A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 2

  If Tía Rosa is there, she comes to my defense, wrapping me up in her arms, the top of my head smashing into her large bosom. “Leave the girl alone,” she says to her sisters, crooning like a bird at her nest. For a moment, I believe this auntie will call a cease-fire. But no, Tía Rosa thinks the war is over. “Stop bothering the girl. She’s Americana.” She pats the top of my head hard, as if I were mentally disabled.

  My mother is different. She believes in truces, neutral zones, even treaties. Together, we stick the Spanish el or la before English nouns, producing words like el vacuum, el color purple, la teacher. We say, “Abra la window,” “Papi está en el basement,” y “Ya pagamos el mortgage.” This is not easy. It takes time, negotiation, persistence.

  In the morning, late for school, I call for my mother, alarmed. I can’t find mi folder.

  “Tu qué?”

  “El folder,” I answer, panicked. “Donde pongo mis papeles pa’ la escuela, Mami.”

  “Ah, el folder,” she says, quietly repeating the English noun to herself.

  I begin resenting Spanish.

  At first, it happens in small ways. I realize I can’t tell my mother about the Pilgrims and Indians because I don’t know the Spanish word for Pilgrims. I can’t talk about my essay on school safety because I don’t know the Spanish word for safety. To share my life in English with my family means I have to give a short definition for each word that is not already a part of our lives. I try sometimes, but most of the time I grow weary and finally sigh and mutter, “Olvídate.” Forget it.

  This is how Spanish starts annoying me.

  I suppose it’s what happens when you’re young and frustrated, but you can’t be angry at the white teachers because that would get you nowhere, and you can’t be too upset with your parents because they want what they think is best for you. Spanish is flaca and defenseless, so I start pushing her around, then hating her. She’s like an auntie who talks louder than everyone else, who wears perfume that squeezes your nostrils. I want her to stop embarrassing me. I want her to go away.

  That’s how the blame arrives. I blame Spanish for the fact that I don’t know more words in English. I blame her for how bad I feel when the white teachers look at me with some pity in their eyes. I blame Spanish for the hours my mother has to work at the factory.

  “If only I knew English . . .” my mother starts, and then her voice trails because none of us, not her, not even La Tía Chuchi, who knows everything about everyone, knows what would happen if only my mother knew English. I am the one who is supposed to find out.

  But to make that leap, to be the first in a family to leave for another language hurts. It’s not a broken arm kind of hurt. It’s not abrupt like that. It’s gradual. It is like a parasite, a bug crawling in your stomach that no one else can see but that gives you a fever and makes you nauseous.

  Because I have to leave Spanish, I have to hate it. That makes the departure bearable. And so I never learn to read or to write the language. I never learn more than the words my family and I need to share over the course of a day—pásame la toalla, la comida ya está—and the words spoken on the nightly news, the telenovelas, Radio Wado, and Sábado Gigante, which all combined leave me with a peculiar vocabulary of words in Spanish about dinner foods, immigration law, romantic fantasy, and celebrity gossip.

  As I become more immersed in English, I also start to distance myself from my family through unconscious gestures. I walk around the house with headphones on my ears and a book in hand. I speak only in English to my little sister. I eat my arroz y frijoles while watching the TV sitcoms Diff’rent Strokes and Facts of Life. The two shows—centered on children who don’t have parents and are being raised by white people—make sense to me. I begin to convince myself that I am like my white teachers: I have no history, no past, no culture.

  My father, however, still worries that I might become like him.

  Sitting in the kitchen, slightly drunk, mostly sober, he grabs my arm. I am nine at the time, and he has my report card in his hand with the letter F in social studies.

  “You have to study,” he says, his brown eyes dull and sad. “You don’t want to end up like your mother and me, working in factories, not getting paid on time. You don’t want this life.” His life. My mother and my tías’ lives. And yet I do—though not the factories or the sneer of the white lady at the fabric store who thinks we should speak English. I want the Spanish and the fat cigars and Walter Mercado on TV every night. To love what we have, however, is to violate my family’s wishes.

  Years later, an Arab American writer smiles knowingly at me. “You betray your parents if you don’t become like them,” she tells me, “and you betray them if you do.”

  If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you.

  They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.

  They come for me again in fourth grade. Me and a girl whose parents are from Yugoslavia. Down the hallway we trudge. In the room the table is the color of wet sand, and the teacher nods at us. She has books and consonants and vowels.

  I memorize more words. I roll the marbles in my mouth and spit them out on tests and at English-only friends. I get a card to the town library and start checking out books by the dozens. I come to know the way the words in English hit each other on the page, and I begin reciting lines from Romeo and Juliet.

  This affection for English happens the way some women talk about their marriages: you do it at the beginning because it’s practical, because you need the green card, because all the jobs are here, but then the viejo grows on you. You come to know the way he likes his café or how he snores when he’s having a bad dream. That is how it is for me with English. The affection comes later and settles in.

  My mother warns me to not drown myself in a cup of water.

  “No te ahogues en un vaso de agua” could be translated as “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but because I am learning English from British novels and hours spent diagramming sentences, I don’t know American idioms. I don’t know how other children are counseled to not worry about a lost pen. I only know that, according to my mother, I shouldn’t mistake a glass of tap water for the deep end of the swimming pool.

  Quietly, over the years, I create literal translations in English for everything my family says in Spanish. Échate la bendición. Throw yourself into the blessing. Dios le da carne al que no tiene muelas. God gives meat to those who have no teeth. Me ronca el mango. The mango does something terrible to you.

  When I consult my sister, Liliana, about a friend’s dilemma, she shakes her head. “No tienes velas en ese entierro,” she answers solemnly. You don’t have candles at that funeral, and if you don’t have candles at a funeral in Ramiriquí, Colombia, where my mother and her sisters were raised, it means the dead person is not your family. Everyone there knows the dead need four velas to light the corridors from this life to the next, and it is the responsibility of the dead person’s family to bring those four candles and place them alongside the body. If the dead person is not your auntie or your primo or your own mother, then you should mind your business and not add your candles to someone else’s funeral.

  Words and dichos are like the spirits of the muertos. They belong to a specific time and place, but they move. They fly. They survive colonization and poverty. They adapt themselves to new geographies, flourish even.

  When I tell my father that I am going to be a writer, he whistles and says, “Ahora si que está tostada.” Literally, this means I am toasted; it is the way Cubans say you’ve gone crazy.

  White women dream for you.

  In high school, my English teacher, Mrs. Spielvogel, fastens her large blue eyes on me. “If you go to Europe, go to Scotland,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s magical. Everyone wants to go to England, but go
to Scotland.”

  I nod, as if my family sits around watching Sábado Gigante and debating vacations to Europe, but in a way, Mrs. Spielvogel gives me the idea. Maybe I could go to Europe someday. Maybe I could even leave New Jersey.

  My father doesn’t know how tostada I am becoming by being in school all day, year after year, with white teachers. Or maybe he does.

  In high school, I tape a picture of an electric typewriter to the refrigerator and he buys it for me. The exact model. An IBM. He grins, watching me type my paper on Oscar Wilde, on the playwright’s time in prison for being gay and this line from a poem of his which I don’t understand but somehow makes sense to me: “Each man kills the thing he loves.”

  My father observes me for a few seconds bending over the electronic typewriter, then retreats to the kitchen for a can of Budweiser.

  I enter the book publishing industry after college in the late nineties. I open mail for book editors, write rejection letters, and proofread flap copy. I spend day after day immersed in manuscripts, and at the end of every two weeks, I am paid on time. My mother beams. “And they pay vacaciones?” she asks. “And sick time, too?” Yes and yes.

  She is happy for me, and I am expecting to feel the same. This job, after all, isn’t just a job. It is the whole point of having learned English. This job is the reason Rosa Parks sat down and Dolores Huerta stood up and why my parents migrated here: so that people like me could work in places like this. It is a given that any moment now, I will feel a gush of joy and accomplishment that will be at once personal, communal, and historical. I imagine it will be like when Ed McMahon shows up at people’s homes with a billboard-size check from American Family Publishing and the white woman or the black woman starts screaming and crying and hitting her husband on the shoulder.

  I expect it to feel that good.

  Instead, I find myself one day in the conference room, listening to a presentation about upcoming books. It’s late in the afternoon already and they are debating what will make one book sell better than others on the market. I’m sitting by the window, and soon the room begins to feel too warm. The sunlight is filtering in through the blinds, making me squint. I close my eyes for a second, and when I open them, the whole scene before me has shifted, has come into a different focus.

  The white people look whiter than before. Their English sounds sharper. I feel dark, small, and confused, and I begin to suspect, perhaps for the first time, that happiness is not going to come from this place or from English.

  This is the point in the story where you try to make things right, where you think you can still be the hero, where you believe, however naively, that the solution is to fix the past.

  I register for a Spanish class at the Instituto Cervantes in Manhattan. There are about six students in a course designed for people who grew up speaking Spanish but didn’t formally study the language. The teacher is a tall Española with thin legs and an interest in bilingual education. She gives us a topic and lets us talk freely for twenty minutes. We begin chatting and debating in Spanish as if we were in our mothers’ kitchens, the platanos frying on the stove, Primer Impacto on TV.

  Finally, la profesora interrupts us. That was good, she says kindly, and I almost believe her until she writes on the board all the Spanglish words we used and a string of verbs we didn’t conjugate properly. Our syntax is English; our Spanish words those of a five-year-old.

  For the pop quiz, she gives us a paragraph in Spanish. Make any corrections you see necessary. I start reading, my pen ready, but I don’t pause when I reach the line that someone’s going to “parquear el carro.” Of course, they’re parqueando; how else would you say you’re parking a car?

  “Estacionar,” la profesora tells us.

  The other students and I glance at each other nervously and try saying the new word aloud. We’re going to estacionar the car. The word sounds strange, because all the words I hear in Spanish have primos in English. It is impossible to hear a word in one language without a reference to the other, and so “estacionar the Honda” sounds like I’m trying to park the car at Grand Central Station.

  I begin reading in Spanish for the first time, and seeing in writing words I have only known in the mouths of the women who raised me.

  champú, ardilla, toalla

  cepillo, colerete, blusa

  desbaratar, huecos, lunar

  Because Spanish has been only an oral language for me, it is a peculiar sensation to read it. It’s like meeting an auntie at JFK who has just arrived from Colombia. She hasn’t seen you since you were a toddler, but she hugs you as if the two of you were intimate, de confianza. And you are. You are strangers who have a shared history. People say you look alike. Tienen la misma cara. The tía inspects you with a grin, pinching your cheeks, like you once really did know each other.

  That’s how it feels to read Spanish now. It is to be in the embrace of someone who loves you and who is also something of a stranger.

  Twenty years after kindergarten, I return to Holy Family Catholic School. The building is not as gray or as large as I remember it, but the fear is still there in my throat as I march up to the school door. I try to shake it off and focus. I am a student journalist reporting on the growing Mexican community in Union City, and I need to act professional.

  At the front door, a brown woman peers down at me: La Virgen de Guadalupe. The school has been closed and is now El Centro de Guadalupe. An image of the Mexican virgin is taped to the door with an announcement about an event. Her hands, como siempre, are clasped in prayer.

  I stand at the door, speechless. The place where I began to learn English, to become white, has itself grown brown, Spanish, indigenous. I know this has to do with patterns of white flight, of migration, of global politics, but for that moment, I am five years old again and back home. There is no one of anything. There are many languages, many kinds of Spanish and English, of brown women and borders that do not shift beneath our feet but simply grow with every step we take.

  Notebook in hand, I knock on the door.

  Stories She Tells Us

  My mother tells the same stories every night.

  In her queen-size bed, I am lying on one side of her and my younger sister on the other. I am about six at the time. It’s evening. My father is at the factory and the bedroom is silent. The windows are shut, the curtains drawn, and the edge of the tall dresser has vanished in the dark. I feel the weight of my mother’s body next to mine. She’s a muñeca de trapo, my mother, a large rag doll, a careful gathering of cotton fabric and thread and something unnamed but substantial. She sighs now in bed and begins telling the story she told the night before.

  In her stories, my mother is the heroine, the inocente who scares easily and whom everyone knows to be gentle and kind. She is not ambitious. In fact, she wants nothing more than to grow up and marry a good man with blond hair and blue eyes and have children who look like him. This is what she tells my sister and me when the lights are turned off. She rubs our backs and whispers stories into our dark hair.

  Always, she begins the stories at the beginning, which is to say the first time she left her mother.

  It is the sixties; the violence is in the jungles of Colombia and Mami is in the capital. She is sixteen. She has left school. She wears clean, sturdy shoes and a knee-length skirt. Her black hair is curled, her face plump. She has never been beyond the border of school or home, but now here she is. In a factory, a fábrica. She spends days marking the fronts of men’s blazers with tiza, so the women on the sewing machines will know exactly where to stitch the pockets.

  The only women she has known are like her mother, women who don’t wear lipstick, who marry young, who birth a dozen children, and bow their heads at church on weekday mornings. But this factory in Bogotá teems with a different sort of woman, the kind who sneers about men, brags about her nights, flaunts her intimacies. Their voices puncture the air like threaded needles. The women even curse.

  “I’d never heard anything l
ike it before,” my mother whispers to us in the dark.

  The bedroom around us tilts, becomes an unlit stage. At the age of six, I stare at this stage and try to imagine a woman who knows bad words in Spanish.

  The second time she leaves her mother, Mami has doubts.

  It had felt innocent at first, akin to a new love. The invitation from a friend to visit New Jersey, her sister’s encouragement and the money también. The promises of how easy it would be over there. She would earn real money, that’s what everyone said, and in dólares, more than she could make at a factory in Bogotá. She is twenty-eight and unmarried. She has no reason to not go. Y ademas, the men over there have hair the color of the sun and eyes clear like the ocean at San Andrés.

  Here, my heart squeezes in terror at the thought that someone could lie to my mother of all people, my beautiful rag doll mother.

  She pauses in her story. My mother is an expert in the relationship between silence and language. She knows when and for how long to permit the stillness to step in and take its sovereign place. It drives me crazy. I lean my face into her arm and ask, “And then what happened?”

  “They said so many things,” she answers.

  She is young in the story, my mother, and she has said she will go north. She will leave her mother for the United States but only for a month. She will set eyes on the country where mountains are made of steel and glass, and she will work to earn the money to pay back her sister and then some.

  But now it is true what they say: the time of leaving is the time of reckoning.

  It is December 8, 1970. It is a Tuesday morning in Bogotá, and my mother can’t stop thinking about what the Jewish forelady at the factory told her. “I’ve been there,” the woman said about the United States, her voice thick and ominous. “It’s a cold place, a difficult place.”

  The words rise and fall in my mother’s mind, squeeze perhaps at the tender places of her belly. She has never been far from her mother. She remembers the forelady’s warnings but keeps mute. The ticket has been paid for. It cost her sister a lot of money. It is nothing that can be changed.