PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : At 16, She’s an All-American Girl, Misfortunately

She is 16 years old. Her hair bounces, her legs are long, her clothes stylish. Large eyes behind large glasses. She takes honors math, honors English; in the summer, she took college credit courses at Cal State University, in psychology. They call her “gifted.” She is beautiful, she is clever, she is the first-born--she is everything her parents dreamed of in the Philippines when they dreamed of America. And her baby daughter is 8 months old.

A grandmother watches over little brothers and a sister sprawled before the television, days, evenings, weekends, in the quiet house on the empty street in the good neighborhood. Grumbling and grudging, she watches the baby, too, at times.

The girl’s parents, a nurse and an architect, come home late from work, beautiful and stylish. Her mother could be her sister; her father has a young man’s haircut, carefully finished. See them in the photographs, around the hospital bed--around their 15-year-old daughter and her child. See them smiling, as if it were a party.

Before the baby, the girl hoped for a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York. When her father bought her a cello, her boyfriend, the star athlete, could not believe anyone would pay $800 for a box of wood. She felt they were different--from one another, but also from the rest of the world.

When they walked for hours, as 14-year-olds, through the empty streets of San Gabriel and Alhambra, to school and from, to football games and practices, no one spoke to them of birth control, of consequences, of life. Just as no one since has talked of how the girl will raise her child, of struggles and dreams. “I said to my boyfriend’s mom, ‘How do you feel about having a grandchild in a couple of months?’ She said, ‘Oh, wow, we have to go shopping.’ ”

“I think,” she says, “that my parents laugh off everything to relieve the tension. If you think about it, it’s really, really serious. If you laugh, you get it off your back.”

And so she laughs after each sentence. When she talks of waking at night with her child and keeping up with honors’ classes by day, she laughs. When she talks of giving up hopes of Juilliard or Ivy League schools and going instead to a local community college, she laughs. As if there were no panic, no fears, no sacrifices.

It is only when she takes off her glasses that the exhaustion, fear, anemia show, in dark, circling bruises. A girl who would tell no one but the boy of her pregnancy. “When I was five months, my mother said, ‘You’re getting a big butt’!” Pregnant, alone, without a doctor’s care.

And all of this is unspoken in the home on the quiet, cold suburban street. It was not always so. When they first came to America, to Los Angeles, they lived in the crowded tenements of immigrants. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, old friends of friends, watching and whispering, reining in her growing up.

But her parents did well; there was a car, roses by the front door, airy bedrooms in the modern duplex, the quiet and tasteful streets--and the long, long hours at work, the sense of being alone .

And here is the girl, age 16, cradling the one thing now her own--her baby. Proud to be set apart, a creator of life, a sexual being. Terrified of the strain of preserving the shiny surface, the appearances of brilliance, the blessing of “gifted.”

“I’m the ‘smart girl’ and most of my friends are ‘smart.’ I had no one to talk to. I knew I couldn’t talk to my parents. I thought: We can be kind of careful, but we don’t have to be really careful because we’re not going to get pregnant . . . . because I was the ‘smart girl’.”

Deafening silences are between us: the price of a too-ready smile. A world in which all days should be “nice.”