A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  In Spanish though, in Bogotá, there is no need for extras or explanation. These boys are everywhere. They are gamines, a word borrowed from the French and meaning “to steal.” A boy who steals.

  “You were so afraid of the street kids,” Tía Chuchi remembers now, fondly, as if, as a girl, I had been frightened by spiders or ladybugs or wingless birds.

  After my first credit card, an offer arrives in the mail for another one. I call the 800 number nervously, as if I were asking someone on a date who has shown a bit of interest. When the person says, “You’ve been approved,” I feel it in my body, an elation like warm water.

  The offers continue to come in the mail, and I buy a large, red fake-leather wallet and fill each pocket with a credit card: Discover, Visa, MasterCard, Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Victoria’s Secret. I sit in my bedroom, admiring the little plastic rectangles and feeling genuinely accomplished, because in my home, in my community, people do not have credit cards. “Nada de deudas,” my father declares, and my mother agrees—no debts.

  Down on Bergenline Avenue, storeowners are used to people buying even large purchases like refrigerators with cash. Only ricos have credit. My mother doesn’t even believe in lay-away plans.

  At the Valley Fair department store, she explains, “It’s better to wait until you have all the money.”

  “The dress will be gone by then,” I argue, to which she gives me her maddening standard answer: “There will be another one.”

  During my last semester of college, I study abroad in England with a group of white students from private schools. I am there on a scholarship with a $5,000 student loan and a wallet full of Visas and MasterCards. With every purchase, I tell myself why it’s necessary.

  When will I be in London again? Never!

  You can’t find sweaters like these back home.

  What would people say if I returned without souvenirs?

  This is my only chance to see a real Oscar Wilde play.

  And the classic: All the other kids are going.

  None of this is to say that I don’t keep track of my spending. I do. I review my new credit card charges, mentally checking off why each one was required. I monitor my bank account frequently, careful to slowly chip away at the student loan.

  One night, standing in line to use the phone in our student house, I overhear one of my classmates, a tall white girl from a state I’ve only seen on maps. She’s going through her own list of justifications for charges on her father’s credit card. “I had to buy the boots, Daddy.” A pause. “I know they were expensive, but I needed them. It’s so cold here.”

  I shake my head, quite smug that I would never do anything like that to my own parents. My credit card bills, and I am very pleased to say this, are my responsibility. So caught up in this perverse pride, I fail to see that I am a college student with two part-time jobs back home and a student loan here, trying to pay off the kind of credit-card balances a grown white man in the Midwest is struggling to handle.

  My mother is pleased that I traveled to England. She knows it’s a good place. It’s like here. Children have camitas and leche, and they don’t wake up in the middle of the night with hurting bellies or having to steal. When I remind her that children are homeless in the United States, she sighs. “It’s not the same.”

  Over the years, her sisters board airplanes for Colombia, like migratory birds. Once a year, twice a year, every other year. They hear an echo of their homeland, and suddenly, they are spending weeks packing suitcases and shopping for jackets and medications and chanclas for their brothers and nieces and nephews. On the day of departure, they dress in matching skirts and blazers and tacones, like women who are traveling on business. They wear their 99-cent lipstick and take pictures at the airport.

  My mother does not hear the echo of Colombia. In fact, she has not been back in more than twenty years. “What would be the point?” she says. “To see all that pobreza?” My father agrees. He hasn’t returned to Cuba in two decades, either.

  But it’s not poverty that scares my mother.

  “It’s so sad to see the children,” she murmurs.

  The street children, the ones with hungry hands and lips that never quite close.

  The easy part is getting the job after college. The hard part is having the money to keep the job. To go out for drinks, dinner, and brunch. To pay for a subscription to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and New York magazine. To buy wine, even cheap wine, for yet another party, and clothes for it as well. The hard part is listening to middle-class, white coworkers talk about the poor and the working class, because it’s the nineties and the headline is welfare reform. The hard part is nodding numbly when they say, “Isn’t that awful?” and not telling them that Mami can’t find work right now and neither can Tía Chuchi, and Papi only has a part-time job. The hard part is pretending you know what a 401k is, and then buying a MAC lipstick, believing it will make you more comfortable about who you are and where you come from and the things you don’t have words for.

  The bills arrive each month. Discover, Visa, MasterCard, American Express. Numbers have stopped being numbers. They are hieroglyphs. The due date, the interest rates, the account numbers—all these curves and slants on the page belong to a language I am failing to learn.

  My mother doesn’t understand how my wallet is so full of plastic instead of dollars, but the white girls I work with are sympathetic.

  “I try not to think about it,” a coworker says about her debt.

  “It’s depressing,” agrees another.

  “I owe $30,000 just in school loans,” one confides.

  It’s the day before Halloween. The supermarket is selling mini-chocolates in bulk. The party stores are peddling temporary selves: angels, devils, pirates, and princesses. Pumpkins are perched on window sills, candles balancing on their tongues. And I am at the kitchen sink, wishing I could fit myself into a new life.

  I have consolidated the debt, so that now instead of having a lot of bad little dreams, I have one giant nightmare, and it’s in my hands: the new credit card bill. It doesn’t matter that I have been sending more than $300 a month in payments. The total due does not budge.

  A thread in me, a piece of hilo that has thinned over the years, snaps.

  I pull every single credit card from my wallet and throw them in the freezer. I look up the support group a friend recommended, and when I show up at the meeting, I take my place in a folding chair and vow to myself that I will sit in this exact chair every week even if doing so will kill me.

  And I do believe it will kill me to spend an hour listening to people talk about not having the money to pay the dentist, the paycheck being short this week, losing their jobs, and the humiliation of not being able to buy a friend a gift as expensive as the one she gave you.

  There are other stories in the group, of course—positive tales about people negotiating job salaries, setting up debt-repayment plans, planning weddings without credit cards—but all I hear are the stories that scare me. I sit there, and sometimes I daydream and don’t listen, and other times, I tell myself that I am not like these people. I am still going to turn out like Bill Cosby: rich and confident and not worried about money.

  But I do what the people at the meeting tell me to do. I buy a notebook and start writing down how much I spend and on what. A woman from the group helps me identify my slippery places, the bookstores and clothing stores where I am most likely to use a credit card. I employ the forty-eight hour rule, waiting two days before making a purchase I haven’t planned. I even start depositing a few dollars into a savings account. Someone from the group says it doesn’t matter if all I put in there is $1.

  After a year, my savings total a little more than $1,000. I sit at my computer, dazed. For so many years, my mother urged me to save, and my father would ask me how much I had saved, and I always insisted, at least to myself: I don’t earn enough to save it. But now, here is proof that I can do it. I have done it.

  I shut my lap
top and declare myself cured.

  What I loved as a child about Bill Cosby was that he didn’t need help. He never had to stick his hand out for charity or even to ask a question about what someone said in English.

  We were always needing help, always needing a health clinic or a dental clinic or a women’s clinic. We were always needing someone to translate for us or give us a ride somewhere because we didn’t own a car. We were, I thought naively as a child, always waiting.

  I was too young then to understand that health care was privatized, that factories needed people like my mother and my father and my tía, that even Bill Cosby needed us. It was our work that made his day possible.

  It takes thirty-seven days, about five weeks, for me to charge $1,003.28 on my credit cards, and for this, I blame the man at Amtrak.

  Sure, I had signed up for a new credit card, telling myself that this one would be different. It wasn’t like the other cards. This was an airline credit card. I would be charging, yes, but paying it off at the end of the month, while accumulating points for a free flight. I told myself, I’ll be getting one over on the airline companies.

  Instead, I find myself at Union Station in Washington, DC. I am in line behind business suits, waiting to get my electronic Amtrak ticket and feeling annoyed that I will have to wait a few hours at the station. When I reach the self-service computer monitor, an Amtrak customer representative is there (in theory) to field any questions I may have. A tall man, he is a bit older, smiling and friendly, and offers to help me locate my ticket.

  He blinks at the monitor. “Your train isn’t leaving until eight o’clock.”

  “I know.” I pout.

  He taps the computer screen. “There’s a five o’clock train. Why don’t you take that?”

  An earlier train? I look at him and find myself staring into Bill Cosby’s fatherly face. Why don’t you take the earlier train? You’re tired. You deserve it.

  “How much is it?” I ask, dubious.

  “It’s just another $21,” he says, adding, “It’s not that much. You’ll be home in no time.”

  I look at the monitor and the Amtrak worker with those father-knows-best eyes and think about the guava pastry waiting for me at my auntie’s apartment in Jersey. I hand the man my credit card. He swipes it for me, and in less than a second, my reality has changed. I will not have to eat a cold sandwich at the train station and arrive in the city at midnight. I can now board the train, nap, and when I wake up, I will be home.

  A month later, when I open the bill and see the amount due, I review every charge. New tires ($232.76), contact lenses ($209.51), a purchase at the Hello Kitty store ($25.05). Important stuff, I tell myself. But still. I add up the charges, confident that the company has made a mistake. It cannot be $1,003.28. It just can’t. But it is. And the $21 for the Amtrak ticket sits there on the page, as if it were blameless.

  Back to my little support group I fly, this time in tears. “This is just money,” I keep repeating. “How can it affect me like this? It’s ridiculous.”

  The group meets in a church room that has fraying carpet and thin, plastic chairs. Through the windows, the morning sky is gray and dull. About twenty people have gathered to talk about the same things: money, credit cards, unsecured loans. When the meeting pauses for a break, four or five people rush to my side. They want to help.

  I wish I could be like bell hooks.

  She has written that because she was never accepted in white or black middle-class circles as a young woman, she didn’t try to belong. She didn’t try to dress like she had money she didn’t have; she didn’t enjoy the illusion that material goods would make her feel better. She found that she liked to live simply, and she hated the hedonistic consumer culture that is American life.

  I wish I could be like that, but I’m not. I love the iPhones and iPads, the hybrid cars and hybrid bikes, the leather shoes made in Israel, the $22.50 lipstick, the Coach handbags, the hotel rooms with flat-screen televisions in the bathrooms, the $10 herbal teas, the $3.99 a bag organic lettuce, the Kindles, the hardcover books with their deckled edges, even the $3,000, bred-to-size lapdogs.

  When I create a spending plan that includes only the organic lettuce, and no fantasy that I will ever use a credit card to buy that or anything else, I am heartbroken. And embarrassed. I’m a feminist. I write about social justice issues. How can I want any of these things? I berate myself, and before that gets out of hand, I call a friend because by now I know that blaming myself for what I feel only makes me think that buying a mocha-scented soy candle for $21 will make me feel better. It doesn’t.

  I wake up one morning and reach for my cell phone. I turn it on and hit a speed-dial button, but an automated voice answers me instead.

  It has happened exactly as the customer-service representative said it would: A Sprint computer has shut off my phone. I can’t place another call until I have paid the bill, a little more than $200, which I will in about two days when my paycheck appears in my Washington Mutual checking account. In the meantime, I have consulted with my support team, reviewed my options, and concluded that I can live without a cell phone for three days.

  The hard part is telling my mother.

  I have decided to be honest, which benefits my spiritual practice but bruises my ego and worries Mami.

  “What do you mean you can’t pay the phone bill?” she asks.

  Not being able to pay a bill in my family means a person is close to financial ruin, about to apply for welfare, or, worse, about to be thrown out of their home and forced to live on the street like gamines.

  “I mishandled things,” I tell her. “But I’ll pay it on Friday.”

  She grows silent, furrows her eyebrows. She’s worried and confused, because my mother is familiar with the likes of bell hooks. She can walk through the shopping mall in Paramus and feel rich from the looking.

  The street children.

  It’s their hands that haunt me. Little, brown hands. The fingers stretched out like the basket for limosna in church on Sundays. The baskets were made of wicker, and we dropped our alms (four quarters) into them when I was a child, and the baskets ate the coins and I worried that we wouldn’t have enough to feed them. They looked like open hands to me, those baskets. Open hands and terror.

  My Father’s Hands

  Parts of my father’s hands are dead.

  The skin has protected itself by hardening, turning his large hands into a terrain of calluses and scars, the deep lines scattered on his palms like dirt roads that never intersect. It is a beautiful and unforgiving landscape, as after a hurricane when trees are uprooted and the ground is strewn with the wreckage of collapsed roofs and crushed kitchen tables, when people walk among the ruins searching for a familiar photograph, a black falda, a comforter, a piece of their lives that survived the storm.

  I don’t know why we return, what pushes us to look for meaning in places defined by loss, but the impulse is there like warm air after a hurricane.

  Revolutions take time.

  In history books, they unfurl over the course of three sentences, but in real life, they span decades of chaos and corruption, negotiations and false starts. They arrive late, if at all. In Cuba, the Revolution does not reach my father in time.

  Born in 1932, a few hours east of Havana, on a farm near the town of Fomento, my father is already a teenager with curly brown hair when he sees a government soldier in the hills. He likes the man’s matching jacket and pants, the uniform’s sense of purpose. My father doesn’t want to be a farmer like his uncle and cousins, picking coffee beans, cutting sugar cane, raising pigs, pissing in the fields. He wants more. He wants to be on the side that wins.

  Some years later, my father gets the government uniform, and he fights against Fidel Castro. By virtue of his birth, of his family’s poverty, my father is on the wrong side. He talks about it now when he’s drunk too much, slurring the words and his history into any number of possibilities. But this much is true, he says, jabbing a f
inger into my shoulder: “It isn’t easy to switch sides once a war has begun.”

  My father leaves the island in 1961 as the United States closes its embassy in Havana. He arrives in New York, a thin young man. He cuts hair, opens a bakery, chops wood, closes the bakery. In the seventies, he settles into factory work in New Jersey and marries my mother. He adopts the uniform of poor immigrants: black jeans, white cotton Hanes T-shirt. He keeps his hands busy. There is work, yes, but there are also cigars, cigarettes, and cans of beer.

  He returns to visit Cuba eighteen years later, in 1979, and brags to his cousins about how good work is in the North. His job is to stay up through the night with a textile machine. He doesn’t need more than a few English phrases. He is at the factory ten or twelve hours each weeknight and sometimes Saturdays, too.

  For the fábricas, however, it is the beginning of the end.

  Textile machines are like doll houses. They can be opened and closed, their contents manipulated, their rooms turned into theater stages. My father’s job at the factory is to manage the doll house.

  In one room of the house, a dance happens at a ferociously fast speed. It is a choreographed baile. The machine’s large steel needles line up before an equal number of spools of thread. The needles pull the dark blue thread, spin and sweep their partners, tuck them here and there. It is a raucous dance. After a short time, the sound of the needles, of that steel machinery tapping its feet, scrapes the ear.

  In another room of the doll house, a stiff sheet of fabric is emerging, and the machine’s fingers spin the fabric like a woman on the dance floor into bundles as tall as my father.

  My father keeps the dance going in one room, replacing broken needles and naked spools, and he carries the bundles of fabric into another room, where they are loaded onto trucks.

  He arrives at the factory in the evening, and he emerges the next day as the sun rises. He walks a few blocks home, crawls into bed, pulls the sheets over his ears and head, and his hands reach for my mother. The two of them stay up, whispering until my mother rises, wakes my sister and me, and prepares for her day at a different factory. There, she spends the hours stitching pre-cut sleeves to box-shaped sweaters. She keeps her foot on the pedal, her hands carefully pushing the fabric under the stabbing point of the needle. When she’s done with a piece, she tosses the sweater in a box. Another woman will cut the ends of the hilo.