A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  “Your father?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  A pause.

  “He has character,” the teacher says quietly before moving on to the next student.

  Blackout

  I didn’t think white people got jobs the way Latinos did, just by talking to each other. But they do, and that’s how it happens for me. My first big job as a writer.

  It’s the end of a graduate journalism class at New York University. The room fills with the familiar cacophony of a class ending: chairs scraping floors, students unzipping bags, murmurs about lunch and papers due. The professor, a thin, white woman, fastens her eyes on me.

  “An editor at the New York Times is looking for a researcher for a book she’s doing on women’s history,” she says, matter-of-fact. “I thought of you. You write about feminism.”

  I smile politely, uncomfortably. I’m twenty-five and writing for Ms. magazine, but I don’t consider myself someone who writes about feminism. That sounds like work other people do, people who are rich or famous or smart. I’m not a boba though. I have spent enough time around white women to know it’s better to not argue with them.

  When I meet the editor, I like her immediately. She’s unpretentious and direct but warm in that “do you want water or tea” sort of way. I have no idea that she’s the first woman to run the editorial page at the newspaper. What I do know is that Gail is going to be the first (and only) lady who pays me money to track down what indigenous women used as menstrual pads back in the pre-tampon days. That’s my first assignment, and I set off, gathering phone numbers for anthropologists and historians, generating a spreadsheet to track my interviews and library reading, and returning with my final report. (They used rags, the natural kind.)

  Months later, I e-mail Gail an opinion piece I wrote for an online wire service and she shoots back: “Oye, you should apply for this internship here in the editorial department.”

  She doesn’t write “oye,” but she might as well have, because the way she e-mails with such ease is how a woman on the bus tells my mother, “Oye, there’s this factory down on Hudson Avenue that’s hiring.”

  Oye, and just like that I send my resume, which now includes research on indigenous maxi pads, to the editor at the Times hiring interns, even though I have no idea what an editorial is. That’s right. I am twenty-five, I am writing for a national magazine, I have been in journalism school, and I do not know what an editorial is.

  I want to say that it’s never come up, that no one has ever talked to me about editorials. But they probably did, and I didn’t know what it was, and as I’ve been doing since I was in kindergarten, I probably acted like I knew what they were talking about and promptly forgot it.

  Now I walk around the block to the Greek deli. I pass the women and men waiting at the bus stop, buy a copy of the Times and flip over the A section. A friend has told me to look at the left side of the last page, at the short paragraphs stacked like shoe boxes in a closet.

  The writing carries no byline. It’s monotonous, and I realize why I don’t know what an editorial is. I’ve never made it past the second line.

  My feelings, though, are irrelevant. This is the New York Times. They have Maureen Dowd and stringers all over the world, including countries I have to find in the Britannica encyclopedia. If I get the internship, they won’t actually let me write.

  But they do.

  My summer internship begins on the tenth floor of the New York Times building on Forty-Third Street. The first days are heady: the large, revolving doors at the main entrance, the elevator racing upward, a massive desk of my own, the thick, solid wooden shelves in the library filled with old books and newspapers and magazines. It’s nine months since September 11, and Howell Raines is the executive editor. He supposedly has a penchant for the visual, which is why, a staff reporter tells me, the corridors are now filled with large-scale reproductions of photographs that have been in the paper. My favorite ones, the ones that make me pause, are the aerial photographs of New York City, the tops of skyscrapers like the closed beaks of birds.

  I’m taken to lunch that week, shown how the computer system works, told to wait a minute while an editor, a white man with sharp eyes, answers a call and laughs about how India and Pakistan need to get it together and play nice. I’m told how to put editorials in a queue, how to see what other people are writing for the next day or the weekend edition, how to answer my editor’s questions online. I’m told to join the editorial board for their meetings in the morning.

  The meetings take place in a conference room. Inside are a long wooden table, large heavy chairs, and a television in a cabinet. Men show up in stiff white shirts with cups of coffee in hand, notepads and pens, and the day’s paper. The women show up in slacks and button-down shirts with notepads and pens and the paper. They file in one by one, welcome me, make jokes about this and that, and it begins to dawn on me that they are regular white people.

  I’m not sure what I expected them to look like, but I figured that writing for the New York Times would turn a person into something close to God, or at least Oprah Winfrey. I expected that they would look different somehow, more beautiful, more pristine, that they wouldn’t have to read the day’s paper because they would have a secret telephone they could pick up and hear about what was happening in the world.

  What’s not surprising is that they are white.

  It’s about a dozen people, and they’re all white except for one black man and one man who is white (blond actually) but Mexican. I sit at the table, terrified that I’ll say something stupid and more terrified that I won’t be able to say anything at all.

  The meetings begin, and they go around the table, pitching ideas, shooting down ideas, bantering. A writer with a head full of white hair, a man who could be a grandpa on an after-school TV special, says, “Now I have an idea you’re not going to like . . .” and everyone grins. There’s much about which to have opinions—the war on terror, Bush, stem-cell research—but this man wants to write about the Superfund sites everyone else wants to forget.

  Assignments are made. One writer sighs. “Yes, I guess I’m the one to do it,” he says. Then they retreat to their offices to make phone calls, conduct interviews, and write opinions.

  My first idea for an editorial is straightforward, a no-brainer really. I think the New York Times editorial board should urge President Bush to grant Colombians political asylum in the United States. The issue is clear: the United States funds the war in Colombia and the people deserve relief.

  To back up my idea I start making phone calls, and I quickly learn that people will talk to me. The name New York Times, in fact, produces the most spectacular effects on people. Local advocates return my calls with eager voices. Government spokespeople chat me up with fake grins. A number of people bristle at the name; others ask to have lunch with me. Me. An intern.

  By the time I call an advocate at Human Rights Watch that summer about another topic, I am covered in arrogance. I announce that I’m phoning from the Times, but when I pause for effect, the woman snaps, “Which Times?”

  I bite my lip, sure this woman has, with female intuition alone, figured out that I’m only a summer intern. “The New York Times,” I answer, doing my best to control the pitch of my voice.

  “If you don’t say that, I can’t possibly know,” the woman answers, adding that there is the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine. But I hear it in her voice. The nervous laugh. The slight faltering, the retreating.

  The paper, I begin to learn that summer, is not a series of pages bound together. It’s not even the people themselves, the ones sitting at the conference table three times a week or the ones reporting the news. It’s something else. It’s an idea that produces tension in people or arouses their flattery. It has the power to agitate. It’s kind of like God, but not in the way I expected. It doesn’t feel good.

  The other discovery I make is about white people.

  One of the editors, a skinny man who I�
�ll call Mr. Flaco, listens to my initial idea for an editorial about granting Colombians asylum. “Why Colombians and not another group of people?” he asks, patronizingly. “If you open the door for them, do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?”

  Mr. Flaco’s questions are rational, but they also feel odd somehow. When I board the bus for Jersey, I’m still thinking about what he asked.

  In Jersey, I step off the bus a few feet from the Greek deli and Chinese restaurant. The street is littered with candy wrappers, the trash bin filled to capacity with soda cans. I walk past the long line at the bus stop, wondering who there is a Salvadoreño with political asylum and who is Honduran and Guatemalan and without papeles. They wear, all of them, jeans and jackets and baseball caps. They’re waiting for the 165, the 166, transfer tickets and bus passes in hand.

  Do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?

  It’s true that Colombians are not the only ones in need of asylum. It is every group from practically every country where the United States and Europe have at some point staked a claim on land. From the perspective of here, which is to say from the perspective of the United States, of this skinny editor, of people who have power, Colombia is not as devastated as Rwanda or even as El Salvador was in the eighties. Colombians are suffering, yes, but not as much.

  There is a hierarchy of pain, and it is no longer confined to the pages of my college textbooks about political theory. It is here in Mr. Flaco. Pain in and of itself is not enough. It matters how many are dead, how many wounded, over what period of time, how much public outrage there is in the West. The pain has to be significant in relationship to those in power. By contrast, we (my family and the men at the bus stop and me) are free to make demands, to share outrage, to know solidarity.

  Realizing this does not depress me. I consider it a discovery, because it feels that way, like I have entered the collective mind of white people with political power everywhere and managed to see one of the strange rituals by which they reproduce. This, I can only imagine, is how Darwin must have felt.

  Because it’s the beginning of summer, NPR has an obligatory story about the high number of girls who are going to tanning salons. I listen to this while lying in bed next to my girlfriend, who frequents these salons, and with my idea for getting Colombians political asylum stalled, I suggest writing on the evils of the fake tan.

  Mr. Flaco loves it. White men can always be counted on to agree that girls do crazy things in the name of beauty and that they need to be chastised. Who better than to scold teenage girls than a young woman herself?

  I put these thoughts aside and sit at my computer monitor in my office on the tenth floor writing the best opinion piece I can muster. Although the topic is one that slightly depresses me (I could be writing about the impact of the civil war in Colombia!), I nevertheless find myself humming and tapping away at the keyboard, having the experience that comes whenever I write: a rush of joy through my body. I feel energized, happy, strong, even.

  At the end of the day, I get on the elevator exhausted, my face slightly flushed. I am living a life I could never have imagined, even if it is about suntans.

  At the Times, people spend their days writing and then get paid every two weeks. It happens even if you disagree with Mr. Flaco or if you write a bad piece that needs tons of editing. You still get paid.

  So, convinced that this life can’t be mine, I insist on taking my intern paycheck to the bank every two weeks and cashing it. Each time the black teller hands me the stack of hundred dollar bills, I feel that I am real and that this is really happening to me.

  It is a lesson I learned from my mother.

  On Fridays, if she had been paid at the factory, Tía Chuchi would take my sister and me to meet my mother at the bank, where she would be waiting on line with a check, that precious slip of paper in her hand. She would take the money from the bank teller in one swift move, as if someone was going to steal it from her, and then she would move over to the side and count the bills, slipping them into a small envelope the way she would place a pillow in a pillowcase. Those dollars were freedom. We could afford an evening meal at McDonald’s and pasteles, too.

  Several times a month, people visit the editorial board. Sometimes they are invited; sometimes they have lobbied to meet with the writers. Sometimes it’s people’s chance to talk about their issues; sometimes it’s the board members who have asked to hear someone’s perspective.

  Cookies and coffee are served, and we show up with notepads and pens. If it is an extremely important person, like the head of the FBI or a superstar academic who wrote a new book about the economy, lunch is served.

  It is during one of these visits that I find myself meeting Mr. Alvaro Uribe.

  For months now, my mother’s kitchen has been plagued with his name. Colombians in Jersey and Queens and Florida were able to vote for him in the presidential election, and my aunties have been anxious. Will Mr. Uribe be able to do anything, however small, to end the civil war that’s held Colombia hostage since the sixties? The answer, of course, is no. It takes a movement, not a lone man, but people being people and aunties being aunties, they fantasize about being rescued.

  Mr. Uribe comes from a wealthy family and he’s promising to be Colombia’s Rudy Giuliani. He is vowing law and order in a country known for drug cartels, magical realism, and the kidnapping of gringos. His own father was killed by the so-called rebel groups who are now drug trafficking, and Mr. Uribe is rumored to have ties to the paramilitaries, the privately funded armies who massacre civilians.

  But in the editorial conference room on the tenth floor, Mr. Uribe hardly looks like someone privy to murders. He could be one of my uncles, a short man stuffed into a suit and not permitted, for the moment, to drink whiskey or curse in front of company. He proclaims that the coffee is not very good and then he makes a little speech about his Giuliani-style plan and takes questions. It dawns on me that he is here, because he has to be, like when my mother and tías would force me to leave the books in my bedroom and meet their friends for coffee.

  “Many Colombians in the States are hoping for temporary protection status,” I say. “Will you take up that issue?”

  His lips curve into a small sneer. “They voted for me, so I have to ask for it.”

  Later in the day, it occurs to me that for the first time I met someone who may be responsible for the murders of many people, and I asked him a polite question.

  It is a custom in Latino families like mine that you live at home until you marry. Even if you go away for college, which I didn’t, you still come home when you graduate.

  I have already broken this rule once, going to live with a boyfriend at nineteen. But the moment the relationship soured, about a year later, I returned home. Now at twenty-seven, I am ready to leave. This time permanently. I just have to deliver the news.

  In the kitchen, my parents and Tía Chuchi are watching the noticias. It is evening and everyone is done with dinner. My father is drinking his beer. The window shades are drawn, but the voices of children playing in yards and on the streets below come up in bursts of firecrackers.

  “I’m going to live in the city,” I announce.

  Everyone turns their head toward me. No one speaks. Then my father looks back at the television, and my mother and auntie do the same. I wait for some questions but they don’t come. Not then. They arrive the next day and the day after: Is it a safe place? Are you sure? You’ll be closer to work, yes, but . . .

  They want to argue with me, but they can’t. I have married the best man I could possibly find—the New York Times—and we all know it.

  My mother and Tía Chuchi go with me to buy spoons and forks, a Brita water filter, and curtains with a flower pattern. They help me set up the apartment, an illegal studio on the Upper East Side that’s about the size of the bedroom I shared with my sister. When they leave, I am left with myself in a way that feels new. I am on my own for the first time
in my life. My very own place. I have the sensation of having escaped a burning building. I have a job. A good job. And my own illegal sublet. I am paying my rent and groceries and not doing it by working at a factory or cleaning toilets.

  The New York Times building has windows like a cathedral’s: tall, large, indulgent with how much sunlight they permit indoors. I walk up to the fourteenth floor one afternoon and stare out a closed window, mesmerized that Manhattan can actually be reduced to a miniature city, that the millions of feet and voices cannot be seen or heard from here but are nevertheless in perpetual motion.

  I love the quiet here, the space to contemplate how quickly perspective can be changed, to wonder how a man like Uribe, who loses his father, makes peace with grief or doesn’t, to think about what a man on the editorial board said to me: “I bet no one else has written for this editorial page whose parents didn’t speak English.”

  In a few weeks’ time it will be the first anniversary of September 11 and with it will come the rush of memory, of women and men who—hundreds of feet above the city—stepped into the sky that morning to escape the heat and the twisting metal and the violence of not choosing their last moments.

  But before the anniversary, about two weeks before, a white man from the Times, a business editor, will look out a window like this one. He will be up one more flight of stairs and maybe he will wonder about the sky and the city and perspective. Or maybe not. The pain by then will be squeezing at him too much. He will prop open the window, place his face to the city air, and step into the sky.

  Mr. Flaco is curious to hear what I might want to write about a new report showing that boys are being left behind in education. Nervous, I stumble through my pitch about how it’s not all boys. It is black boys and teenagers. “Racism,” I begin, “has, you know, shaped the expectations the kids have of themselves and that teachers have of them.”

  “What’s going to be your recommendation?” he asks, a smile dancing at his lips. “Tell teachers to raise their self-esteem?”