They cannot leave soon enough to suit me. I want to be rid of them both, quickly, so I can redefine myself in this place, so after a five-hour trip I hustle them out of the room and into their car as fast as possible. “Bye … I’ll call you … Bye …” As soon as they are out of sight I run back to make myself over in this brand-new world. If I’m really quick and clever I can become whoever I want. Who should I be? I have already been the garter-wearing Kitty from Gunsmoke girl, and the sari-wearing East Indian girl, and the solemn intellectual beatnik. What to be now?
I go for the Native American counter-culture look, putting my hair in two long braids, wearing a headband, a sandalwood necklace, and a denim shirt. My new roommate comes in at the middle of my transformation. She is tall, with long, wispy hair a non-color I can’t describe. She looks just like all the loafer, kneesock, pleated skirt, and soft-sweater-wearing college girls I’ve seen in magazines. She holds her hand out and murmurs something I can’t hear so I lean in. “Huh?”
She whispers again and I just make it out. “Hello, I’m Sharon. I’m from Columbus, Ohio.” Her voice is whispery but I can feel her excitement through her handshake.
“Hi. I’m Sonia from New York City.” Sharon’s parents come in with boxes of books.
“Hello,” they say.
I’m polite and I go through the motions but I can’t take my eyes off the books. What are they? Why bring them to school? This is college—don’t they have books here already? Has she read them? Will she read them? They unpack and I really don’t know what to do so I’m glad when they are done.
“We’ll wait downstairs,” her parents say.
Sharon smiles at me before following them out the door. “Well, I guess I’ll go and walk around with them … They want to see me in this great institution of learning …”
All of a sudden I want my folks and rush to the window hoping to catch them before they drive away. Don’t I want them to see me in this great institution of learning, too? But they are gone and I am left wondering.
After one last look in the mirror I go off by myself to see the campus, looking like Pocahontas.
Outside I catch the eye of a very cute blond boy on my way to the drama building, who grins at me. My God, it’s one of the Beach Boys, I think. I check out the drama building, and when I come out—he’s there, still grinning! I have never met a boy so silly and grinning and bold.
“Hey …” he says.
“Hey …” I say and before the week is over we begin to hang out together all the time, sitting on the school lawn or tossing a Frisbee. He is in a fraternity and wears plaid shirts and loafers. Ha! I’m living the coed life immediately, my old life behind me shed like old skin. This is going to be a piece of cake, I think smugly.
But when a week later the teacher who auditioned me, Jewel Walker, invites me over to his house one Sunday for brunch, I am suspicious. Why me? I don’t know him. When I get there it’s not just me, it’s some other kids as well, a blond boy and another girl. We all look at each other and I quickly check them out to see what we have in common, but this isn’t the ethnic club or the loser club; we have nothing in common except being in the drama department. Walker serves us oatmeal and bacon! Oatmeal and bacon? What a crazy combination. I eat and wait for a trap to spring.
There is no trap, but when I act, or sing, or even write in class I feel like I am in a hall of mirrors with the ground shifting around under me, not knowing if I’m good or bad, being laughed at or not. Then we are introduced to a big-deal visiting professor.
“What’s my name? What’s my name?” he asks. It’s the same teacher I had in high school. Have I come very far at all?
I am a little girl again, and my whole family is sitting around the kitchen table laughing and telling jokes about being really poor in Puerto Rico.
“The baby fell through a hole right in the house … !” cackles Aunt Iris. “The river of shit just floated her away …”
Everybody laughs.
“And she hadn’t eaten in a week,” adds Uncle Frank.
This last crack makes everybody double over. I feel nervous and edgy. How is this funny? Then my father, wearing huge, funny-looking boxer shorts, calmly and serenely gets up and goes over to the oven, from which he retrieves a gleaming, hot knife. He sits back down and begins to slice up the thickest part of his thigh. The blood oozing out makes everyone, Uncle Eddie and Uncle Frank and their wives, laugh even harder. I am mesmerized by the color of the blood and how it drips, drips in big drops onto the black-and-white-checkered kitchen floor, when I hear a breathy, whispery voice say, “… Sooonnnia.”
“Whaaa—?”
“Phone for you.”
I wake up, suddenly gasping for air and relieved to see that I am in bed wearing pajamas and in my dorm room and I am eighteen years old and not a little girl in a dream in a Bronx kitchen. Sharon’s face comes into focus.
“Phone for you,” she repeats.
I look at the clock and see that it’s 2:00 a.m., and I stumble out into the brightly lit hallway. Though we’ve all been in school for months, the girls in the dorm still stay up all night, laughing, talking, doing their nails, and setting their hair. My father is on the line, snarling drunk, complaining about something. I am surprised he is able to dial me and even more shocked that he thought I could help him with whatever was bothering him so many miles away.
“Pops,” I say.
He launches into a tirade about something.
“But …” He doesn’t hear me and goes on. I lean my head against the wall, and place the receiver on my lap until I hear a pause in his monologue that I might be able to break into and say something, but there is no break and I listen until he starts losing steam. I put the phone to my ear.
“Pops!”
“Huh.”
“Listen, are you home … ?”
“¿Qué?”
“Go to sleep, wherever you are.”
He mumbles something and then I hear a click. He’s off the phone. Hanging up, I stagger back to bed and hope that I can fall asleep for a long time, and when I finally do a girl’s squeal makes me bolt upright on the alert for danger and ready to fight. I stay up and wait for daylight to catch up with me.
Sleepwalking that morning into voice-and-diction class, I sit in the back of the room and watch Sharon recite a Shakespearean sonnet while trying to control her breathy voice.
“ ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day …’ ” she whispers.
“My dear,” drawls the teacher. “You must connect with your inner core … your …”
Sharon stops, shakes her head slightly, and heads out of the class, eyes brimming. I feel bad for her. Back in the room she sits on her bed reading and I wonder what it is, and if it will make her feel better.
“I hate that class, too,” I say.
Sharon whispers a self-conscious laugh. “No matter what I do … I can’t seem to please that professor …”
“Who wants to talk like that anyway?” I add. For a moment she and I have things in common. “Thanks for getting me up for the phone last night.”
She closes the book after carefully putting in a bookmark. “You’re welcome,” she whispers. “I was up. You are always talking in your sleep,” she adds carefully. “What do you dream?”
The atmosphere in the room grows still. We haven’t really been friendly, but why not at least talk? So I laugh and decide to tell her my dream about my father slicing up his thigh. Her look of spellbound consternation when she hears it makes me want to tell her more—so I tell her the one about my head being a page on a calendar. I even tell her the dream I had when I was a kid and was sure a periscope with the eye was chasing me, whether it was a dream or just something I had made up.
“Oh … oh … oh …” is all she can say.
I know she’s never met anyone like me, same as I’ve never met anyone like her—but at least I was aware that people like her existed (in magazines, anyway). Suddenly I want her to see me, and I tell
her about the pharmacist who tried to seduce me by offering me free crayons, of my sister trying to take me to the police station after my father beat me, and about Cousin Eddie’s mom digging for gold in her Brooklyn basement.
“Gold … ? In the basement … ?”
No memory is too traumatic, personal, or stupid to relate, and I never feel ashamed or angry while telling them because they become stories that happened to someone else. I even embroider them.
“She did find something interesting.”
“What?”
“Some ancient-looking Hebrew books. Could’ve been worth a fortune. But she burned them.”
“Why?”
“Fear of spirits …”
I continue telling her my stories and meanly enjoy shocking her out of the safety and predictability of her world. There must be some good and sweet stories for me to tell as well, but I cannot think of them.
Eventually I find solid ground in Jewel Walker’s movement class, where we mime walking miles by standing in one place, or are pulled by dogs that aren’t there, or scale walls where there is no wall. I hold on to these lessons as a reason to stay in school and they help me get through visits home.
It’s Christmas Eve by the wetlands. Ma and I wait for the phone to ring to see what’s doing—but it doesn’t. We have never had to wait by the phone before. Relatives and friends would just appear, as if they snatched a message to show up out of the air. The family is too spread out to have Christmases like we used to. Uncle Eddie is in another part of the Bronx. Uncle Frank and Iris are completely involved with Carmen (relieved to have done her duty) and Manny, who have two children now, a boy and a girl. Another reason we don’t parranda around from house to house singing aguinaldos anymore is that it’s hard to drag around the amplifiers my father now insists on using.
My brothers have made friends with neighborhood boys so they have gone to prowl the swamp in front of us. The plastic Christmas tree we now put up chimes Christmas carols. Ma checks on the pernil—and sings along with the tree: “We three kings of Orient are …” Even the pork shoulder in the oven looks lonely. The singing tree gets on my nerves and I unplug it.
“¿Qué pasa?” says Ma from the kitchen. “No Christmas spirit? It ain’t like the old days, is it?”
She’s right. I want the old days. Besides, I can sing one aguinaldo now—maybe I could’ve sung with my uncles …
“Take this bread pudding to Maya.” She hands me the bread pudding and I take it down the block to our crazy Cuban neighbor. As I approach I hear her yelling to her son, “¡Tú eres un drogadicto!” So I’m quick with my delivery; I’ve heard her call her son a junkie before.
“Felicidades,” I say, leaving it right on the coffee table nearest the door.
On my way back home I see my father coming toward me. From the lilt in his posture I can tell he’s had a few—but what the hell, it’s Christmas.
“Hey, Pops,” I say cheerfully. “Ready for Christmas?”
He focuses for a moment, then flares up like a hot coal in a sudden wind.
“Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?”
What? Huh?
My eyes burn and I walk past him and into the house. He follows me and I think if I had delivered the rice pudding just ten minutes before or after I would’ve avoided him but I didn’t and he corners me at the kitchen, yelling and screaming about who should’ve done this or that. There is a box of Cheerios on the table, and looking at the image of a bowl of cereal I imagine myself swimming in the milk, cavorting with a Cheerio as if it were an inner tube. Only my father’s spittle spraying on my face brings me back to reality, and I decide to look him right in the eye, frankly, the way a baby might look at you with an open and direct gaze when they see you on the train or bus. It seems to dissipate the projectile of his anger and I am happy that I have been able to disarm him. When he looks away I feel I have been set free and go on up to my room, but I don’t feel like I’ve won anything. I only feel that I am so tired of this shit and I count the days until I can go back to school.
Sonia can play that part!” a director announces. “It’ll be hilarious!”
I’m cast as the personification of Peace in a production of the ancient Greek antiwar play Lysistrata. Representing Peace as a half-naked stripper I wear a feathered helmet, leaf pasties, sandals, and am directed to bump and grind around the outer lip of a raked stage, then pose triumphantly upon reaching its pinnacle. Somebody gives me the great idea to oil my body. On opening night I bump and grind like I did at rehearsal, but when I get to my triumphant pose my legs start to tremble! What the hell … ! I sheepishly make it offstage after the curtain call.
“Oh my God!” screams one of the students with a real part as she looks down at a stain on her costume.
“What’s this stain?” she continues to yell, staring down at her breast.
“It’s everywhere!” screams someone else. A domino effect of tension ripples through the actors as they look down at their costumes in horror, making this more of a drama than anything that had just happened onstage.
“Oh my God! My gown is chiffon! It’s ruined!”
“My helmet is stained!”
“My armor has a smudge on it!”
“My tunic is fucked!”
“Where did this shit come from?”
Then they all stare at me.
“You … !”
“That oil!”
“It’s ruining everything!”
“Jesus Christ …” somebody mutters, “how irresponsible!”
I have left an oil stain on every person I brushed against. Though the comments are about me they direct them to each other and I feel myself getting hot and angry, unable to find an opening, a moment of silence, in which to defend myself. They do not feel my side of the story is even worth considering, and I feel dismissed and swatted away like so much nothing as they flounce into their dressing areas, I am sure, poisonously murmuring about me.
The next day I am called into the head of the Drama Department’s office. Is he going to criticize me for wearing oil, too?
“Sonia, you must get over your nervousness onstage.”
“My nervousness … ?”
“You were so nervous you were trembling.”
Nervous? It wasn’t my nerves … it was my muscles. Didn’t he get that?
“By the time you got to your final position the boat had sailed!”
The boat had sailed … ? What boat? Oh my God, was there a reference to a boat in the play that I had missed? Wait a minute—wait a minute—a boat sailing away sounds like a good thing. Is he saying I did something good?
Jewel Walker casts me as Cherie, a sorry chanteuse in the play Bus Stop, and when Cherie sings “That Old Black Magic,” Walker laughs so hard he must lie down across the theater seats, and I am thrilled to have had that effect on him. But the day he shows us a Charlie Chaplin movie is a day of complete clarity for me. That little silent-movie guy arrests me! Yes, he does. My God, he plays a poor little Jew in Nazi Germany! Is this supposed to be funny? It is! It’s hilarious even as I worry what the Gestapo will do to the little barber. I even laugh when he plays Hitler himself! The movie is over, but I get it, and I want to understand more, and I become obsessed with the Little Tramp and the things he can physically do. I get up early and go to the movement studio to practice jumps, walking into walls, spins, tumbles, and pratfalls. Isolating my head from my chest, from my midsection, from my ass becomes a full-time job. I even practice floating my head imperceptibly on my neck. Wearing baggy pants I practically wish I could grow a mustache. I get a book on Chaplin and am buoyed by the fact that his childhood was even more miserable and poverty-stricken than my ma’s, even worse maybe because he had to struggle in cold weather.
Back home that summer, floating on my discovery of Chaplin, I go see about a job. It’s as a go-go dancer in the meatpacking district on Fourteenth Street on the Lower West Side, but that’s not what I tell Ma. Since the hours are noo
n to four I get away with telling her I’m going for a job as a waitress.
Grabbing my Chaplin book, I show up at 11:00 a.m. The bar is long and dark with just a few patrons ogling a girl who is already dancing on the small platform. Right away I know I have brought the wrong clothes to dance in—she is wearing pasties and a sparkly bikini bottom; I’m wearing dance tights under my bell-bottom jeans. I look at her more closely. Her skin is pale, her hair is red and fluffy, but there is something wrong with her face. It takes me a moment to realize what it is—she’s missing some teeth. The bartender tells me that I am to dance for twenty minutes at a time. When it’s my turn, I take my pants off, neatly fold them, and put them at the edge of the stage, along with my Indian macramé bag and my biography of Charlie Chaplin, and I get up on the stage and wait for the music to begin. It doesn’t.
“Ya gotta play your own music, sista,” yells the bartender.
I get off the stage, expecting him to give me a few quarters.
“And ya gotta use your own money,” he adds.
I pull a dollar out of my bag, exchange it for quarters, and then select some songs on the jukebox. At this point there are four or five butchers wearing bloody white aprons at the bar eating roast beef sandwiches. I dance for twenty minutes, imagining myself as Chaplin in The Rink and trying to come as close to the edge of the stage as possible without looking down at my feet. When my time is up I gather my things and head for the bathroom because I can’t wait to get back to my Chaplin book. But I’m just getting settled when there is a knock on the door.
“Hey, you can’t just sit in here on your break!”
It’s the bartender.
“You have to sit at the bar!”
Huh? Well, okay—I think.
Becoming Maria Page 19
