Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (25 page)

Luigi and La Muda couldn't live together, but neither could they live apart. They separated, reunited, separated again, came together
in teary reunions when he'd just happen to drop in during a family gathering. La Muda, Mami, and Tata had long conversations that we were not allowed to watch. I managed to need something from the kitchen whenever La Muda visited, and since I was
casi mujer,
Mami didn't shoo me off as she did my younger sisters. During one of her visits, La Muda swatted the side of her face, which seemed to mean that Luigi hit her. It was hard to believe that such a quiet, gentle man would hit anyone, least of all the woman he loved. But it was even harder to believe that La Muda would lie about something like that.

A few days later, he came to see us, his sad figure stooped inside his suit as if he'd shrunk and his clothes had grown around him. He had decided to return to Puerto Rico. We begged him not to go, but he said he couldn't stand the cold any more.

“Look at my hands,” he moaned. The bumps on his knuckles were huge, the fingers curled over one another into loose fists. I looked away.

He walked back to the train station, his steps a painful shuffle down the street. He'd aged so much in five years that it was hard to imagine he'd been young, had performed card tricks, had been vibrant La Muda's lover. I sensed we'd never see him again, and less than a month later, we learned he was dead. It wasn't clear what killed him. Arthritis, someone said. He died in excruciating pain under the warm Puerto Rican sun. Someone else whispered that Luigi was so in love with La Muda that, unable to live without her, he had committed suicide. He had drunk himself to death, went a third theory, less believable because we'd never seen him drunk. We never knew. He simply disappeared from our lives, consumed by pain, grief, or liquor, a memory of pale graceful fingers scattering magic into the air.

The spring of my senior year of high school brought daily updates from my classmates on acceptances to colleges they had applied
to and I hadn't. Mrs. Provet, Dr. Dycke, and the school guidance counselor encouraged me to continue my education.

“I can't afford to go to college,” I said to them. “I need a job so I can help my mother.”

“Maybe you can work part-time,” Dr. Dycke suggested.

“Most colleges have work-study programs,” Mrs. Provet added.

But I wasn't interested in college just yet. I wanted to be out in the world, to earn my own living, to help Mami, yes, but also to stop depending on her for my every need.

Mr. Murphy offered me full-time work in his lab in Brooklyn, but I'd already decided to seek work in Manhattan, in one of the gleaming new office towers that sprouted from the ground like defiant, austere fortresses. The only problem was that I had no skills to bring to a business.

Performing Arts offered a typing course, designed to teach us a practical skill should our talents not be recognized the minute we graduated. I sat in the front row of the classroom, feet flat on the floor, back straight, head up, eyes focused ahead, fingers poised over the keyboard, as Mrs. Barnes called out the letters we were to press without looking.

“Capital
T
, lowercase
r
, capital
J
, lowercase
m
, Shift Lock,
H P S V
, semicolon.”

Each keystroke was a nail that hammered my future onto a rubber platen. If not an actress, a secretary. If not a dancer, a secretary. If not a secretary, what?

Senior Showcase was the last time my class performed in front of the whole school. I had expected to portray another Cleopatra in an obscure play by an unknown playwright, since I'd already interpreted all the famous Cleopatras. But I was surprised to be cast as the Virgin Mary to Laura Rama's Bernadette of Lourdes.

When I told Mami I was to play the Virgin Mary, she was
ecstatic. Unlike Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, Mami knew the Virgin to be a respectable character who didn't wear outlandish clothes or heavy makeup. She offered to make the costume, but the school provided it.

The first day of rehearsals I learned that my part didn't require acting in the traditional sense. I was to be a dancing Mary, with no dialogue. While my classmates blocked their scenes, Miss Cahan and I worked on a dance of apparition in a corner of the Basement.

Mine was not a religious family, so my idea of the Virgin Mary was based on what I'd picked up from devoutly Catholic Abuela, my father's mother, who went to church every morning and prayed the rosary every evening. “
Santa Maria, madre de Dios
,” she'd taught me, and in my dance improvisations, I tried to come up with decorous, evocative movements, befitting Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Miss Cahan, however, offered a less pious interpretation. Her vision of Mary was according to the Martha Graham school of movement: geometric, hard-edged, abstract. I made my entrance in one deep lunge, firmly planted my right leg, straightened it as the left rose parallel to the floor. Eyes focused on the ground, arms outstretched, back flat, I balanced on the right leg, while the rest of my body formed the cross-stroke of a T. I held this position until Bernadette of Lourdes noticed me and went into a trance. Then, still on one leg, I straightened my body, while my left leg swung up, up, up into a standing split, which I held with my right hand. Not very modest, this Virgin Mary with her privates exposed.

Laura Rama knelt at the foot of the stage, while I circled the back like a hungry tigress, my long robes hissing, Bernadette's terrible vision. Not once in the entire dance did my hands come together in the traditional prayer pose, nor did my arms gently open to encompass humanity. I was a warrior Virgin, mourning my Son. Torso contracted, I sought Him in my empty womb. Arms stretched back, I arched my heart toward Heaven, daring God to take me instead of Him, who suffered on a cross. When I
made my exit, in the same powerful lunge that brought me on stage, there was a pause, followed by scattered claps and, finally, real applause. I ran down the stage steps, through the back door into the makeup room, where I collapsed into a nervous heap. Northern ran over from the wings.

“That was great!” he said with a grin. “Great costume too!”

I laughed and thanked him, under the impression that he was joking about how I had finally left behind the yellow tablecloth of my Cleopatra days. As the next group of actors ran out for their scene, I bent over from the hips to stretch my back, my legs apart in second position, and noticed that, with the lights of the makeup mirror behind me, my virginal robes were transparent. I rose in a panic. During my dance, I'd been lit from behind to enhance the dramatic effect of the Grahamesque choreography.

I dropped to my knees, covered my face with my hands. Around me, my classmates ran back and forth, preparing for their moment on the stage, while I tried to make myself disappear.

After the performances, everyone gathered for a reception in the Basement. When I came down, Mami, my sisters and brothers, and Don Carlos circled me.

“
Ay, Santo Dios
,” Mami was breathless, “it must be a sin to be so disrespectful to the Virgin.” She was flushed, scanned the crowd as if God Himself were walking toward us to punish me on the spot.

“We saw right through the dress,” Delsa announced, and people clustered around another student turned toward us and chuckled.

Miss Cahan came over. “It was wonderful.” She kissed me. “Lovely.”

“My costume . . .” I burbled on the edge of tears, “the robes . . .”

“Don't worry,” she assured me. “You were great.”

The Basement hummed with the chatter of proud teachers and excited students. For three years we'd been one another's critics, but this night everyone loved everybody's work. As we
hugged, kissed cheeks, and applauded ourselves, my family backed away. The distance was not much, a few feet at most, but it was a continent. I felt their pull from where they bunched in a corner of the room, talking and laughing, isolated in the noisy crowd of voluble actors and jovial teachers. I couldn't walk away from them, but neither did I want to be with them and miss the camaraderie of actors after a show. I was pulled by Mami, Don Carlos, and my siblings in one direction, while my peers and teachers towed me in another. Immobile, I stood halfway between both, unable to choose, hoping the party wouldn't move one inch away from me and that my family would stay solidly where they were. In the end, I stood alone between both, and when it was clear no one missed me in the spirited gathering of actors and teachers, I ambled back to Mami, and in a few minutes we were on the train to Brooklyn.

Back home, I suffered through a depiction of my dance by my sisters for the benefit of Tata, Don Julio, and the kids who hadn't come. Seeing them recreate my Virgin Mary was so funny that I laughed until tears sprouted. Later, when we'd all gone to bed and the house was still, I cried for real. I didn't know why, didn't want to know. I just let the tears fall and hoped that in the morning my swollen eyes wouldn't give me away.

I asked Papi to come to my graduation. He wrote back that he'd see. “We'll see” usually meant no, so I didn't insist, but I was disappointed. In the five years I hadn't seen Papi, I'd grown at least five inches, had learned to use makeup, had acquired another language, had become independent enough to travel around Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own, had worked at two jobs, had become a dancer, had managed to avoid the
algos
that could happen to a girl in the city. And he hadn't been there.

I wondered if he had any idea what our lives were like in New York. My letters seldom described the conditions under which we lived. Even when things were at their worst, I didn't ask for help.
It was his responsibility to determine his children's needs, not ours to beg him to take care of us.

Sometimes I was so angry with him, I wished there were a way to tell him, but I couldn't bring myself to be disrespectful, to risk his anger. My letters responded to his newsy chatter, but I expected more from him. I longed for the small, tender acts that marked our life in Puerto Rico. The time he took to explain things. The hours we spent side by side hammering nails into walls. His patience when he taught me to mix cement, to place a cinder block over squishy concrete, to scrape the mud oozing from the bottom of the block with a triangular spade. I missed the poems he wrote, the silly jokes he told, the melodies he hummed as he worked. Now that I was almost a woman, I missed my father more than ever. But I couldn't tell him, afraid that my need resembled a demand, or looked like a criticism of Mami's ability to take care of us. Instead, I stifled the hunger for a father who had become more and more of an abstraction, as illusory as the green flash of a tropical sunset.