When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [101]
One morning, Mr. Barone, a guidance counsellor, called me to his office. He was short, with a big head and large hazel eyes under shapely eyebrows. His nose was long and round at the tip. He dressed in browns and yellows and often perched his tortoiseshell glasses on his forehead, as if he had another set of eyes up there.
“So,” he pushed his glasses up, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“I don’t know.”
He shuffled through some papers. “Let’s see here ... you’re fourteen, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ve never thought about what you want to be?” When I was very young, I wanted to be a jíbara. When I was older, I wanted to be a cartographer, then a topographer. But since we’d come to Brooklyn, I’d not thought about the future much.
“No, sir.”
He pulled his glasses down to where they belonged and shuffled through the papers again.
“Do you have any hobbies?” I didn’t know what he meant. “Hobbies, hobbies,” he flailed his hands, as if he were juggling, “things you like to do after school.”
“Ah, yes.” I tried to imagine what I did at home that might qualify as a hobby. “I like to read.”
He seemed disappointed. “Yes, we know that about you.” He pulled out a paper and stared at it. “One of the tests we gave you was an aptitude test. It tells us what kinds of things you might be good at. The tests show that you would be good at helping people. Do you like to help people?”
I was afraid to contradict the tests. “Yes, sir.”
“There’s a high school we can send you where you can study biology and chemistry which will prepare you for a career in nursing.”
I screwed up my face. He consulted the papers again.
“You would also do well in communications. Teaching maybe.”
I remembered Miss Brown standing in front of a classroom full of rowdy teenagers, some of them taller than she was.
“I don’t like to teach.”
Mr. Barone pushed his glasses up again and leaned over the stack of papers on his desk. “Why don’t you think about it and get back to me,” he said, closing the folder with my name across the top. He put his hand flat on it, as if squeezing something out. “You’re a smart girl, Esmeralda. Let’s try to get you into an academic school so that you have a shot at college.”
On the way home, I walked with another new ninth grader, Yolanda. She had been in New York for three years but knew as little English as I did. We spoke in Spanglish, a combination of English and Spanish in which we hopped from one language to the other depending on which word came first.
“Te preguntó el Mr. Barone, you know, lo que querías hacer when you grow up?” I asked.
“Sí, pero, I didn’t know. ¿Y tú?”
“Yo tampoco. He said, que I like to help people. Pero, you know, a mí no me gusta mucho la gente.” When she heard me say I didn’t like people much, Yolanda looked at me from the corner of her eye, waiting to become the exception.
By the time I said it, she had dashed up the stairs of her building. She didn’t wave as she ducked in, and the next day she wasn’t friendly. I walked around the rest of the day in embarrassed isolation, knowing that somehow I had given myself away to the only friend I’d made at Junior High School 33. I had to either take back my words or live with the consequences of stating what was becoming the truth. I’d never said that to anyone, not even to myself. It was an added weight, but I wasn’t about to trade it for companionship.
A few days later, Mr. Barone called me back to his office.
“Well?” Tiny green flecks burned around the black pupils of his hazel eyes.
The night before, Mami had called us into the living room. On the television “fifty of America’s most beautiful girls” paraded in ruffled tulle dresses before a tinsel waterfall.
“Aren’t they lovely?” Mami murmured, as the girls, escorted by boys in uniform, floated by the camera, twirled, and disappeared behind a screen to the strains of a waltz and an announcer’s dramatic voice calling their names, ages, and states. Mami sat mesmerized through the whole pageant.