A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 16

  A week or so after the theater meeting, I meet the Jourdans.

  They are Haitians. They came to New York City one by one over the course of thirty years: Patrick, Paul, Cosner. They knew that life would be easier the closer they lived to white Americans. They earned their money; they sent it back home. They brought another brother, a sister and a young cousin. Together, some of them with spouses, they shared the basement apartment and second floor of a two-story home in Brooklyn.

  They learned to have familial love by telephone calls. Like Tía Chuchi, they probably bought the wallet-size phone cards and used pennies to scratch the personal identification numbers. The Jourdans probably called the 800 number and an automated woman’s voice asked them for the PIN and then told them how much money they had to call Aquin, their home town, how much time they had with the people they loved.

  Maybe that’s what Cosner Jourdan did on Saturdays. He walked the neighborhood most days. At sixty-six, he had diabetes and had retired from factory work. He had been in Brooklyn for ten years and he took care of two trees outside of his basement apartment. He had friends, people who loved him.

  On the night of May 29, 2003, however, a fire breaks out around three in the morning. It rips through the basement apartment. The smoke spreads to the other floors, and the brothers, their spouses, sister, and young cousin flee to the streets. But not Cosner. He dies in the basement from smoke inhalation.

  Because his death happens on a day when the news is slow, the story catches my editor’s attention, and I arrive at the Jourdan house along with reporters from other papers. We all scribble the pertinent facts: Cosner’s age, the names of the brothers, the cause of death. The other reporters leave the scene in a matter of minutes having deduced that there is no news. I see the same thing, but I stay.

  Perhaps it is the basement.

  Layers of soot cover a bicycle and shopping cart. Hours after the fire, it’s still hard to breathe in the basement. I sit with the Jourdan brothers on the front stoop as friends and neighbors come by. They speak in Creole about the night and Cosner’s death. I ask a few questions from time to time, but mostly I watch the sadness on their faces.

  The day is hot; sweat coats my back and drenches my button-down shirt. In his last moments, did Cosner dream of his father, of his homeland? Did he wake up and think it was his father’s birthday that day, that the old man was turning ninety-eight and what would he say when he received the news? His son, dead.

  Remembering now that day with the Jourdans, I think: we were not meant to be here. We were not meant to die underground engulfed in smoke. Not Cosner, not any of us. The death of a Haitian man is not some accident in the middle of the night, but that is how it is reported. It is how I reported it.

  I wish I had saved my notes from that day, but I threw them out. I discarded them because it was perhaps that day sitting in the thick heat of a Brooklyn summer with the Jourdans that I began to feel a cracking inside of me.

  I first read that word cracking in an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay called “The Crack-Up.” I didn’t know much about his writing, only that he had become a writer and earned a lot of money and did not live in basements. Everyone had told me as a child that I would be like Fitzgerald one day, without the booze and early death. I would do more with my life than work to pay the rent. I would write, and in writing, I would help people.

  But sitting in Brooklyn, surrounded by the somber faces of Haitian men and the smell of soot, it begins to seem to me that things are not going to turn out as people said they would, as my parents hoped for, as I wanted. At least not at this newspaper, not now. I need time to find words for what I am seeing, for the grief and the killings, for my confusion, for the people who wake up each day and help to keep a hierarchy in place because they are afraid.

  The bravest phrase a woman can say is “I don’t know.” That’s my answer when my mother asks what I am going to do with my life if I am leaving the New York Times. I don’t know.

  She gives me a blank face, and some of my friends give me sympathetic looks the way you do when someone is about to file for divorce and you really liked both people in the marriage and you feel sad and wonder what it says about life that two good people couldn’t make it work. I don’t know.

  My last months at the newspaper are a blur of reporting, of long hours and nights out with friends. When a blackout hits that August, the city is flung into a universe without cell phones or computers or subways, and Manhattan turns into a small town. People start walking home. They laugh and curse and eat ice cream at the deli before it melts, and I interview people at the Lincoln Tunnel trying to get rides to New Jersey. An old man hollers, “East Orange! South Orange! Any Orange!”

  Maybe it’s perfectly acceptable to not know what is going to happen next in life. I walk back to the office in Times Square, where editors are frantically shouting into phones, and I file my story on the oranges. It’s after eight or nine when I start the walk home to my illegal studio on the Upper East Side.

  Times Square is silent now.

  It’s not only an absence of sound but also of color. The black billboards loom like empty picture frames. I squint my eyes to adjust to the dark. At Grand Central Station, I can barely make out the grown men in suits stretched out on the sidewalk, their heads on their briefcases, fast asleep, because the trains are not running tonight. The only lights are from the taxis, from the city buses that groan past me, their doors open, people teetering from the steps.

  There is comfort in walking through Manhattan when it has been flung into darkness. There is humility, some quietness, and I find that I am not afraid or confused, or maybe it’s that when those feelings rise up, I am focused on my feet, on where the sidewalk ends and where the next one begins.

  Después

  When my mother needs to tailor a skirt, to let out the waistband or take it in, she turns the skirt inside out and lays it on the ironing board. She exams the seams, the places where the hilo is holding everything together, giving it shape, form, purpose. She adjusts her eyeglasses, makes her decisions, and picks up the scissors, the tiny ones that fit in the palm of her hand. The tips of the blades poke out like extra dedos, so that for a moment my mother looks like a woman with seven fingers, two of them silver.

  Her hands are swift, almost brutal. She slips the silver dedos under the thread and yanks it from its place in the fabric. In English, we would say she’s removing the stitching. In Spanish, however, the word is desbaratar. If you ask my mother what she’s doing with the skirt, she will keep her eyes on the hilo and say, “Desbaratandola.” Not a taking away, but a taking apart. It is what I am doing here right now, what I have been doing in all the pages before. I have the story, and I am turning it inside out, laying it down on the ironing board, taking it apart with silver dedos, desbaratandola so I can put it back together again the way I want, the way that makes sense now.

  A few weeks after leaving the Times, I packed three suitcases. They bulged at the seams with books and a comforter and a map of San Francisco that showed hills and valleys and the bay. Inside each of the three suitcases, I taped a piece of paper with my name and telephone number, in case the bags went missing.

  The first time I picked up a copy of ColorLines I was in my early twenties. The only magazines I knew were the ones we had subscribed to at the library in my hometown, the kind they sold at Barnes and Noble: Cosmo, Glamour, Time, Newsweek. In all those years, I think I only saw a black man on the cover of a magazine once, but it was O. J. Simpson, and Time had distorted the color of his face, so I wasn’t even sure that counted.

  But ColorLines had a brown man on its cover, and he was not being accused of murder or of beating his wife, and the story was about the arts fueling social justice. I flipped to the masthead, expecting a Manhattan address, but the magazine was not published in New York. It came from a city I had never heard of, a city that sounded more like a park than a place with sidewalks, electrical poles, parking meters, and people pushing past you. O
akland, California.

  My mother was supposed to ride with me to the airport. It was going to be her and me and the three suitcases in the car all the way to JFK, because after the Times I was moving to California. But the guy we hired to take us to the airport brought a car too small for my three suitcases and my mother. He said the choice was mine. Either I left a suitcase and took my mother, or I left my mother and took all of my bags.

  It must have been around three or four in the morning. Mami and I stood in front of the house on the curb under the branch of a tree. The light post had turned the street silver. My mother’s hair, her face, the wrinkles at her eyes, the cars and the shadows, all of it was dipped in silver, and I cried and stared at her for a long time and finally hugged her, because I was taking the three suitcases and leaving my mother.

  In Oakland, I began working at ColorLines and quickly learned that a small magazine is like a big family. There’s something to do all the time. There’s the toddler who needs to look up for the cover shoot today, the photographer who needs directions, the writer who needs her edits, her proofs, her payment. There’s another call to make for the story I’m writing about Gwen Araujo’s murder. There are the women after the raid in Postville, Iowa, who need to tell their children’s nightmares, their own depressions, their rage, and how the future feels like a page ripped out of a book. There are deadlines and meetings and phone interviews, and a toddler who we hope will look toward the sky.

  My mother did not fight with me about California. Neither did my aunties. They are not those kinds of women. Maybe it was because they knew migration. Maybe it was because their own mother had let them leave home. Maybe they thought I was a piece of hilo or a word you couldn’t keep in your mouth.

  After I moved to San Francisco, the city exploded into white dresses.

  It was 2004, and women flocked to city hall, holding hands and bouquets, ready to exchange vows and besos and white-gold bands with each other. The mayor was marrying them and the male couples who arrived in tuxedos and shiny lace-up shoes.

  Over the phone, I pleaded with my mother to visit me. I wanted her to see the sublet studio I was renting in the Mission, the candle for Elegguá I had placed near the front door, and the pink armchair I’d found at the thrift store. My sister though advised me to stop. Mami was seeing enough of el famoso San Francisco.

  For a few nights, maybe a few weeks, San Francisco pranced across my mother’s television screen in Jersey. Telemundo and Univision would have shown the weddings, the promises, el cariño. Even at a distance of three thousand miles, I knew my mother had sighed, as if the news being broadcast were about an earthquake in Colombia. Tía Dora closed her eyes and switched channels. Tía Chuchi shuddered. “I will never travel to Cuba or to California,” she told me over the phone. “I hate communists.”

  I don’t know what Tía Rosa did. She is the oldest auntie, and she had spent the nineties pressing her fingers to the television screen whenever Bill Clinton appeared, creating the impression that they were lovers being kept apart by the illogic of miles y montañas. She thought he was handsome, and I liked thinking that my oldest auntie understood exiled love, that she nodded in approval when Univision showed women lifting veils and laughing in the new light of their lives.

  It is certainly not what she later said about Obama.

  “Ese negro,” she snapped at the flat-screen television in her bedroom, as if the new president of the United States had broken into her Section 8 apartment the night before and tried to steal the dollars she hoarded for the monjas in Colombia.

  A woman I dated once asked me why I still spoke to my family. It felt like I was running on Mission Street past the botánicas and the bodegas and the Mexican flags and she had stuck her foot out when I rounded a corner. Why do you still talk to them? I stumbled through answers, lurched and teetered and finally fell. I couldn’t explain it. But Barack Obama could.

  At a podium in Philadelphia in the early months of 2008, he talked about family, about blood family and political family and church family. He declared that he would not banish Reverend Wright from his life. The black pastor was not Obama’s father or stepfather. He was not even a tío. And even though the viejito believed we had brought September 11 on ourselves, he was family. Obama would not shun him or his grandmother, a white woman who had confessed to him once that when she passed black men on the street, when her pale elbows neared their dark hands, she grew afraid.

  I understood what Obama was saying: Some stitches cannot be undone.

  After I left, we unraveled, my family and me. I moved to California, y después; a year later, my parents sold the house, hired the movers, and migrated to Hialeah, Florida. My sister went to Albany, then DC. My mother’s sisters were themselves three long pieces of hilo, and they were taken apart over the next ten years. Tía Rosa left for Colombia, promising to die in the house where her mother once fed them boiled eggs. Tía Chuchi moved into her own apartment in New Jersey and filled it with cups of water for the muertos and the Virgin Mary. Tía Dora stayed put. She refused to come undone. Even with more trips to the emergency room, she insisted on being un pedazito de hilo, her hair a bob of copper around her thin face.

  But Thursday came. The doctors had scheduled Tía Dora for abdominal surgery. That was the good part. It meant she was in the hospital. The nurses were nearby, the doctors too. When my tía’s heart began to fail, the white coats ran into the room. They had fast hands and they saved my auntie. Afterwards, they transferred her to the cardiac ICU.

  The rooms there were in a half circle around the nursing station. One or two patients had visitors. The rest were alone, the tubes strung around their faces like giant bandages. The nurses had swaddled Tía Dora in white blankets, and she was attached to a respirator. Her eyes were wide open, but she was blind. She squeezed my hand. The machines beeped and whirred and flashed their numbers at us.

  Us. We were all there. We sat in twos and alone, in separate corners and in silence. Finally, I called us to the bed. “Make a circle,” I said, quietly. We did. “Hold hands,” I said. We did. After that, I didn’t know what to say. My mother paled. Tía Rosa squeezed her prayer book. My sister ate her tears. Tía Chuchi had the rosary beads in her hands, and she began reciting the Hail Mary, and we followed—Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros—and we prayed like that for several minutes, giving my auntie over to a mother we hoped was waiting in the sky.

  Después, we drove back to Tía Dora’s apartment. We tried to sleep, then we called one of her brothers in Colombia. It was dark outside. The kitchen table sat in shadows and so did the bowl of plastic fruit and the glass salt shaker. It must have been five or six in the morning. It must have been later. “Se nos fue,” Tía Chuchi wailed into the phone to her brother. Se nos fue.

  Her brother was confused. He didn’t understand. Someone had to say it to him like it was: Tía Dora is dead. She hasn’t left us. She’s died.

  In Florida, my mother tried one factory, and then another. They weren’t hiring. They weren’t paying. They weren’t there. Mami, however, was not a woman to come undone. She registered at the local library for an English as a Second Language class. She sat through lessons about numbers and nouns. She nodded at the teacher and brought cookies for the potlucks. And then, she turned it into business. She did alterations, she told people. She was fast and she didn’t charge too much and she was right there in Hialeah, a few blocks from the library.

  The women came to her. At first, one or two, then three and four and more. Women in their thirties and forties, their fifties and sixties. Women from Cuba and Colombia and Venezuela and Argentina. Women in fitted jeans and high heels; women with wide blouses and perfumed ears. They were mothers and abuelas and wives. They lived down the street, across town, near the hospital. They didn’t leave their homes without lipstick and their hair done and a pocketbook in hand.

  The women brought my mother plastic bags filled with their lives, their husband’s jeans, their own faldas, their
teenage daughter’s black dress. One woman came with pink pants; another, a bed comforter. They brought my mother their complaints too: the skirt was on sale but it was too long, it was too short, it was impossible to find in life the things you wanted and to the measure that you wanted them.

  The women brought news too about car accidents and did you hear about the guy who murdered his girlfriend and three women at Yoyito’s on Forty-Ninth? Shot them in the restaurant, right there in the kitchen, then killed himself in his SUV. They shook their heads and murmured prayers and then inspected the seams on the skirt they wanted my mother to take apart.

  Sometimes, the women came for my mother but found my father instead. In Florida, in his sixties, my father returned to Cuba. The backyard had a banana tree and a mango tree. My father began wearing sombreros like his uncle and father in Cuba, to keep the sun off his forehead. He planted tomatoes and calabaza, and he collected avocados the size of his forearm, and when the women came to pick up their skirts and jeans and comforters, my father pushed bags of produce into their arms. “Take them, take them,” he insisted, waving the women away, and so it was. The women carried away their clothes in one bag and giant aguacates in the other.

  Over and over again, this truth: Writing is how I leave my family and how I take them with me.

  Tía Chuchi began writing her memoir.

  Her apartment was a second-floor walkup in Jersey. The cups of water gleamed from shelves and night tables and end tables. The cups of water were for everyone, for Tía Dora and the Virgin Mary and Santa Clara. The cup under her bed, though, did not have kitchen tap water but instead holy water from church, because the vasito was meant for her archangel, for his sword and protection and nearness to God.

  In that home, surrounded by cups of water, Tía Chuchi began her memoir on a notepad. She drafted an outline first, and when she started writing, she found that one recuerdo led to another and that she had to make phone calls to Colombia and inquire about details, because memories are like thread. They can be tugged and loosened and stitched in different directions.