A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  para todas las hijas

  “What does a woman inherit that tells her how to go?”

  —Sandra Cisneros

  Contents

  Condemned

  one

  Before Love, Memory

  Stories She Tells Us

  The Candy Dish

  A Cup of Water Under My Bed

  two

  Even If I Kiss a Woman

  Queer Narratives

  Qué India

  three

  Only Ricos Have Credit

  My Father’s Hands

  Blackout

  Después

  Agradecimientos

  Condemned

  A town official came to our home one day. It was a kind of inspection since my father was itching in those years to build an addition to the original house, and he needed certain permits. When the white man arrived, he had a clipboard in his left hand and began examining windows and fire alarms, then frowning and scribbling notes.

  Our house sat in a small corner of northern New Jersey, and it was a very old house. It had no basement, no closets, no doors on the bedrooms. The living room was a box of a place and the kitchen took up most of the first floor.

  Standing there in our kitchen, the town official muttered, “This house should be condemned.”

  My mother wanted to know what he had said. “Qué dijo?”

  “Nada.”

  I don’t remember now if I actually said, “Nothing,” or if I stayed silent. I was about twelve at the time and I didn’t know the Spanish word for condemned. I didn’t have a word in our language that would say, This photograph on the wall, this pot of black beans, this radio we listen to each day, these stories you tell us—he’s saying none of this matters. It should not only be thrown away but bulldozed.

  I began writing this memoir in 2000 when the feminist magazine Ms. gave me a regular column in its pages. I was twenty-five and terrified to write for real people who might condemn me, so I wrote about what I thought I knew, like why my mother didn’t call herself a feminist and why we wanted advice from women who talked to dead people.

  When my contract with Ms. ended, I continued writing. I wanted to understand my mother’s questions and my auntie who thought I was una india and my father who drank too much. I needed to see on paper the women and the father I had loved and resisted and betrayed, and to write them without the mancha of a white man who thought our lives and our stories should be bulldozed.

  I wanted, too, to testify. To say: This happened. These quiet stories were taking place when the suits in Washington were waging their private wars in Central America, when they began shoving the border into the desert, when they insisted, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” when they signed NAFTA and everyone began seeking the safety of corners. My mother and father prayed harder. My auntie told another cuento. I wrote it all down. To believe that my story, our story, any story stood by itself was dangerous. Feminists taught me this. Journalism confirmed it.

  Journalism: A fancy word to say that I spent days with my hands in other people’s stories, asking and telling, because nothing happens in isolation, especially when it has to do with language. Nothing is more vulnerable than the words in our mouths, because nothing has more power.

  I had words in 1980. They were the color of copper and ash and pomegranates.

  But Ronald Reagan was elected president that year and John Lennon was shot, and before that, it was morning and they had come for me.

  one

  Before Love, Memory

  They come for me in a station wagon. My mother already has me dressed in a navy-blue plaid jumper and a white blouse. She has yanked my dark hair into pigtails and now makes the sign of the cross on my forehead before turning me over to a skinny lady, who ushers me into the backseat of the station wagon. I join a small group of children, mostly Cuban, all of us dressed alike, our eyes bright and nervous.

  The station wagon lady drops us off at the steps of a gloomy castle in Union City, New Jersey: Holy Family Catholic School. The yard is hemmed in with black iron bars and the front doors are made of steel. Women in dress pants roam the cement grounds like fat hens with their wings clipped, their beaks pointing and gesturing. I huddle with the other children in packs of three and five like scared chicks.

  Miss Reynolds is the kindergarten teacher. She has glasses that make her eyes look like oversized buttons on her face, and she speaks the funny language that comes out of the television set at home when we are not watching telenovelas or the noticias, which is to say that she talks like the cartoon character Mighty Mouse. It is English, a language that sounds like marbles in the mouth. It is fun to hear, but mostly because the mouse on the TV screen is flying.

  Sitting in the classroom, I wait for Miss Reynolds to start talking like my mother. In Spanish. Surely it won’t be long now. An hour passes. Two hours. An entire day it feels, and still it is all Mighty Mouse.

  I am familiar with the language. I even speak a few words of it. But I have never heard so much of it all at once. It’s like being forced to watch the same cartoon all day long.

  I don’t know if this is what actually happened on my first day of kindergarten, but it is what I remember of my first two years in school. A few memories can be confirmed by research and on-site inspection: Mighty Mouse on television, the school’s black iron bars. My mother verifies the station wagon lady and the ethnicity of the other children, and school photographs offer details of the uniform and my teacher’s face.

  There are, however, missteps in memory, places where emotion has distorted people, sights, even cuerpos. In a school photograph, for example, my teacher is a skinny, androgynous white woman with thick glasses. But I remember her as a fat hen, a flying mouse, and kindergarten as the beginning of the end.

  A teacher comes for us one day. Just two of us. Me and my friend, a thin, pixie-faced girl.

  I don’t know why we are being taken from class, but in the darkened hallway as we find ourselves farther from our classroom, my friend starts crying, and hers are not baby tears. They are full blast, llorona wails. She roots herself to the ground and refuses to take one more step. The teacher begins dragging her by the arm, but the harder the woman pulls, the more my friend yells and twists, and for an instant, it looks as if her left arm is threatening to rip from her body, as if she will choose self-mutilation over what is to come at the hands of white women. As for myself, I don’t fight. I follow.

  In an empty classroom, the white woman pulls out a deck of cards with pictures and words. She spreads the cards on a broad table, one by one. The sun is pouring through the window and coating us in a yellow liquid, but I can decipher the cards. Each one holds a picture and a word: dog, cat, house. I am to repeat each word after the teacher.

  In Spanish, we have cartas. Tía Rosa’s husband uses them to talk with the spirit world. The cards tell us about jobs that are about to arrive, ancestors who are unhappy, a case pending with immigration. The cards are paper doors only special people can open.

  I look at the white woman’s cards and listen to her bold English words—dog, cat, house—and there is all the evidence of what is to come in my life. I am not to go the way of the two people I long for in the thick terror of the night. The first man I love and the first woman I adore, my father and my mother with their Spanish words, are not in these cards. The road before me is English and the next part too awful to ask aloud or even silently: What is so wrong with my parents that I am not to mimic their hands, their needs, not even their words?

  Before language, there is love. Before love, memory.

  What I know of the world before kindergarten is the uneven sidewalks of Union City, New Jersey. The shop with its fat chicke
ns hollering at us and nipping at the wire cages. The sharp smell of chicken blood when the little beasts are killed in back and brought in white plastic bags to my mother. The fabric store with its bins carrying spools of thread like a Cubana holding up the ends of her apron. The buses that snake up and down Bergenline Avenue. The store jammed with cigars and wrinkled men and women folding the ends of the thick brown leaves.

  Our national language is Spanish and there are many kinds. Mostly it is the firecracker Spanish of my Cuban father and his friends. It smacks the air and the back of my head and the inside of my ears. There is also the Spanish of the Puertorriqueño Tía Rosa has married. His words mimic popcorn when it first begins popping. Finally, there is Colombian Spanish. My mother’s language does not crack or bounce. It stays close to the earth, to thick hands and the smooth sides of stones.

  English has a place here. It is the language of minorities, and you hear it every now and then, mostly from Mighty Mouse on television or the older kids on the block. English is a game of marbles. The words shoot after each other. They bump and plod and leave tracks on the ground, and it is a decent game, English that is, but everything real happens in Spanish: the way women complain about the fábricas where they work, how they yell at you to not play in the street, how they drag you into the house when the sky turns a velvet black, lying to you: “Ahorita sales otra vez.”

  Terrible things happen in Spanish.

  My father and his friend get drunk, slur their words, and turn into screeching birds. Rage is an awful habit in any language, I suppose, but on our street, in our home, in Spanish, it takes on awful proportions, and the mothers complain to each other in shorthand: “Qué se va ‘cer?” The reply is always the same: Así son los hombres.

  Women are different.

  Union City is filled with virgins. La Caridad, La Altagracia, La Virgen de Chiquinquirá. They come from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. Like us, they are a matter of multiplicity. There is never one of anything in this world. There are many virgins, many women, many sounds in Spanish.

  Dollars, though, are a constant. In the kitchen, my mother folds aluminum foil over dollar bills and packs them into envelopes. The dollars are to be mailed with letters to her mother in Colombia.

  We send dollars because of the wars. It is the eighties and there are two wars. The one in Colombia is about land and poor people. The other one, the Cold War, means my mother and I cannot travel to Cuba. “It isn’t safe,” my father says in between puffs of his thick cigar.

  We travel instead to Hialeah, Florida, and Mami and I go together by plane to Bogotá and Boyacá, and by train to Queens and Manhattan. By the time I start kindergarten, I feel these places and New Jersey are part of the same country. Everyone lives within its borders, speaks Spanish, and eats a lot of fried pork.

  In the evening, my mother turns on the television for the noticias. The stories arrive from Latin America. Women with missing teeth cry into microphones. Men with brown faces scream. Los niños carry younger children. Sometimes, it is only the image of men’s feet in their shoes and the white sheets covering the rest of their bodies. The women wail behind the reporter, who talks about the number of dead and those left behind.

  “Ay, los pobres,” my mother whispers, before turning her eyes and her pregnant belly away from the television screen.

  But I don’t look away. I want to see what it is all about, because my mother comes from that place in the television set and so does my father. Those places where the floor is a thick brown soil and men’s bodies disappear save for their shoes.

  At Holy Family, report cards are made of heavy stock paper and folded once with your name handwritten on the cover. Inside, Miss Reynolds has seared the letters U and I across the squares, because, according to her, I am unsatisfactory or need improvement in starting work promptly, reading books, accepting responsibility, speaking English, and, yes, even singing.

  Nine months later, every line of my report card is filled with the letter S, the curves leaning into my new future. Satisfactory. The only category that eludes me is the “oral expression of ideas.” The ability to speak English. There Miss Reynolds has written a tilting but nevertheless insistent I. Improvement needed.

  My mother searches for the only English words she knows on the report card: parent signature, and there in her best penmanship learned in Colombia, she signs her name: Alicia Hernández.

  We are both proud of her signature. The poverty in Latin America means that many people do not know how to sign their names, let alone read or write. Penning your name is a sign of progress, no matter what you are signing.

  My mother makes recordings on cassette tapes to ship to her sisters and mother back home. She documents local gossip, my father’s business ventures, and me at the age of four recounting the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Spanish. She insists I say something in English. Anything. But I am four. All I know are a few numbers. She says that’s fine.

  I begin: “One, two, three, four . . .” I pause, turn to my mother. “Y después qué va?”

  Her voice, an accented English that so many years later strikes me as the voice of a stranger, replies, “Five,” and I repeat the word. She says, “Six,” and I repeat it, my voice dancing after hers, until we reach the number twenty.

  Numbers are important in our lives. There are the two black garbage bags filled with fabric that a man brings to our apartment every few days. The dozens of women’s pants my mother can produce on her Merrow sewing machine. The hundred dollars she is paid when the man comes for the bags at the end of the week.

  Numbers are why my mother came to New Jersey, why she spent nights crying, wishing she could go back to Colombia, to her mother.

  The author Minal Hajratwala has written, “Perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents’ risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.”

  By the end of kindergarten, my mouth is full of fruit, and as each year arrives, I stuff myself with more English words. I memorize nursery rhymes and numbers, and I sit on my bed with vocabulary books, committing to memory nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, while in the kitchen, my mother hollers, “Llegó Walter!”

  Walter Mercado arrives on the television screen. He has blond hair that has been set with hairspray into the 1980s look of being eternally windswept. Thick layers of foundation coat his pale face, and a deep coral lipstick shapes his lips. He sports elegant suits and over his shoulders capes studded with glittery piedras that look like rhinestones, diamonds, and emeralds. Each cape is said to be worth ten thousand dollars.

  But Walter is like us. He speaks Spanish. He looks directly into the television camera and into our hearts, lifts his right hand, and, quickly and authoritatively, proclaims our daily horoscope. We can expect a gift. We can expect the doors to open. We can expect good health.

  Walter Mercado is normal. White women are a different story.

  We move, as Mami would say, al Norte.

  In 1982, this means about five miles north of Union City and four miles from the George Washington Bridge. I am seven years old, and Papi has found the two-story house with no basement or closets. Our own home, and in the front yard, a tree. A few blocks away is the factory where he works nights. A block away is my new school. Into the large shed in the yard, Mami squeezes her two sewing machines and plastic bags of telas and extra bobbins and scissors and fat spools of thread.

  Fairview is a quiet town, a white town, an English-only town. The neighbors bring us tomatoes. “They think we’re Italian,” my mother giggles, as if she has snuck a puppy into her parents’ house.

  In Fairview, white women teach at my school and shop at a place called Macy’s. They go to Florida in the winter, even though they have no cousins there. They have aunties who do not live with them, and they are not like the white kids in my class whose grandmothers speak Italian and walk them to school in the mornings. The white women’s grandmothers are dead. When they mention Pol
and, Ireland, or Germany, it sounds like they are talking about a sock they lost in the laundry. They are white now. American. They have no history, no songs, no past.

  But they do have power.

  They have the sharpness of chalk, the sting of chemical cleaners for the blackboards, the clean earth smell of sharpened lead pencils. They have the respect of my parents. By virtue of their English and the light color of their faces, these teachers determine the words that creep into my dreams at night.

  I envy them. I want what they have. I want my words to matter.

  My mother’s sisters come and go over the years, but finally they arrive, one by one, to stay. No more back and forth. They have no children and no husbands in Colombia. Their mother is dead. Their father, too. They are three pieces of thread cut from the spool.

  Tía Dora. Tía Rosa. La Tía Chuchi.

  The three were school teachers in Colombia. Tía Dora is the youngest, a piece of silk hilo. In Jersey, she scrubs toilets for a white lady down the shore and later gets a certificate to teach Spanish. Tía Rosa is the oldest, with hair like black cotton and tacones with thick heels. She cleans up after a white woman in the city. Tía Chuchi wears lush red lipstick to church every day and has stories better than the Bible’s. Like my mother, she stitches sleeves to women’s blouses at the factory. When the three aunties are home, they dote on my baby sister and work on me and my Spanish.

  I call the carpet la carpeta, and Tía Dora shakes her head. She lifts her thin, fairy-like hands. “Se dice alfombra,” she says, and then slowly pronounces the word for me: al-fom-bra. Carpeta is the word for folder.

  My mother tells me that my new friend has called. When I reply, “La voy a llamar pa’ tras,” Tía Maria de Jesus, better known as La Tía Chuchi, puckers her bright lips. In Spanish, she lectures, “You never say, ‘I am going to call you back.’ Eso es del inglés.” The verb, she declares, is devolver. “Voy a devolver la llamada.”