Almost a Woman : A Memoir (9780306821110) by Esmeralda Santiago

can you take me?” I showed her the paper on which Mr. Barone had written the school’s address: 120 West 46th Street. She studied it as if there were more in it than the two numbers and two short words.
    â€œWhen do you have to be there?” she asked after a long while, and I went limp with relief. I gave her the details, mentioned that Mrs. Johnson had suggested I didn’t have to get dressed up, but that I should look nice. “I saw a dress that will look good on you,” Mami offered, and I didn’t argue that if she were to buy something new, I’d rather pick it out.
    Several days later, she brought home a red plaid wool jumper
and new shoes. “This is a garter belt,” she told me, unwrapping a white cotton and lace undergarment with straps ending in rubber buttons snapped onto a metal loop. “It’s what we’re working on at the factory. I made this one myself.”
    I’d watched Mami pull on her stockings, smooth them with her fingers, snap them on. I’d seen her stand with her back to the mirror to check that the seams were straight, then gently tug them into place. Until now, I’d not been allowed to wear stockings, and I knew the garter belt and the flat package that held a pair of “Nude” seamless stockings were a concession from Mami, an acknowledgment that I was no longer a child, although neither of us was ready to call me a woman.
    â€œThank you, Mami,” I gushed, hugging her.
    â€œFor special occasions,” she said, as she kissed the top of my head. “They’ll look good with your new dress and shoes.”
    Over the next week, Tata ladled out larger portions of our meals, as if to fatten me up for what was to come. Aware of the attention I was getting, my sisters and brothers followed me with big, puzzled eyes, searching for what other people saw that they couldn’t.
    I felt the same way they must have. So many adults fussing over me on the one hand, while on the other, Lulu and her flock stepped up their threats and taunts, as if to keep me from getting too confident. I sensed that getting into Performing Arts was important not only for me but also for Mr. Barone, who strutted around the school telling anyone who listened that I was going there, even though the audition was still days away, and I might not impress the school with my dramatic talent. And it was important for Mami, who boasted to the relatives that I was going to be an artista, which brought the same images to my mind as it did to Norma’s: curvaceous women in skimpy costumes with feathers in their hair.

    The day of the audition, Mami took me to Manhattan, the first time I’d been out of Brooklyn since our arrival in New York. The elevated train ran level with the upper windows of warehouses and apartment buildings a few feet from the tracks. I tried to peek at what lay beyond them, inside the apartments that seemed an arm’s length away. But the train moved too fast for me to see more than blurred images of shapes that might or might not be people inside shadowy rooms.
    The school was one block from the bright lights and commotion of Broadway. It was a cold, blustery day, and Mami and I walked arched inside our coats, our eyes teary from the frigid winds. The few blocks from the Times Square station to the school were packed with people oblivious to the cold, who admired huge billboards on the sides of buildings or stared into storefronts, most of which featured posters of women with their private parts covered by a black stripe narrow enough to show they were naked.
    On the corner of 46th and Broadway, there was a Howard Johnson’s, and we went inside to warm up. The tables along the windows were occupied by people who looked as if they hadn’t moved from that spot in years. Mami and I sat at the counter, where we were waited on by a woman with frothy platinum hair, turquoise eye shadow, false eyelashes, hot pink lipstick, and a