My Beloved World Part 12

Come November, a postcard arrived from Princeton with three boxes, a cryptic message beside each-"likely," "possible," and "unlikely." On my card, the first was marked with an X. This seemed more like communication from a Magic 8 Ball than from a university. I wasn't sure what I was expected to do with this occult clue, so I trooped off once again to the guidance counselor's office.

Behind the look of utter surprise that completely rearranged her features, the oracle p.r.o.nounced: " 'Likely' means just what it says. There's a very good chance you'll get in." I thought to myself, really?

I was still getting my head around this when a couple of days later I happened to walk by the school nurse's office. "I heard you got a 'likely' from Princeton," she called out to me as I pa.s.sed.

I stopped in my tracks. "Yes, I did."

"Well, can you explain to me how you got a 'likely' and the two top-ranking girls in the school only got a 'possible'?"

I just looked at her. What did she mean by that? Not to mention that accusatory tone. My perplexed discomfort under her baleful gaze was clearly not enough; shame was the response she seemed to want from me.

Sometimes in such situations, an apt answer only occurs to you hours later: "Because of what I've accomplished on the forensics team and in student government. Because I work part-time during the school year and full-time during the summers. I may be ranked below them, but I'm still in the top ten, and I do much more than the others do." But even that undelivered comeback was far from complete. Her question would hang over me not just that day but for the next several years, while I lived the day-to-day reality of affirmative action. At the time I was applying to college, I had little understanding of how the admissions process functioned generally, let alone how affirmative action might affect it in particular. Barely a decade had pa.s.sed since affirmative action had been implemented in government contracting. It was still experimental in Ivy League college admissions, and few of the first minority students to benefit from it had even managed to graduate yet.

Soon, those fat envelopes I came to recognize as acceptance packages stuffed the mailbox almost daily. Now that the choice was real and imminent, I sat down to more serious deliberation. Columbia, I realized, a mere subway ride away, was too close for comfort: I'd have no choice but to live at home, unable to justify the extra expense of a dorm room. That left Radcliffe (Harvard's sister school), Yale, and Princeton, each worth a visit.

With Love Story still lodged in my mind, I scheduled Radcliffe first. I was told that after an interview at the admissions office, a student group would show me around. But first I had to find my way to Ma.s.sachusetts. As close as we had lived to Manhattan my whole life, I had only been there on special occasions-that first date with Kevin; the Christmas and Easter shows at Radio City Music Hall; Alfred's death march to the summit of Lady Liberty. On the miserable rainy day that my visit was scheduled, the cavernous hall of Grand Central seemed cold shelter, its vault dark with decades of grime. The railways then were staggering back following a long decline, only recently rescued by the establishment of Amtrak and, in New York, the long reconstruction of Penn Station as Madison Square Garden. My nine dollars and ninety cents bought me a seat in a tattered car carpeted in cigarette b.u.t.ts.

A sooty rain fell uninterrupted from New York to Boston, and by the time I had navigated the Boston subway and walked the last few blocks to the admissions office, I was dripping like a sewer rat. I was also feeling a shade of disappointment. There was neo-Gothic architecture aplenty, but the campus was no idyllic haven set apart from the world. Harvard and Radcliffe were fused with Cambridge, densely urban, tangled with honking traffic.

Inside the waiting room, when the inner door finally opened, I found myself face-to-face with a creature such as I had never encountered: a woman with a hairdo-no, "coiffure" would be the word-of sculpted silver, in a perfectly tailored black dress, a pearl necklace and earrings, beautiful little pumps. This is different! I thought.

I followed this apparition into her office and was stunned again by what met my eyes. I had never before seen an Oriental rug, its intricate pattern the most gorgeous of puzzles meandering across the floor. And I had never before seen a white couch. To be honest, I had probably never seen a couch that wasn't covered in plastic. I was ushered into an elegant, high-backed, winged throne of a chair, in which I felt as small as Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, surprised to feel my feet touch the floor. I had never seen such a room with my own eyes, but I knew: This was good taste. And this was money.

That's when the yapping dogs shattered my trance. They must have been barking since I'd walked in, but now they were jumping up at me, all bare teeth and bony claws. They were just lapdogs, really, one black and one white, but they scared me. She called to them, and they scrambled onto the white couch and sat beside her, and there the three of them completed a surreal tableau, three pairs of eyes gazing at me, a vision in black and white.

That may have been the shortest interview of my life, perhaps all of fifteen minutes. The flow of words that always came to me naturally, and still does whenever I meet a stranger, mostly dried up. When I found myself back in the waiting room, too early for the students who were to meet me, the numbness dissolved into a suffocating panic: I don't belong here! For the first and, so far, the last time in my life, I did the unthinkable: I fled. Asking the receptionist to leave word for the students who were coming to get me, I said, "I'm sorry, but I have to leave."

It was early evening by the time I retraced my journey in reverse. My mother looked up from her homework at the kitchen table. "What's wrong? You were supposed to be away for a couple of days."

"Mami, I don't belong there."

Her gaze seemed inclined to question this conclusion, but after a moment's thought she said, "You know best, Sonia." She would say it often hereafter, to confess the limits of her judgment in the world I was entering and acknowledge my having reached the stage of adult self-determination. And that was the last we would speak of Radcliffe. I was convinced they would retract their offer. They didn't, but my list was now shorter by one.

My visit to Yale was a very different story. When I arrived at the station in New Haven, an old hand at Amtrak by now, the two Latino students sent to pick me up said they were coming from a campus protest. Eager to jump back into the fray, they apologized, saying that they would just be dropping me off for now. They would give me the tour later ... unless, perhaps, I'd like to come along to the protest?

My experience of the antiwar protests was limited to the television screen. Though friends worried plenty about their luck in the draft lottery and Vietnam would come up as a topic in Forensics Club, debates weren't boiling up spontaneously in the lunchroom. Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of New York for whom my school was named, was also vicar to the armed forces and a fervent supporter of the war, spending Christmases in Vietnam with the troops. As the bombings escalated and spilled over into Cambodia and Laos, the protesters on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral called it Spelly's war. But the closest we had ever come to protesting at Cardinal Spellman High School was to lobby for a smoking room and the occasional no-uniform Friday.

That's not to say I didn't understand the reasons underlying the cause, but raising voice and fist against Yale's involvement in the war effort didn't seem a smart way to prepare for an interview there. Instead, I went for a walk. The inner city of New Haven was impoverished then, depressed and threatening, no better than the South Bronx and a lot less lively. Actually, it made Co-op City seem idyllic.

When my guides found me again, they were buzzing from the protest and eager for a rap session. We joined up with a larger group of Hispanic kids, some from New York, others from the Southwest, all of them more radical than anyone I had ever known before. For two days I camped in the dorm and scouted the campus in their company, listening to talk of revolution, Cuba, and Che Guevara and feeling generally uninformed. At least Fidel Castro was a familiar name, and news of the Cuban missile crisis had penetrated even the coc.o.o.n of my Catholic school childhood, where communism was deemed a G.o.dless threat, more cosmic than political. I could tell purgatory from limbo better than I could recognize the distinctions between socialism and communism that spurred the arguments during those two days at Yale. So embarra.s.sed was I by my innocence that I would go to the library and read up on Che Guevara after I got home.

I was embarra.s.sed, too, by all the "down with whitey" talk. It wasn't an att.i.tude I shared, nor one I was eager to adopt. Many of my friends, most of my cla.s.smates, and virtually all of my teachers were white. Whether it was due to the indeterminate color of my skin or my very determined personality, I moved easily between different worlds without a.s.suming disguises. Yes, I'd experienced prejudice aimed straight at me, from the blatant taunts of my street-fighting days to the cold shoulder of Kevin's mom, to the subtler barb from the school nurse more recently. Of course I knew that the painful consequences of bigotry-then so common, even endemic-went far beyond the sting of being called a spic, as I had often been. But I couldn't see such narrow-mindedness as the workings of systemic forces of history and certainly not as fitting neatly into a master narrative of perpetual cla.s.s struggle, the way these Yale kids did. This stuff simply didn't define me in any meaningful way: if somebody called me a spic, it told me a lot about them, but nothing about myself. And how could it help the situation to hurl a slur in reply?

It was difficult to picture myself spending four years in this environment, especially with Kevin coming to visit on weekends. I left Yale thinking: not here-though I didn't feel the same panicked urge to flee that I had felt at Radcliffe. Even if I didn't share their att.i.tudes, I knew where these kids were coming from, and when they talked of family and home, I recognized how much we did share.

BY THE TIME I went to see Princeton, I was down to gathering loose change for bus fare, Amtrak now beyond my budget. When Kenny met me at the bus station, I was surprised to see his hair grown very long, an expression of his new freedom. We dropped my bag at his dorm before heading out to tour the campus.

As we entered the main gates from Na.s.sau Street, the sunlight on that balmy spring day danced magically on the sandy Collegiate Gothic architecture and the emerald lawns and the surrounding woodlands, a prospect that has enchanted generations of Princeton students but that took me completely unprepared. Even the bronze tigers flanking the entrance to ivy-covered Na.s.sau Hall, while reminding me of the stone lions that guard the New York Public Library, seemed more pensive and more elegant.

Kenny had gathered a very small group of friends. Like him, they were exceptionally bright but slightly offbeat inner-city kids, radical in their politics, though quietly so, who conducted their lives at arm's length from Princeton's preppy mainstream. We sat up late together in a dorm room that night, talking easily. "Socially, it's a wasteland here," Kenny said, his judgment affirmed by solemn nods from the other freshmen. "It's a bunch of very strange, privileged human beings, and you're not going to understand any of them. But intellectually, you can deal with these people. They're not that smart." n.o.body seemed to mind, or even notice, that I didn't join in when the pipe was pa.s.sed. I didn't feel a need to make excuses or explain about being diabetic. This group was mellow through and through.

At my interview the next morning I felt just as comfortable chatting with the admissions officer in his tiny corner office. He was professorially tweedy, down to his leather elbow patches and little horn-rimmed gla.s.ses, but he was open and easy to talk to.

Before the weekend was over, my decision was firm. A full scholars.h.i.+p capped it.

I didn't begin to understand the power of those Ivy names Kenny had first disclosed to me until I saw the reactions of people when they learned that I was headed to Princeton. Prospect Hospital was abuzz with the news, and all day long the staff-not just the nurses and orderlies, but the doctors too-were popping into the business office: "Congratulations! Sonia, how wonderful! We're so proud of you!" All those women I had spent long summer lunch hours with in the cafeteria over card games and surprisingly good roast chicken as soap operas droned in the background and the women shared their own incrementally unfolding family dramas-they all came to give me a hug. Mr. Reuben, the comptroller, who had never been thrilled to have a kid working in the office, softened his habitual scowl. Even Dr. Freedman, who owned the hospital and who had overridden Mr. Reuben's objections when I asked for a job more challenging than candy striper, stopped by just to join the well-wishers. All this left me a little shaken. Other kids had gotten into college too. I had certainly expected to. Was Princeton really so special?

WHEN, at the end of summer, it finally came time to say good-bye, the women at the hospital had taken up a collection. "Sonia, go buy yourself some new shoes for college. Please!"

"But these shoes are comfortable," I said, my usual line. It wasn't the first time they had begged me to upgrade my footwear. My feet blistered easily in new shoes, so once I had broken in a pair, I would never give them up. Everyone in the office had heard me on the phone defending my raggedy shoes to my grandmother. "Buy some new shoes already! Make your grandmother happy" was an old story. New shoes for college was just the latest twist.

On Kenny's advice, I planned to get a bicycle once I got to Princeton. The only other purchase he advised was a raincoat. Mami offered to buy it and came shopping with me. We searched up and down Fordham Road without finding anything I liked. We even stepped into Loehmann's, my first time there. Though it was a discount house, and popular in Co-op City, the prices, to us, were a shock. So we went-where else?-to La Tercera, the Latino shopping heart of the South Bronx on Third Avenue.

No luck at Alexander's. I wasn't being fussy; I was just having a hard time picturing myself in that magical land of archways and manicured lawns wearing anything I saw on these racks. On the other side of the street, which was divided by the elevated train line rumbling overhead, were the slightly more upscale dress shops, places where you might shop for a wedding or some other very special occasion. In this case, a last resort.

There it was: glowing white with toggle b.u.t.tons and a subtle flair of fake fur trim up the front and around the hood. As improbably white as a white couch, white as a blanket of snow on a college lawn.

"You like it, Sonia?"

"I love it, Mami." This was another first. Unlike my mother, or Chiqui, or my cousin Miriam, or many of my friends, I'd never cared enough to fall in love with a garment. But wrapped in this, I knew I wouldn't feel so odd. Unfortunately, it was a size too small. I tried on a couple of other coats, but my heart had been claimed, and Mami knew it.

I was ready to leave and try elsewhere, but she said, "Espera ... Sonia, wait, maybe they can order it." She went to the counter and waited in silence as the saleswoman helped another customer. And then another and another. My mother is a very patient woman, so I knew what it took for her to finally say, "Miss, I need help."

"What do you want?" she snapped without turning.

"Do you have this in a twelve?"

"If it's not on the rack, we don't have it."

"Do you have another store? Can you order it?"

The woman finally turned and looked at her. "Well, that would be a lot of trouble, wouldn't it?"

I was halfway to the door, fully expecting my mother to give up, but she stood her ground. "I know it's a lot of trouble, but my daughter's going away to college and she likes this coat. I want to give it to her as a gift. So would you please look to see if you can find this coat for my daughter."

Her silent shrug spoke loudly enough: You're a pain in the a.s.s. But as she turned away, she asked indifferently, "So where's she going to college?"

"To Princeton."

I saw the saleswoman's head swing round as in a cartoon double take. The transformation was remarkable. She was suddenly all courtesy and respect, full of praise for Princeton, and more than happy to make a phone call in search of my coat, which, as it turned out, would arrive in a week. Mami thanked her profusely and left a deposit. It was a lot of money, but that coat would last me all four years of college. It had to.

As we were walking back to the station, I commented on the saleswoman's change of att.i.tude. My mother stopped in the shadow of the elevated track and said to me, "I have to tell you, Sonia, at the hospital I'm being treated like a queen right now. Doctors who have never once had a nice word for me, who have never spoken to me at all, have come up to congratulate me."

Overhead, the train rumbled loudly, and I had to pause for a long moment before I admitted that I had never dreamed what a difference Princeton would make to people.

She looked at me steadily. "What you got yourself into, daughter, I don't know. But we're going to find out."