Becoming Maria

by Sonia Manzano

  Curtain calls are not set. Actors take them or not as they wish and I am so spent after each show I never take a bow. One night the beautiful fellow actress with the long red hair I have always envied calls me out about it in front of others. “It is the responsibility of a performer to take a curtain call!” she says.

  Devil anger on my shoulder sees this as an opportunity to awaken and thrive. Before I know it, it has dug its long, sharp claws into my back and is pushing me forward to attack. White flashbulbs explode in my head and I scream, “Fuck you, you tight-ass bitch!”

  “You just don’t know any better, and you are not professional!” she retorts.

  My head reels as I sputter, “Fuck you!”

  I am split and terrified that I can watch my horrible behavior, as if hovering above it all, yet cannot do anything to stop it. This new anger sticks to me like napalm and burns through my skin for days and days.

  Later, onstage, during a song she tries to smile at me and make up, but when I try to smile back, fresh anger pulls me down under. This simmering rage becomes my state of being. Even one of the producers picks up on it.

  “Would it kill you to smile?” he says to me on more than one occasion. I am even impatient when I am singled out to be interviewed, and when the newspaper reporter asks me if I ever feel in danger I answer sullenly, “Yeah, every time I go home for dinner.”

  When the show moves to a steady run in another theater it’s time for the cast to clear out of Robin’s house and get places of our own. I find a one-bedroom apartment on West Eighty-First Street. As I shop for Constant Comment tea and wheat germ and yogurt and Brie cheese and all the other new foods I was introduced to at Robin’s house I think of Vanessa and wonder what she is doing besides having had a baby girl, who I’m sure looked just like her, the way she looked just like her mother and grandmother. With them it’s like no man had anything to do with their existence, as if they were born from each other. Vanessa is probably doing to her daughter whatever her mother did to her. I don’t want to see that. My life, though only twenty minutes from the Bronx on the subway, seems centuries away. Still—this apartment would’ve been the perfect place for us and I can’t help feeling sorry it didn’t happen.

  One night after the show an agent leaves his card for me backstage. I call and go see him, not knowing what to expect. He’s a nice enough man who tells me I need résumé shots.

  “What’s that?” I ask him.

  “Standard actor’s pictures. Head shots.”

  He gives me the name of a photographer, and the night before the shoot I wonder who I should be in the picture. I’m sure my hair will tell the world who and what I am. If it’s natural I will be looked upon like a black person, if I straighten it I will be looked upon as a … what? I leave it natural and even forgo makeup on the day of the photo shoot, but all I end up looking like is a fourteen-year-old girl.

  That night, I watch a girl in the show who always had a vision of what she wanted. She did summer stock, and showcases, and all the rest, always having a goal she ran to. I never ran to anything—I only ran away from things—and now I am stopped short, looking around and trying to figure out how I got here.

  I give the photos to the agent but hope he never calls, but he does and I go on auditions, which I begin to hate more than anything. It’s impossible for me to do at an audition what I do on the stage at night.

  Producers and directors often want me to have a Puerto Rican accent, and though I can do it with my family it embarrasses me to do it in public. Or, I go up for parts of smart-talking black girls when real smart-talking black girls are much better at it than me. Why can’t I just be myself? Besides, is this what I want? To run around in front of people, thinking, Pick me, pick me, so I can feel bad when they don’t pick me even though I’m not sure I want to be picked in the first place? I don’t know what to do. What have I gotten myself into? Months pass and I never get the jobs and feel I have let the agent down.

  Then it’s Christmas again and I busy myself with decorating my tree in my new apartment, but I get a yen for seeing all the decorations I made stories about long ago in the Bronx, so I go home for Christmas Eve. My sister and her husband, Bill, come, too. We eat and when it starts to get late and my father isn’t home yet we wait for the violence, then are inexplicably surprised when it happens. Pops comes home like he’s fallen to earth from another planet. His clothes are dirty because he went straight to drinking from working, and when his eyes don’t focus I know he does not recognize us—again.

  Swiftly, he runs into the kitchen, spewing incoherent words of hate about something that possibly happened twenty or so years ago when he and Ma lived on First Avenue. Finding his target, my mother, he manages to rip the phone off the wall and strike her on the head with it.

  We subdue him somehow … maybe Bill does, but I snap to a halt and it occurs to me that in all the years of living through this I’ve never understood what he is hating about. With that thought I separate from the group and feel like I’m floating above them, in the same way I imagined my mother’s mother, Encarnación Falcon, floating above her dead children in 1926 Puerto Rico. I look down on my family, thinking, This will not go on anymore. I am not a kid, I’m twenty years old, I’ve been to college, and I’ve got a job in a real off-Broadway show that people pay real money to see. I have even been mentioned in the newspaper. This cannot go on. I trudge up five blocks through the snow to find a pay phone and call the police, then trudge back to wait for them, not being sure of what they’ll do but sure that if I don’t do something I will lose my mother—if not that day, then on some other day when I am not there to protect her, because eventually one of his blows will hit her in exactly the spot that will end her life and the next day he won’t even know what happened. Of this I am sure.

  The police come as Joe and Petey and I gather the Christmas presents and call a cab that will take us all to my apartment in Manhattan. There we sit and sourly open our presents on that sorry Christmas night. “Merry Christmas” we say to each other but our words are hollow, and I continually look at my mother and wonder about her. How can we share jokes and songs and stories and gossip and she not see that violence has been the driving force behind every decision we have ever made? How can I cherish the approval and warm hands on my face of someone who has let our situation go so far down the road to badness? I see her whole person but with a deep black hole in her center I cannot understand.

  The Godspell people are the only ones I know to turn to. I know there are lawyers involved in show business and my mother needs one.

  “We are not the kind of lawyers that your mother needs,” they tell me carefully. “We do show business law.”

  “What’s the difference?” A lawyer is a lawyer, I think.

  “She needs a divorce lawyer. We can find one for you.”

  They find me a divorce lawyer and I am like a crusader, a woman with a mission, one single force driving me—the separation of my parents. The only time I veer off my goal is when I am onstage at night. There I am someone else with all the power in the world and I reign supreme. But off the stage I push my mother. My father won’t vacate the house so I push my mother and brothers to find an apartment. They locate one in an unwelcoming Italian neighborhood. “Only for a while, Ma,” I tell her. “The judge will give you the house.” I ignore that she looks awful, even worse than when she was struck by Pops. His blows mar and hurt her skin and bones; the pain she has now radiates from her insides, blinding me. I push away any thoughts that I have caused this pain, but a part of me doesn’t understand why she isn’t elated. Happy. Like those women on the Queen for a Day television show when they get a washer/dryer, happy that their years of misery have paid off. Even as she continues to be immobile, numbed into robotic, passive submission, I push forward my plan to save her.

  “I don’t think your mother wants to go through with this,” the lawyer confides in me, but the words bounce off like water on a new raincoat. I cannot stop myself a
ny more than I can stop an avalanche or a bullet with my hand. This is my mission—if not, what did any of it mean? Living happily ever after is always the correct ending.

  In court my mother and father sit apart, each with their respective lawyers, but I feel like the odd man out, that they are a team against me!

  “With the telephone … ?” the judge asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “He hit her with the telephone.” My testimony is short and quick, and I feel so much like the little girl I was sitting in the big chair at my father’s boss’s house so long ago I have to remind myself that I am not little anymore. Still, suddenly I look down at my clothes. My God, did I forget to take off my Godspell costume? Am I wearing a clown outfit in court? No! I’m not—I am wearing the proper clothes of a grown-up person and I find comfort in that fact as the judge pronounces my parents divorced. That’s when I see my father stumble like he’s been hit hard, and I think I see my mother’s heart go out to him.

  “Ma, we did it!” I say when it’s over outside the courtroom. But she looks away from me, not happy and grateful like I thought she’d be. Months pass and she does nothing to retain the wetlands house, and my brothers get beat up by the Italian kids in the neighborhood they now live in, though I push and push and push, through the rest of the winter and into the spring.

  That June I am in a photo shoot for the New York Times newspaper. I pose with my finger cymbals. The Sunday after, there is an article about up-and-coming Broadway stars and I am one of them—I think I am happy but honestly don’t know how important or serious it is. What can I compare it to? Is it as important as Ma’s divorce or her safety or the loss of her house … ? I push …

  “You’ll go to court and get the house you’ve worked so hard for, Ma.”

  But months pass and my mother and brothers continue to live in a rental while my father occupies the house, so I visit and try to push him. I find it strange that he is not angry with me.

  “What the hell—life happens,” he says.

  “You have to move out, Pops, so Ma can live here. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I am not going to move.”

  “Then sell it and split the money. If you don’t the judge will sell it for you for less than what it’s worth—”

  He cuts me off. “Look,” he says. “I don’t care about the house. I never cared about the house. That was your mother’s thing, your mother wanting to do whatever she wanted.”

  I am ashamed that he is petty and won’t do the manly thing that I am sure my uncle Eddie or uncle Frank would do in the same situation. But I push for a decent and good solution even as spring drags into summer.

  When I don’t push I do the show at night, hope I don’t have any auditions, and fool around decorating my apartment. Now, I’ve decided to draw a roundabout arrow on a wall that will eventually point to a light switch. The arrow will come up from nowhere on the floor and turn in on itself until it finds its destination. Taking a break, I make myself a cup of Constant Comment as a reminder of my new life and the control I have over it, when the phone rings. It is my uncle Félix in Puerto Rico. He talks of going on a Disney Cruise and somehow ending up in New York for a short visit. We laugh as we struggle with our languages until talk of vacations makes him mention that my parents recently found time to vacation together in Puerto Rico.

  I am knocked solid.

  “¿Qué pasa?” he asks.

  I try to answer but the swig of tea I have just taken shoots out of my nose.

  “Nada,” I gasp, choking and coughing. “Nothing … something just went down wrong … I’ll be okay in a momento.” In that momento all the anxiety that I’ve been trying to contain for months bursts out in a laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” asks my uncle in Spanish.

  “Nothing,” I gasp. But I really mean everything. Everything is funny. It’s just all too funny for me. I say my good-byes, hang up the phone, and look at the pointless arrow on my wall, and suddenly the fact that it’s perfect and hell-bent on going nowhere really makes me laugh; and I laugh because of what I am finally sure about.

  That I know nothing, nothing, nothing.

  What do I love? What do I love? I must get back to something I love outside of myself or drown, so I go to Clark Center and take a 10:00 a.m. acrobatics class, an 11:00 a.m. jazz class, a 1:00 p.m. ballet class, every day before doing the show at night. Keep moving, keep moving, a moving target is harder to hit, I tell myself. And in all this hiding in plain sight I get a message from my answering service to call my agent and I cringe. What now? How come the agent hasn’t figured out that I know nothing? Doesn’t he feel disappointed that I never get any of the jobs he sends me up for? Can’t he tell I don’t understand a thing? Apparently not, because he wants me to audition for Sesame Street.

  The green-and-white empire-waist dress I decide on wearing is comfortable and fits me perfectly. I love it because Ma made it for me from some material sent to her from Puerto Rico. Cheap Indian sandals reveal big toes I decide to show off as an act of defiance. My hair is natural and long because I don’t care what people think I am.

  I go to the Children’s Television Workshop on Broadway and Sixty-Third Street, where I am to meet Sesame Street’s executive producer, Jon Stone. My big feet enter the room before I do. It’s just him in his office, no conference room with chairs pushed against the wall.

  He is a big man with curly white hair and a beard with a pencil stuck through it. Very friendly with cherubic lips, but I can’t help seeing a storm brewing behind his eyes and brow.

  There is a board with a black circle, a circle with stripes on it, a black square, and a square with stripes on it. After we chat he asks me to make believe he is a four-year-old, and that I should explain which two items on the board are the same. I realize there are two right answers and we laugh about that, and I like that things aren’t cut-and-dried, and I notice he has several wayward, wiry, rogue eyebrow hairs sticking out.

  Then he asks me to tell a scary story, once again to him, as if he were a little kid. Without thinking I quickly and immediately go back to Third Avenue where I was most scared. The dream or experience I had with the periscope with a big eye watching, stalking my every move and breathing down my neck, jumps into my mind.

  “Once upon a time in the olden days there lived a little girl who lived alone in a woods full of goblins and fairies and monsters,” I begin. “She had to hunt for her food every day and one day out hunting she felt something watching her. She turned around but couldn’t see what it was, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of long hairs sweeping along her neck. It made her feel so creepy and nervous she couldn’t catch a thing to eat. I mean—who could hunt in a situation like that? This went on for days until she got very hungry.”

  Jon Stone looks amused but would still like me to get on with it.

  “Finally she had had enough and she yelled, ‘Why don’t you come out and look me in the eye?’ And it did. It was a big, ugly eye that had been watching her all the time! It was huge and bloodshot and had long sticky eyelashes that practically swept across the back of her neck. It scared her so much she ran, and ran, but the eye got closer and closer. Finally it got so close the little girl had no choice but to face it. She had no weapons, so she decided to bite it.”

  I wait for a reaction from Jon. His bushy eyebrows flicker for one instant. I go on.

  “Once she had done that she figured, what the hell, I might as well eat it. I’m hungry anyway. She did, and it was disgusting. Crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside—like eating a soft-boiled egg with the shell on! Yuck!”

  This makes Jon smile. I am encouraged and continue.

  “But she was brave and sucked it up anyway. She walked back to her cave feeling sick to her stomach. But she was glad she ate the eye even though it tasted lousy and made her want to throw up.”

  For one second I don’t know where this story is going—but I plunge on.

  “And the next day, when she woke up, she not
iced something funny had happed. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Not only that—the sky was really blue, and the sun was clear and bright, and the flowers prettier. So eating the eye not only made her not afraid and filled her tummy, it also made her see things better. The End.”

  He looks pleased. I am glad to have found a use for that story. I think I wouldn’t mind auditioning for things if I could always make up my own material. Who wouldn’t? Jon looks at me for a moment, we say good-bye, and he sends me on my way.

  That’s it? I think as I get on the elevator. Then I go home, because there is nothing else to do but wait for the next thing to happen.

  It “takes a village” to make a book, so let me thank my agent, Jennifer Lyons, for her unwavering support and enthusiasm in finding the right publisher, and Andrea Davis Pinkney, my editor at Scholastic, for her encouragement and vision and for allowing me to write freely while guiding me through the process.

  Gracias to copy editor Monique Vescia for smoothing the words, and to Elizabeth Parisi for creatively presenting the best visual introduction to the book possible.

  I’ve changed the names of my friends to protect their privacy. However, any names of Godspell cast mentioned in this memoir are their own, as are the names of my relatives and siblings. A special thanks goes out to my siblings for willingly traveling to the past with me. Thanks to my daughter, Gabriela Rose Reagan, for her sweet, supportive presence. And finally, an extra-special thanks goes to my husband, Richard Reagan, for patiently listening, critiquing, and graciously giving feedback for each and every draft.

  Memories can be both elusive and concrete. When I look at early footage of myself on television, I sometimes cannot remember taping the segments, but I do remember what I think is more important: what my feelings were at that time in my life—if I was angry, happy, or sad, in or out of love.