A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  I imagine her picking up the suitcase and giving her bed a long look. Then seeing she has no place to hide her doubt, she swallows it whole and shuts the door.

  “And then what happened?”

  It is my sister asking or me. I can’t tell because I am fighting to stay awake, to hear the story I know by heart, the stories I hear every night.

  And then what happened?

  I am too young to know that this is the nature of children’s stories. There is always the heroine. There is always the terrible moment when the road splits, when a girl finds herself alone on the stage having to choose between school and the factory, between her mother and the cursing women, between Colombia and New Jersey.

  And there is always the child listening as anxiously this time as the first time she heard the story. There is always the child learning the nature of fear, the promise of happy endings.

  The stories my mother tells are crowded with monsters.

  There are the factory women who curse, the woman who invites her to come to the States, the woman who uses her as a distraction while shoplifting. Sometimes the monster is Rosa, the sister who lent her the cash to leave Colombia.

  In the States, Mami expected to find dollars plastered on sidewalks like wet leaves. “That’s what they used to say,” she whispers. “That it grew on trees.”

  But nothing is what it was supposed to be. The Friday before she arrives in Jersey City, socialists bomb an oil refinery in nearby Linden. The flames shoot more than a thousand feet into the air, a blinding protest for Angela Davis and Bobby Seale.

  My mother finds work at a factory, cosiendo women’s blouses on a Merrow sewing machine. Some days, she has the sleeves, the empty brazos, and she prods them under the pulsing needle, stitches them to the blusa. Other days, the blouse is nothing but two sheets of green fabric, and Mami’s work is to attach the two at the shoulder, the thick thread birthing the shape.

  Soon, she has another job, and a third. She is desperate to pay off the debt to her sister.

  At twenty-eight, she lies in bed in New Jersey solita, and she cries and wonders, “What did I do?” She thinks about what her mother may be doing in that moment. She imagines them all there at the house together—her sisters, her brothers, her sisters-in-law, the nephews and nieces, the cousins and neighbors. All of them together sin ella.

  I listen to her, my heart no longer an organ in the body but a pillow that can be grabbed and squeezed up close to the throat. My eyes are closed and the world is only my mother’s large rag-doll arm soft against my cheek, her Spanish with its measured silences, and that horrible knowledge—that a girl may have to live without her mother—weighs on my chest like a stone, like death.

  In my mother’s stories, women are named after soft drinks.

  La Coca-Cola lives in West New York. She has a lapdog she walks around the neighborhood. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her, which is why she’s named after the popular soft drink. In the early seventies, La Coca-Cola understands immigration law, and women and men, and even marriage. She introduces my mother to Ygnacio, a skinny Cuban, who is so smitten that he buys a car to drive Mami around town.

  When the Cuban proposes marriage on a park bench a few months later, my mother’s answer is not the frenzy of “Yes, te quiero” or the cautiousness of “I need to think it over.” It is the practical: No tengo papeles.

  She isn’t a citizen. She isn’t a resident. On paper, she is not even a tourist anymore.

  My mother loves to tell the story of how she took me to Canada. This is a happy cuento and so it is not a bedtime story. It is one that can be told in the light of day when the aunties and neighbors are crowded around us at the picnic table in the yard. She took her baby to Canada.

  “That doesn’t count!” I object.

  The lawyer said it did.

  In those years, the mid-seventies, the border at the north was not a solid mass, nothing made of granite but rather a door that swung open and allowed women like my mother to claim they had been living out of the country, so they could be sponsored by their American husbands, or in this case, a Cuban-turned-American on paper.

  “You were in Canada,” she croons. “En la barriga.”

  My own stomach tightens. “What did they say?” I ask, nervous at the prospect of hearing a terrible story. How did they want her to prove that she was married, that it wasn’t fake?

  She tilts her chin into the air, defiant. “What could they say? I was pregnant. What more proof is there?” She smiles, satisfied.

  I gape at my mother. She hates places where people wear uniforms or suits. Hospitals, embassies, even banks make her anxious. It is hard to imagine a time when she was bold enough to show her swollen belly to white men, to government officials.

  She insists, though, that it was the other way around, that crossing the border into Canada, I was the one who kicked in protest. I was the one who wanted to be heard, to be felt, to be taken into account.

  My mother has one bedtime story that makes her smile.

  In this story, she is seven or eight. She’s not in Bogotá yet. She’s still in Ramiriquí, a dot of a town a few hours outside of Colombia’s capital. She is with her mother at morning Mass. Standing there in the pews, listening to the priest drone at the altar, my mother catches sight of a woman and her son. The woman is fine, perfectly acceptable, but the boy . . .

  “What was wrong with the boy?” I whisper from my side of the bed. I am eight and alarmed, imagining a missing eye, a nose askew.

  “He was . . .” My mother pauses, smiles fondly, as if it’s a silly story. “He was negrito.”

  The boy was black.

  My mother, then only a girl my age, turns her young pale face to her mami and in a hush, she asks: “How can that woman love her child? He’s feo.”

  My grandmother smiles or scowls or shakes her head. That’s not the important part. What counts is what she said next: “No matter how ugly, a child is always beautiful to his mother.”

  The words shock my mother. She stares at the boy some more. She’s young, my mother, and she cannot imagine that it is true, that a mother’s love demands nothing of its beloved, not even whiteness.

  On the second floor of our home one evening, the white board stands on a tripod. It is magnetized, which makes the board into a sheet of paper that has come alive. I place upon that alabaster landscape the plastic magnets in the shape of letters: A, B, C, D, E. The letters are bursts of blue and red and orange, and to me, at the age of nine or ten, they are precious. They are not letters, not even letras that in Spanish sound so dignified—they are the tiny springs and steady hands that make the day possible. They are reliable. My mother, I have decided, needs to have them. In English. I believe they will rescue her from the horrors of this lifetime: the loneliness of her bedtime stories, my father’s rages, the forelady at the factory who doesn’t pay on time, the receptionist at the dental office who knows we’re there on charity and talks about us in third person.

  I stand at the white board. My mother sits before me and the bright letters. “Repeat after me,” I instruct in Spanish and then switch to English. “A, B, C . . .”

  My mother grins. She is not the young woman of her stories now, not the one bracing herself for a new world of sounds and terrors. She is not even a rag doll. She is sturdier, rounder, more reliable and promising, like a new spool of thread. Her hair is the dark red of the sun at dusk, the result of coloring it with Clairol. Her pale face is tired and satisfied. She has spent the day steeped in fabric and thread and women’s voices at the factory. Now she is here with me to learn English.

  She repeats after me—A, B, C—but something grabs her attention: The sound of my sister’s voice in the other room. The clock signaling the hour for the telenovela. “Pon atención,” I demand, my jaw as tense as a white schoolteacher’s.

  My mother feigns a guilty face and tries again. But then something bigger happens (something is always happening). The phone rings. My sister wants mo
re orange-flavored soda. An auntie arrives. And my mother leaps away with that vicious promise of “Seguimos más tarde,” as if learning English were a game that could be interrupted, paused, and resumed at leisure.

  I am so young. I think language is all a woman needs.

  As a child, I don’t know how to find myself in stories.

  Sometimes I am in my mother’s cuentos and I understand what it means to leave your mami since I am leaving mine every day while I stumble over English verbs. Other times, I see myself in my social studies textbook. I am the Statue of Liberty, welcoming my mother to the land of the free, of the saved.

  The textbooks carry pictures of women and men arriving at Ellis Island. The women in the photographs appear stoic, with obligatory bleak faces and thick eyebrows, their lips as thin as my mother’s, and the caption begins: “They came . . .”

  What comes next varies.

  They came looking, they came searching, they came hoping—the verbs always more lively and ambitious than the women in the pictures, whose faces speak another refrain: “What the hell are you looking at?”

  It must have been around the time I was nine that the stories moved. I must have wanted to be in my own bed at night, and my mother did not object. Her stories stepped into other moments of our lives, into that hour in her bedroom on Sunday mornings between waking and boiling water para el café.

  Here, the curtains are still drawn, but the light of the day filters in. The room is golden. The dresser squeezed into the corner. The Virgin Mary, confined to a spot above the bed, watches over us, and my mother remembers the time she first learned what it means to be a woman.

  She was in the shower. It should have been a normal day, but her mother had not told her about the bleeding. Now here it is: the red river between her legs, her back throbbing, and later her brothers laughing and telling her about the prostitutes they know. “I was so naïve,” she sighs.

  My mother wrote for a time. She penned letters to her mother and posted them in the mail in Jersey, but they never reached Colombia. “They thought I was dead,” she says, the wrinkles forming at the corners of her eyes and lips. She tells us again about those days: the crushing solitude, the debt she had to pay, the factories.

  But I am grown now. I am writing this story, and I have questions that feel harsh in the morning light and also necessary. Why was it my mother and not her brothers or sisters who left Colombia? Which is to say, why am I writing and not my friends or my sister? Why her and me? Why are we willing to leave home?

  “I got the invitation,” my mother answers, as if she has never told me the story. “I knew this lady who had worked with me in Colombia and she said, ‘If I ever get to the United States, I’ll send for you.’”

  “But that can’t be it,” I argue.

  It cannot be as simple as getting an invitation. There has to already be the trace of something in a person, a certain boldness, at least a longing.

  The room at New York University has two sofas and a dim light. It’s been a year since I finished college in Jersey, and now I squeeze in between the women on the long sofa. Three Latina feminists have organized a writing workshop here. An introduction is made and a South Asian woman in her twenties begins to read her work.

  The story is about a girl whose family home is burned down in an act of racial hatred. The girl’s father is distraught and enraged; the girl is standing apart, watching the burning. She hated the house like she hated her father, who lorded over that home, over her girl life, over her mother.

  It is the first time I have known someone my age writing about loving and hating where you come from, about the terrible things a father does and the awful things the world does to him, and the mother standing by in that bitter silence. Running clear through the story is the love the girl feels for her family, their home, and, also, the anguish.

  For me, this has all been a very private matter, a story not even whispered at bedtime. But here is a dark-haired woman sitting right in front of me, having written it all down, and I can see for the first time that shame and memories need not oppress us. Naming carries its own brilliant power.

  In the kitchen, the light of the early evening flickers through the partially opened curtains, and my mother does not have a story for us today, but I have one for her.

  Feminism, I want her to know, is what will liberate her. She should organize with the other women at the factory to demand their back wages. This is what women have done before. I’ve read about it.

  “What’s that?” my mother asks.

  I am annoyed to have my story interrupted. “What’s what?”

  “Femenís.”

  Her Spanish squeezes the word as if it were not an elegant arrangement of sounds, a whole body of ideas and stories and political actions, but an avocado she’s pinching at the supermercado.

  I don’t know the word in Spanish for feminist, so I write about not knowing. I write about the places between Spanish and English, between my mother’s stories and my own. When I am done, the piece is published in Ms. magazine, and I translate it into Spanish for my mother.

  Before sharing it with her, I check my spelling. I read it several times. It’s a crude rendering of the English version because I have no grace in Spanish, no intimacy with the syntax, but it is the best I can do.

  Days later, when I ask my mother what she thinks of the piece, she says, “Me dió tristeza.” Not “I hated it,” “I was shocked,” “I think you’re crazy.” But “Me dío tristeza.”

  The English translation—“It made me sad”—is not the equivalent of the Spanish. When a woman says in Spanish that something has made her sad, it sounds like she has kissed her child good-bye and boarded an airplane pa’ el Norte. The words in Spanish make you want to look away, which is what I do, and my mother and I don’t speak again about what I wrote.

  A few weeks after, though, she is sitting next to me at the kitchen table and asks, “What are you reading?”

  “A book,” I say without taking my eyes off the page.

  “Who wrote it?”

  I look up, startled. I have spent most of my days since I was nine years old reading books at the kitchen table. I am twenty-five. My mother has never asked me for the name of an author.

  “It’s this woman . . . Gloria Anzaldúa,” I say slowly, suspicious about her sudden interest. “She’s Chicana, like Mexican, but born here.”

  My mother sips her manzanilla tea. “What does she write about?”

  I stare at her, slightly disoriented. Before I can think too much, I am racing, the Spanish words stumbling out of my mouth as I explain Gloria’s ideas of the borderlands, of living “in between” as feminists, as Colombianas, as women who belong to more than one land and one culture. We are neither here nor there, I conclude, almost out of breath. Ni aquí, ni alla.

  My mother nods. She lowers her eyes to the book’s cover, then looks back at me, waiting for more, and the idea begins to bloom in me: my mother already knows this.

  It is a story as old as time, that we always find what we needed was right at home.

  But, therein is the riddle: a child has to leave to return. My mother had to. She says it often. She only appreciated her mother, only understood her mother, after she had left home.

  I had to leave, too. It was me, not my mother, who needed English, who needed the stories and feminist theories. Without them, I might never have come back to her.

  I tell my mother I am writing about her life and ask what she wants me to include.

  “I like to travel,” she answers, cheerfully. “I like gardens, flowers.”

  Her favorite place (the place she still thinks about) is London, because somehow despite the number of children with black hair, my mother’s eyes saw only the ones with blond ringlets and blue eyes. “They were cochinitos,” she laughs, “but I would have cleaned them up.”

  My mother tried to clean me up when I was born.

  She and Tía Chuchi scrubbed my face and arms and chest with soapy
water and cow’s milk. “You were so dark,” Tía remembers, as if the color of my skin had been an illness.

  It is Christmas Eve and the palm trees are swaying in the blue-black night. My mother, my sister, my father, and I are at a cousin’s house in South Florida. A pig is being roasted in a corner of the yard, its pink skin browning in the earth, and someone has turned up the volume on the speakers. The music winds around us and the women start to dance.

  My mother, now in her late sixties, begins an old dance, one from Colombia, from when she was joven and beautiful, she says. Her left hand lifts the edge of a long imaginary skirt. Her right hand reaches into the air as if to call forth a lover or the stars. Her feet tip to the left and to the right and her body follows.

  I look at her and think: Who the hell is this woman? And then I feel the thread between us break loose and my mother is a separate woman from me, one with her own life, a separate country, if you will. Her arm is reaching into the sky like an inverted exclamation point. Her right hand is not calling anyone to her but is instead announcing her.

  The Candy Dish

  My father keeps a candy dish in the shed. On the floor.

  When my mother refuses to grant me any more sweets in the kitchen, I make my way to the shed, or el cuartico, as we call it. It’s a small room attached to the front of our house and it holds the boiler that heats our home, my mother’s two industrial-size sewing machines, a shelf of plastic bags stuffed with fabric, and my father’s machete and hammer.

  The candy dish is hidden behind the boiler.

  My mother scolds me if she catches me here. My father does as well. If he’s drunk, he yells, curses, even shoves me out of the shed. None of this deters me.

  At the age of eight, I squeeze myself around the boiler’s round white body, careful to avoid the grease spots on the ground. The candy dish waits for me back there, a clay plate filled with M&Ms, Tootsie Rolls, and caramel candies. A gray rock with cowrie shells for eyes and a mouth sits on that throne of dulces, and next to the plate, a white ceramic cup has been filled with Cuban coffee.