A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  Of course, I have no idea if she is on public assistance, but she is my image of a welfare queen, of everything I do not want to become. I don’t want a baby out of marriage. I don’t want a relationship full of argument, had over phones and beepers. I don’t want hours with nothing to do but push a baby carriage and wait by that pay phone on Anderson Avenue.

  Coming out of the library, I look at this girl, and her life feels so empty to me that sometimes I think I will cry. But instead I grow angry. I don’t understand yet that I don’t hate the girl. I don’t hate anyone on welfare. I don’t even hate poverty. What I rail against is someone else making decisions about our lives, about where the good schools are placed, where the bus lines will run, who the health clinic can treat, and the shame shoved onto us, how it crawls inside of our lives and eats away at us until all we can do is scream, and it doesn’t matter who hears us. In fact, we want everyone on Anderson Avenue to hear. We want to matter.

  Sometimes, Tía Dora called me “indiecita” as a sign of affection, as in “la indiecita looks pretty today.”

  It’s common in Spanish, especially in Colombia, to add “-ita” or “-ito” to a word, even a hostile one, and believe it is made more endearing. A skinny woman becomes la flaquita, a small woman turns into a chiquita, and a black woman into la negrita. A house too small for a family of six becomes la casita, a car that has engine troubles but still bears the weight of your needs is el carrito.

  This is what I admire about my people, about our language. We believe there is a way to love what bruises.

  José died the year I began college.

  It happened so quickly. A stomachache. A doctor’s visit, the cancer diagnosis, and, then, the preparations. A new dresser and bed for their rent-controlled apartment. He didn’t want his wife, my fairy-like tía, to live with memories. She would have a new home, even if she couldn’t afford to move.

  The large portrait of their wedding day stayed, though. In the picture, my auntie stands with a raised chin in her white, princess dress decorated with sequins by her sisters. Her small hands are wrapped around a bouquet. She isn’t smiling. She is serious. She is marrying. Beside her, José is also muy serio with his glorious, dark eyes. And I think to myself that if he were still alive, my auntie would be talking to me now. Her husband would make her. He would lecture her on acceptance and tolerance. He was a good man.

  It is hard to say how one year of my auntie not speaking to me has become two and three and four. But it has, and I refuse to call her. I don’t visit. We have both shut the door.

  And yet stories of her come to me through my other aunties, my mother, my sister. Tía Dora is sick again, she is doing well again, she is teaching Spanish to a new class of elementary school kids in Jersey City. She is going to Spain. When her husband was alive she was terrified of travel because she hated airplanes. Now she is determined to do what she should have done with him.

  My auntie has one peculiar passion. I say peculiar, because it contradicts everything she taught me about being a lady.

  Tía Dora loves professional wrestling.

  She will spend hours on the weekends in her living room, cheering for men who drool and grunt and fling each other across a boxing ring, their emotions dictated by a script someone else wrote. She will shriek with delight as Hulk Hogan shoves his white index finger into the camera, threatening his opponent. She will giggle and clasp her hands as if he were courting her, because she adores his golden hair, the bigote framing his thin lips, his body stuffed into what I would describe as an oversized Pamper. Tía Dora, though, will declare wistfully: “Qué cuerpo que tiene el hombre.” What a body he has.

  As a child, I used to look at the screen and search for the beauty she saw, the thrill. But each time I only saw fat men in diapers bullying each other, and there, on the sofa, my Tía Dora with her small, thin frame and a wide smile on her face, as if a bird had taken flight, because everything about Hulk Hogan and professional wrestling truly pleased her—the collection of white male bodies, the fitted shorts, the way they took space in the world.

  When I start dating a transgender man, I only tell my family that I’m dating a man, because I am tired. Tired of explaining my life to my family and them not understanding, and by the time they begin shifting, the relationship is already over. I have made a secret agreement with myself that I will clarify everything if, and only if, as the saying goes, “Things get serious.”

  But Tía Dora hears about my new boyfriend and wants my sister to show her some pictures. His masculinity confirmed, she wants to talk to me. It has been seven years.

  Tía Dora does not invite me back into her home for a reconciliation dinner. Instead, when I call Tía Chuchi on her cell phone, Tía Dora answers. “Pick your tía up here.” I arrive and she hands me her car keys. “Do you want to drive?” Before I can answer, she says, “You can drive. Where did you buy that pocketbook? It’s gorgeous.”

  “Alejandro gave it to me.”

  “Oh, ask him if he’ll give me one,” she teases.

  Tía Dora has changed. She talks to me about her illness. She names it. “They tested me in Colombia,” she says. “They say I don’t have Chagas, so then what do I have?”

  She has her hair in a bob now and colored a shade that makes me think of copper jars. She is still too skinny. “What did your doctor say?” I ask, as if we have been speaking for years.

  She shrugs. “He said they wouldn’t find the disease because of all the surgeries.” It has been almost thirty years since the operations and still her belly swells at times and eating is difficult.

  We talk some more, and she tells me she will vote for the negro to become president. “Obama,” I say. “His name’s Obama.”

  A few months later, when I tell her about the new man I am dating, a Chinese American, who is sweet and funny, she sighs, “I liked the Mexicano.”

  We both act as though the seven years did not happen, as though I never dated women, so that it’s like we are speaking in another kind of silence, and I have agreed to it, because I don’t want to risk losing her again, because I know that it could happen again, that I could walk out into the night and fall in love with a woman and make my life with her, and then Tía Dora would vanish. Again.

  She insists on watching the new Woody Allen movie. It’s out on DVD. She asks me to rent it for her, to watch it with her.

  I have already seen the movie, so now I sit next to Tía Dora on the sofa, and I wait, patiently, silently, for the scenes of Penelope Cruz kissing a gringa. When they begin, their lips and tongues searching each other in a photographer’s darkroom, my auntie gasps and covers her face. “That’s disgusting!” she squeals.

  “No, Tía,” I begin. “It’s two people kissing.”

  She insists that it’s horrible, and I that it’s beautiful. But I don’t snap at her. I don’t try to convince her. I don’t go all india on her, and when I leave her apartment a few hours later, I kiss her good-bye on the cheek the way you’re supposed to, all sweet and formal, like she taught me.

  three

  Only Ricos Have Credit

  At fifteen, I land my first job. At McDonald’s.

  Learning the register’s grid with its Big Macs and value meals is easy, like picking up the mechanics of playing PacMan. My fingers memorize the grid so that in a few weeks I am considered what the managers call “one of our fast cashiers.” At the end of my shift, I feed my card into the time clock, and then stand next to the manager’s desk to hear how much money is in my till from the day’s orders, hopeful that it will be higher than the white girl who has been here longer and can handle more customers.

  I love my job. I love that it’s not a job. It’s the start of something, not the American Dream exactly, because I am an American, so what other kind of dream would I have? No, this job at McDonald’s is the start of the rest of my life. It is the first stop on my way to that country where rich people live and don’t worry about money or being treated badly when they don’t kno
w all the English words or behave como una india.

  A white man shuffles up to my register at McDonald’s one day. He’s old and his voice is muddled, as if his mouth were full of marbles. When I ask him to repeat his order, he snaps, “What’s the matter? You don’t know English?”

  Without thinking, I twirl around and walk away, past the fry machine with its crackling oil, and into the kitchen, where the guys are peeling slices of cheese and tossing them on burger patties, then wiping their foreheads with the back of their hands. I stop at the freezer. I’m not breathing right. My hands are shaking, and a minute later, the manager wants to know why I left the register and he ended up having to take the gringo’s order. But I don’t know how to say that I didn’t trust myself to be polite, and I can’t lose this job.

  When my first paycheck from McD’s lands in my hand, it is for a total of about $71 and change. I cash the check and take it to the beauty store on Anderson Avenue. There I spend close to an hour, inspecting rows of matte lipsticks and lip glosses and lip liners with names the colors of precious stones and wild flowers and sand dunes. The price tags are glued to the front of the display case, the numbers in thick block print: $3.99, $4.99.

  The women in my family buy 99-cent lipstick. The women in my family are their lipsticks. My mother is a pale strawberry. Tía Dora, a warm peach. Tía Chuchi, a pomegranate. Tía Rosa, a plum. And I am a black raspberry. The fruit never lasts. It smudges. It hardly sticks. It vanishes when you take a sip of soda. Tía Chuchi, who knows everything, schools me in how to eat a meal without losing your pintalabios. “You put your tongue out like this,” she says, and then she sticks her lengua out at me and maneuvers the spoon’s contents onto it (some melon, a pedazo of yuca), careful to not touch the edge of her lips. “See?” she says, chewing. “I knew a woman who did that. She kept her lipstick on the whole day.”

  Sometimes, Tía Dora splurges on a $3.99 tube. Sometimes, a friend gives her a makeup bag from the mall, the kind they include as a freebie after you’ve spent $75. The color from those lipsticks is thicker, like hand cream.

  Now at the beauty store, I choose the items I could never ask my mother to buy, because a $4.99 lipstick would make her shake her head and ask, “What’s wrong with the 99-cent one?”

  It is a question I never know how to answer because I don’t know that what I am trying to say is this: “I’m buying lipstick to make myself feel better about the class, racial, and sexual oppressions in our lives. The 99-cent lipstick ain’t gonna cut it.” Instead, I roll my eyes at the suggestion. “Mami, por fa. It’s ugly.”

  With my own paycheck, I buy the lipstick I want, which with tax turns out to cost something like $5.07. I also pick up face powder and eyeliner and mascara. In a single hour, half of my paycheck is gone. Back at McD’s, I plead to work more hours, and when I get longer shifts and more pay, I am almost earning as much as my mother does in a week at the factory. Close to $200.

  In her book Where We Stand, bell hooks writes about a time in American life, or at least in Kentucky where she grew up, when people did not spend their earnings on lipstick, face creams, or even television. People valued what they had. They enjoyed homemade fruit jams, scraps of fabric, and each other’s stories. They didn’t even blame the poor for being poor.

  If a black person was poor back then it was because the white man was keeping them down. The day would come when racism would be wiped out and every black man, woman, and child would eat with only fine linen napkins and not worry about their lipstick smudging. Class wasn’t the problem; race was.

  Unfortunately, when the lunch counters and the schools were integrated, the wealthy black families got out of town, the white activists went back home, and the rest of the country turned around to look at poor and working-class black people and found them to blame for not having the good napkins, the kind Bill Cosby has.

  Bill Cosby was on television in the eighties, the father of a rich black family, a doctor married to a lawyer whose lipstick must have been named after rubies or topaz. He was making me laugh, charming me and the country with the story that skin color didn’t matter anymore. Community didn’t matter. A person could buy anything in this country now. All they needed to do was to work for it.

  A manager at McD’s approaches me one day.

  “I’ve got a proposition for you,” she starts and explains how we can make money from the till, how easy it is, how you can pretend to ring up an order but not really do it, how, you see, it isn’t a big deal. We’ll split the money. It’ll be cool. And I say, “Sure,” not because I want to steal, not because I understand that she’s asking me to do that, but because I’m afraid that if I say no, she’ll be angry with me. I’m a teenager. She’s in her twenties. I want her to like me.

  At the end of the shift, she finds me in the break room. She has light brown eyes and a wide forehead. She grins at me, places a small bundle in my hand, and walks away. I shove the money in my pocket, and, alone in the McDonald’s bathroom, I count the bills.

  $20. $40. $60 . . . $300.

  That’s the number that stays with me decades later. It might have been less or more, but what I remember is $300 and that I had never held so much money in my hands, never seen so many twenties all at once, not even in the envelope my mother got at the bank when she cashed her paycheck.

  I know exactly what to do with the money, too. Or at least a part of it. I take it to the dentist on Bergenline Avenue.

  Fragoso is a crabby old Cuban who works out of a back room in his apartment. We owe him hundreds of dollars for filling the holes in my mouth. Now, however, I enter his apartment the way Bill Cosby must feel all of the time—on top of things. Here I am, with hundreds of dollars to put toward the bill, hundreds of dollars my parents won’t have to worry about. I am single-handedly taking care of business.

  Among the drills and jars of cotton balls, Fragoso counts the twenties. “That’s it?” he asks, looking over at me.

  My face freezes. The room grows smaller, suffocating. I nod my head, bite my naked lip, the shame running through me like a live wire, and I promise to bring more next time.

  Although he was a part of our lives, I never saw how Bill Cosby got to be Bill Cosby, how his fictional character became a doctor and saved money and bought a house and paid the dentist. What I knew back then about money was that you could work for it or you could take it. In college, I found out people I had never met would also give it to you.

  He’s wearing a business suit. A dark suit. The tie is some brilliant color, a red perhaps. He smiles at me the way Bill Cosby has done on television, warm and confident, but this man is younger. He can’t be much older than me, twenty-five at most, and he is white or Italian or maybe Latino. He calls out from beside a folding table at my college campus. The sun is bright and the man is offering free mugs, free keychains, free T-shirts. All I have to do is apply for a credit card.

  I fill out the form the way you would enter your name into a raffle. It is all a matter of luck. I am eighteen and I don’t know about credit scores. My parents pay in cash for everything. Credit cards are a phenomenon that happens to other people, rich people.

  When the credit card comes in the mail, however, I know exactly what to do. I march into a shoe store in Englewood and ask to see a pair of dark-brown Timberlands, size seven. It’s the early nineties, and everyone is parading around school in that brand. You wear them with baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans and dark lipstick, and when people dress that way, they look special, like the white plates with gray flowers my mother brings out for Thanksgiving.

  The shoes cost close to $100, a little more than half of my weekly pay from my two part-time jobs. But I don’t have to give cash now. I hand the woman the plastic card the way I have seen other women do in stores, as if the price doesn’t matter, and I’m grateful that my hand doesn’t shake, even though I’m outrageously nervous.

  She hands me the receipt, a slip of paper that fits in my palm like a secret note a girl has passed to me in class
. Just sign here. That’s all. My signature. My promise to pay.

  Back home, my mother stares at my feet. “$100?”

  The question hovers at her lips, as if she has come across a cubist painting and is trying to untangle the parts.

  First pintalabios, now shoes. Tía Chuchi doesn’t know how I turned out to be such a materialist. “No one in our family is like that,” she insists, and I would like to believe her.

  It is a strange comfort to think that some aspect of being raised among strangers brought out the worst in me, that if I had been born and raised in my mother’s native land, I would have known the Kentucky that bell hooks writes about.

  But this is an illusion. Colombia is where I sometimes think it began.

  I am walking down the street in Bogotá, holding my mother’s hand. We are visiting for a few weeks, spending days with my grandmother and enough cousins to fill up two of my classrooms in New Jersey. The civil war reveals itself here and there, mostly in the rifles of the security guards at the airport.

  As we stroll down the street, a boy my age, about six or seven, his arm thin as a twig, his lips cracked, extends a hand toward me. Our eyes meet, the same eyes I have, the same small voice except his pleads, “A few coins please, to buy a little milk.”

  His hand is a tiny version of my father’s. It is dirty and scarred in places. I cringe, afraid of something I cannot name.

  My mother snaps me close to her and quickens her pace, my head close to the fat on her hip.

  “Why is that boy asking for money?” I ask.

  “To buy leche.”

  “But why?”

  “That’s what children here have to do.”

  Language is a rubber band. It bends and stretches and tries to hold in place our mothers and the plaza in Bogotá and the boy asking for milk.

  In English, they are street children. Abandoned children. Neglected children. Thrown-away children. The adjectives expand to make sense of little boys having to ask strangers for the first taste we are entitled to in this life: milk at the tit.