Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) (40 page)

The stage of the Longacre was huge. A few hours before the opening, I stood in the center, peered at the rows of empty seats, and saw not a deserted theater, but a challenge. My task was to transform a roomful of adults worn out from Christmas shopping and children fidgety with expectation into an audience. If I believed that I, a Puerto Rican girl from Brooklyn, was an Indian princess captive in a tower, rescued by a monkey, married to a prince, my audience would believe. If I could do that, I could do anything.

Mami and my sisters and brothers came to the first show. I was so nervous that I raced through it and was dazed and exhausted for the curtain calls. When I returned to the dressing room to change, I was greeted by a huge bouquet of flowers from Bill and Vera, another from Mr. Grunwald, a third from Shanti. Within minutes, the room filled with people. When she came backstage, Mami carried more flowers, somewhat wilted from having to share her arms with Franky. Mr. Grunwald stopped by, waved at the confusion from the door, disappeared.

Bill and Vera made a point of being nice to Mami, and she later told me she could see they were respectable, sober people.

“You take good care my daughter,” Mami told Vera, when she mentioned the tour.

“I'm a mother, too,” Vera responded. “Don't worry.” Mami hugged her.

Don Carlos brought his kids. La Muda showed up. Shoshana came with Josh and Sammy. Shanti took pictures of me putting on makeup, as well as in the captive-in-a-tower costume.

“This looks nothing like what Indian girls wear,” he complained. “It's for a harem.”

“The designer took creative liberties,” I said, “but the costume works on stage, which is what matters.” He shrugged his shoulders.

Every day before a show, I got off the subway from Brooklyn,
walked slowly along Broadway, listened to the commotion as if it were a marvelous song. Taxi horns blared. Tourists chattered in a plethora of dialects, all of them incomprehensible but familiar. The Hare Krishnas clinked their finger cymbals, pounded their drums, chanted their joyful tune. Peddlers offered legal and illegal bargains. I turned the corner and smiled at the bold
Babu
on the marquee of the Longacre. In front, there were huge posters of Allan and me, of Tom as the monkey god, of the rajah and his dancer. I entered the theater through the stage door, floated as if in a dream into my leading-lady dressing room, and caught an image of myself in the enormous mirror. I was not the most beautiful girl Shanti had ever photographed, nor the most talented actress graduated from Performing Arts. Alone with my reflection, I wondered what had brought me here. I was grateful, but I didn't know whom to thank.

Because Vera lived in Westchester County and ran a children's theater series there, she organized several performances of
Babu
at schools in her area. The cast met at the rehearsal studio, and Bill drove a brown-and-beige Volkswagen van along the Hudson River north toward Scarsdale or Bronxville, Tarrytown or Elms-ford, Mamaroneck or White Plains. We didn't spend much time in the communities where we performed, because the cast couldn't wait to get back to the city. Some claimed pollen allergies, exacerbated by the mere sight of trees. Others remembered childhoods in similar communities and were morose and pensive the whole way there and back.

The polite, mostly white audiences of Westchester County were a contrast to the outspoken children of New York City schools. When the curtain parted to reveal me praying before a stone god on the stage of an auditorium in a suburban school, there was appreciative applause and intense attention. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Town Hall, or schools in New York City, the applause of third, fourth, and fifth graders was accompanied by whistles and commentary. It took great concentration to wait while teachers tried to control students who called out “Hot mamma!”, “Baby!”, or “Hey, sweet thing!” Once the audience was relatively quiet, Allan made his entrance, discovered the captive Soni, a chain tied around her waist. As we discussed my predicament, a yank startled me and the audience, who couldn't see Bill
or the stage manager dragging me off while I pleaded with Babu to help me. In the suburbs, this was a moment of high drama. In the city, the kids screeched. “Follow her, man!” they yelled—obvious, though not dramatically efficient, advice.

The schedule of performances intensified as spring neared and the promised tour developed. I took time off from college and from the Advertising Checking Bureau to go to Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts. The plan was to drive north to Bangor, then perform our way down the coast toward New York. Bill, Vera, and the cast traveled in the VW bus, while the stage manager followed in a truck that carried the set and costumes.

Early on a Sunday morning, we met on the corner of 55th Street and Sixth Avenue. The familiar VW bus was parked on the curb, a rental truck behind it.

“Nanook of the North!” Allan joked when he saw me, bundled up as if our destination were the North Pole and not New England. It was mid-March, and although New York was beginning to bloom, I had consulted regional newspapers at the Advertising Checking Bureau and knew to prepare for foul weather, from snow to sleet to implacable rain.

The cast negotiated where to sit, a process Vera likened to her four children bickering about who'd be in front and who needed frequent bathroom stops and who must sit by a window or they'd throw up. The city peeled away as we drove north on Interstate 95. Every time a familiar exit appeared, someone told a story about a summer stock playhouse, or about being stranded in New Haven in a blizzard, or about out-of-town tryouts that never made it into town. Lee, who played Soni's nurse, began a round of camp songs, none of which I knew. While everyone sang, I clapped my hands or whistled.

We stopped for meals at diners sometimes five or ten miles from the highway. Millie's Coffee Haus, Aunt Polly's Place, the Towne Line Diner, the Harbor View (with no water in sight)—all offered delicious, inexpensive food on enormous platters. We were a coffee-drinking group and usually entered diners in the throes of
caffeine withdrawal, which made us irritable and impatient until the fragrant black liquid hit our systems. Veteran waitresses recognized our dazed looks the minute we walked in, desperately sniffing the air. They didn't ask if we wanted coffee. They poured full cups as we sat down, then handed us chatty menus with a long list of offerings. Along the back of the counter, refrigerated cases held golden-crust apple pies, lemon meringues, crunchy cobblers, puddings, creamy tapioca. Except for Lee, who was a strict vegetarian, we were indiscriminate eaters, eager to taste local specialties, like Rhode Island's coffee milk, Massachusetts's clam chowder, New Hampshire quahogs, Maine steamers.

We spent our first night in Lewiston, Maine. Bill and Vera were nervous about the accommodations in local bed and breakfasts. They relaxed when we pulled up to a pretty Victorian house on a hill.

“It looks like a storybook house,” I exclaimed, charmed by the lace curtains in the windows, the gingerbread eaves, the etched glass door. The owner of the house, a rosy woman named Mrs. Hoch, had a fire going and muffins in the oven. Lee, Allan, and I stayed with Mrs. Hoch; the rest of the cast and crew went to other houses nearby.

We went to dinner at a local restaurant. The minute we walked in, I sensed how much we—ten New York types in urban wear—stood out from the rest of the patrons. I was the darkest person in the room, and the stares I drew felt like darts. The waitresses joined a couple of tables as we huddled at the door. I was embarrassed by the commotion we caused, conscious that we were out-of-towners in a small community. Every action was noticed by the locals, who blinked us away whenever one of us looked in their direction. I made a point of sitting between Allan and Bill.

“I feel so dark,” I muttered. Bill smiled and put his arm around me.

The color of my skin was something I noticed every day when I stripped naked for a shower or bath. When I tried on new clothes,
the color of my skin determined whether I could wear certain greens or yellows. Black, I noticed, made me look paler, white had the opposite effect. Hot pink gave me a healthy glow, whereas certain blues created ashen shadows around my eyes and lips. It was important for me to know these things when choosing costumes, because at Performing Arts we were taught that a character's choice of color said a great deal about her. The principles I learned there seeped into my choice of everyday clothes. I favored bright, tropical hues but avoided distracting patterns. Other than the color of my clothes, there was nothing about the style to make me stand out. My skirts were never too short, nor my pants too tight, nor my blouses too low-cut. So it was the shade of my skin, I thought, that caused people to stare in Lewiston, Bangor, and Portland, in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Wherever we stopped to perform our Indian fable, I was the darkest person in the room, the diner, the school, the store, the entire town.

“I must be the only Puerto Rican ever to have visited Woonsocket,” I joked once, after a particularly tense visit to a diner. The others chuckled, but no one said more. The color of my skin, my Puerto Rican background, were not topics in the garrulous discussions in the VW bus or at meals. Just as the others took their whiteness for granted, I was to do the same for my darkness. Only they didn't draw stares as I did.

At first I was intimidated by the attention. As the tour progressed, I grew defiant, interpreted the stares as a challenge, made sure that at restaurants I sat where everyone could see me, a dark face among light ones. When that didn't change the way I felt, I decided to educate people about Puerto Rico. A blustery morning in Salem, Massachusetts, recalled the warm, soft dawns of the Puerto Rican countryside. As I walked the shore in Newport, Rhode Island, with my fellow actors, I felt compelled to describe San Juan harbor. A side of pilaf next to my meat loaf elicited memories of my mother's tender rice. I took every opportunity to mention Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, even when the subject
of conversation had nothing to do with ethnicity or culture. Waiters, school custodians, the doorman at one of the hotels where we stayed, the clerk at a pharmacy where I went to buy sanitary pads, a cashier at L. L. Bean—all learned that I was Puerto Rican, that Puerto Rico was in the Caribbean, that Puerto Ricans were American citizens at birth, that we spoke Spanish as our first language, that English was a required subject in our schools. Yes, there were a lot of Puerto Ricans in New York, but there were also many in other cities, such as Chicago and Miami. If I relieved their ignorance about me, maybe they would look at the next Puerto Rican who came through with respect rather than suspicion.

When the tour was over and we returned to New York, I felt worldly. I'd traveled into the vast horizon of the United States that I couldn't see from the ground, but the trip made me wary of venturing farther into the continent. What would it be like if, as Vera and Bill planned, we toured the South? Could I be forbidden from restaurants? I knew the laws didn't allow that, thanks in part to Martin Luther King, Jr., whose portrait hung in our living room. But I also knew laws meant nothing to people who hated. I wasn't black, I wasn't white. The racial middle in which I existed meant that people evaluated me on the spot. Their eyes flickered, their brains calibrated the level of pigmentation they'd find acceptable. Is she light enough to be white? Is she so dark as to be black? In New York I was Puerto Rican, an identity that carried with it a whole set of negative stereotypes I continually struggled to overcome. But in other places, where Puerto Ricans were in lower numbers, where I was from didn't matter. I was simply too dark to be white, too white to be black.

The weeks following the tour were a flurry of catching up. I had been absent from college for fifteen days and returned to assignments missed and hundreds of pages to be read in order to get to where my classmates were. At the Advertising Checking
Bureau, a daunting stack of clippings on my desk had to be examined and approved. Mrs. Davis smiled as I scanned the pages without catching up on the latest news from Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Baraboo, Wisconsin.