out of this,” I insist. “You really want to be like my cousin Sue, always having to have someone help you out because you have lots of kids and no money?” And then I immediately think of Carmen and recent images of her ratchet into focus. Pregnant now but who really, I suddenly realize, reminds me of a beautiful bird in a cage looking dazed and disengaged. I turn to my mother for some explanation of this horror but she just gets up again, as if nothing unusual is happening.

  “More rice?” she asks the group.

  “I’ll take some more,” says my sister.

  Why are they talking about rice? We have to figure a way out of this. This is important. I launch into a monologue.

  “Vanessa, it doesn’t have to go that way! You’re just a kid! You can end this pregnancy. It’s the sixties! We are free now.” But every argument I throw glances off her expressionless face and disappears into the ozone as she vanishes from within and resignation takes over.

  Later, after everyone else has left and Ma has gone out to sit on the cement landing to interpret the sky, I start to hyperventilate. I cannot believe Vanessa would do this! And right then and there I think, Fuck this, I am out of here. I will go, go, go as far away as I can from this place where nothing changes.

  I sit in class antsy and bored.

  “Ask me my name, ask me my name,” the senior acting teacher demands.

  “What’s your name?” a game student complies.

  The teacher states his name, then asks emphatically, “Was I being dismissive, loving, or contradictory?”

  “Dismissive,” the student offers.

  “No, that was loving, loving, loving! I was being loving! Try again, ask me my name.”

  Oh, who cares, for Christ’s sake! I am tired of this relentless acting lesson of guessing games of emotions. And then, after forty minutes of this crap, I have to go play a Jewish maid in a play that takes place in a German girls’ boarding school! I think it’s funny that all the Jewish girls get to play the Christian German Fräuleins and I get to play their housekeeper.

  “That’s how we maintain social balance,” says the director cleverly.

  Lucky me.

  As a cleaning lady I have few lines so I entertain myself in rehearsal by making up a game—when given a command by the Fräuleins I open my mouth as if to answer then suddenly press my lips together as if I have changed my mind about answering or they have cut me off. It’s funny, and fooling around like that cracks me up every time. I even crack up my Chute Smoker friend until she gets tired of me breaking her concentration and deadpans me into stopping.

  Later in class, in a moment when the teacher has stepped out, I pan the room. Melvin is enraptured with a rich, beautiful, red-haired girl with a hook nose who is so perfectly happy with the way she looks I envy her. They thrill each other, recalling the lyrics to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—convinced the song is about LSD. A few seats from them is the lead girl in the German play. She is going through her lines and the order of the emotions on her face is so clear I know exactly which scene she is working on. I believe that she is the real actress in this bunch, and when a week later the director says that she must cry on cue and she delivers I know my suspicions are correct.

  And what about me? What did I do except find everything funny and chase boys I was sure I was smarter than? The teachers of Performing Arts will not recommend me to colleges because my grades are so low and I am too dull an actress, but they have gotten me a job doing clerical work at the American National Theater and Academy—maybe they are preparing me to be a secretary after all. But I won’t be a secretary. I’m going to college no matter what.

  I become like oozing, moving lava, sliding down a hill, finding and looking to fill every crevice of opportunity, expanding with all of me in every space available before moving on. I don’t think, I don’t read “how to” flyers and pamphlets on higher education, but I move mindlessly forward to find and fill niches that will hold me. The only possibility for me is to get into college by way of an audition—I will get the money somehow—I just know I will, for how can you stop the flow of things going their natural path? I pick schools in Long Island, Pittsburgh, and one so far upstate New York it’s close to Canada, and I walk into my boss’s office when I’m ready, to give her the chance to help me.

  “I have some … college … applications … and … they want …”

  “Recommendations? Sure, I’ll write one for you. No problem.”

  “Thank you …”

  “Will the school write you one as well?”

  “No … they …” I don’t think I should apologize. It’s not my fault I got a crummy education in the Bronx that caused me to be so far behind. So I am honest. “I have terrible grades, so PA won’t recommend me to any drama schools.”

  She takes a moment to think, and before she can change her mind about helping me I make a joke: “I don’t know how I could’ve been so smart in the Bronx and so dumb in Manhattan.”

  She laughs—I got her on my side. At home I pore over the applications and write the essays telling them all about myself. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement have shifted society to being on my side a little but now it is up to me to step up.

  The next thing I have to think about is what to audition with. Why not Street Scene? It worked before—why not again? I don’t examine it too closely because it might interrupt my moving forward. The day arrives and the auditions are held in a Midtown hotel conference room. I’m wearing a blue sweater that seems cheerful and a black skirt, stockings, and shoes to give me a serious-enough look. Entering the room, I see a few professors seated behind a long table and I focus on one in particular because he has such a precise, nicely organized face and a curious name—Jewel Walker. I take off my shoes to get down to it. Why? I’m not sure except taking off my shoes is like rolling up my sleeves and getting down to work.

  As expected, the monologue takes me to another place and I am so overcome with gummy tears I lose my sense of where I am and end up with my back to the professors auditioning me. Blinking rapidly to clear my vision, I find my shoes and put one on.

  “Come sit and talk to us …” says Jewel Walker.

  I turn and limp toward them.

  “… after you put on your other shoe.”

  Months later I’m filing at ANTA.

  “Sonia, step into my office a minute, will you?” My boss smiles coyly. I follow her as she waves me into a chair, picks up a letter from her desk, and teases me with it. “This concerns you, Sonia. Read it.”

  I do. It’s from the head of the Drama Department at Carnegie Mellon University thanking her for the letter of recommendation and saying the school is most happy to accept me. And not only that—they are prepared to give me a scholarship. I’m stunned.

  “Congratulations!” she chimes.

  I’m stunned.

  “It’s a great school.”

  I’m stunned.

  “Maybe you’ll even like Pittsburgh.”

  I’m stunned.

  “Would you like a glass of water … ?”

  Aurea was the first to finish high school in our bunch and now I am going to college.

  “Thank you, thank you …” I croak self-consciously.

  “Now, you are not to tell anyone because it’s not official yet. Except your family, of course,” she adds. “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon off? Go home and celebrate with them.”

  When I step out into the daylight I am concerned that my brightness, my glow, might blind some poor unsuspecting people walking up and down Broadway. But people do not stare at me in any way. Still—I find my image in a going-out-of-business store window and I think I do look different. Performing Arts will know soon enough, and I don’t want to gloat and
preen before them; my star aura is too bright for me to stoop so low. I forget about the Performing Arts teachers the minute I see Ma.

  “Ma, I got into college!”

  “You did!”

  “Yes!”

  “Which one?”

  “Carnegie Mellon.”

  “What kind of school is it?” she asks.

  “Carnegie Mellon University. I’m going for drama.”

  “Drama?”

  “Yeah, like acting.”

  “Wonderful. What will you learn?”

  “I don’t know! Theater stuff.”

  “Like singing?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Where is it?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “Pittsburgh! Why so far?”

  “Because they want me.”

  “But it’s so far!”

  “And they are going to give me a scholarship.”

  “A scholarship? ¿Una beca?”

  “Sí …”

  “How come?” Ma wants to know.

  I just grin at her.

  “Sonia …”

  “Huh?”

  “¿Qué estás pensando … ?”

  “What was I thinking? Oh, nothing … just that I’m happy!”

  “You go, go, and go, baby!”

  Take this bed,” Pops suggests, pointing to one near the window. “More fresh air.”

  Yay! After sticking my head out of the car for five hours, like a dog anxious to get somewhere, we have arrived at my new school in Pittsburgh. Ma and Pops have been in the front seat, stony and silent, and I am glad that Pittsburgh took so long to get to because that means I am really far away from them.

  My dorm is a brick building with big pink flowers landscaped all around a circular driveway. The lobby has soft, overstuffed, easy places to sit and talk that can’t muffle the undercurrent of excitement. I sign in, run up the stairs, and find my room with Ma and Pops trailing me. Ma bursts into tears the minute I close the door behind us and I ignore her. My father looks uncomfortable, either because of her tears or this fussy place he’s in—I can’t tell.