A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  “Aquí hay una boda!” Conchita announces, her hands banging on the table.

  “Here, there is a wedding!” I practically scream, surprised at the authority in my voice and also at the news.

  Geralen’s eyes widen. I look into the cup almost expecting to see a picture the way I hear Conchita’s words. But the water is an empty, shimmering canvas, and soon the session is over. Remedies are prescribed. Geralen pays in cash (twenty dollars), and we leave.

  We pour onto the street, the light of the day almost blinding after the cool dark of Conchita’s apartment. Geralen and Tía Chuchi are nodding about the accuracy of the reading, and although I am slightly light-headed from all the talk and movement, I can hear myself, that other me, the dark river, say: I do not believe this woman.

  Conchita is too loud, too brash, too excitable. She makes me want to go home and take a nap, or walk over and see La Viejita María, the woman who told me I could be a writer and make a living. She is a comma, La Viejita María. She’s gentle. She smiles at me and my auntie as if we are sitting in a rowboat and the river currents do not bother her and don’t need to worry us.

  My parents’ bedroom has only enough room for their bed and a dresser. I am already out of college when I first kneel beside their bed because something has slipped underneath: a book, a pencil, a spool of thread. And there it is: a cup of water tucked under their bed, directly below my mother’s pillow.

  I had expected that when I left my mother’s home, my father’s house, my Tía Chuchi’s stories, that I would be done with the women too. It was my parents and my auntie who needed the cups of water and the cartas. I didn’t care what the dead thought about what I planned to do on Tuesday. I had better things in life: a graduate degree in journalism and Latin American studies, shelves of books about God, feminism, and America’s racial hierarchy, and late-night conversations with artists and activists. Most important, though, I had a therapist.

  When I am anxious now about what might happen next in my life, I do not consult Conchita and her big cup of water or even La Viejita María. I walk into the office of a nice Japanese American woman who has an iPhone and has studied dead white men, the unconscious, and the id.

  “Help me,” I whine to my therapist, Cary. “Everything’s falling apart.” People are being mugged at gunpoint in my neighborhood and I need to stay away from a lover I can’t seem to stay away from. In short, the near future lies in front of me like a series of cards turned over, unwilling to reveal anything and I am imagining the worst.

  Cary nods and asks, “What’s helped you before?”

  Together, we make a list: talk to friends, take long walks, journal. At the end of fifty minutes, I have a sheet of paper with words on it. It is helpful, but somehow, it is not enough.

  Yvette is a woman who looks like a church bell. Her copper body curves with purpose, angles on a chair as if from a tower overlooking a village by the sea. Her bones are strong everywhere, in her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands. They are made from something more durable, like iron or brass. When she smiles, it is as if a bell has been struck, as if music has entered the world the way God intended: at noon by the sea. It is hard to believe she is another Juana, a santera, a woman who is supposed to know.

  A friend of mine has brought me to Yvette, and although she lives outside San Francisco, far from New Jersey and Bergenline, when I step into her home, the scene is familiar. White candles lay on their sides, unlit and expectant, a vase brims with red roses, soperos are mounted on shelves. Each muerto has their own framed picture and a cup of water. The vasitos gather on a table next to cologne and flores like old friends.

  “It’s good to meet you,” Yvette says, hugging me, the church bell sounding.

  My friend has brought me here because I asked. I did it on impulse, curious perhaps to meet a santera so far from home. It is not Yvette, however, who knows how to carry out the divination reading. It is her husband.

  Carlos looks like a darker version of my father. He’s flaco and smoking a cigarette, but he’s also a famous drummer from Cuba. He eyes me seriously, then grins. He does not use tarot cards or cups of water. He reads cowrie shells, porcelain-like shells. About a recent failed relationship, he declares, “Where there was fire, there are still ashes.” I shake my head. That romance is over. About what to do next in my work life, he says, “Every dog has four legs but only one road.” I sigh. “You have to choose,” he says. No shit, I think.

  “You’ve had readings before,” Carlos says.

  I nod. “My father . . .” And before I can catch myself, I am crying, because this place reminds me of home, because I still want to know a love that does not have sharp edges.

  The tears pass, the reading ends. I am ready to leave when a model ship on the mantle catches my eye. Made of bleached wood, the ship’s sides glisten with glitter, cowrie shells, and coat buttons.

  “It’s beautiful,” I marvel.

  “Yeah, you like it?” Yvette says, fingering the stern. “I made it.”

  “How?”

  “You find stuff, you know,” she laughs. “I pick up bits from here and there and you know . . .” Her long fingers flutter to finish her sentence.

  Seeing the ship she has created is like coming across a poem you wish you had written. The barco itself is for Yemayá, the ocean goddess in the Afro-Cuban religion, the great mother. I don’t tell Yvette that I am, myself, partial to Eleggúa, but standing next to me now, she says: “What happened with your father—Eleggúa saw that. He was there.”

  My chest, my throat, my belly, my whole body it feels, falls into place. Eleggúa saw that. He was there. You weren’t alone.

  I stare at the ship’s stern and the brass buttons like portholes, and I can see that for more than thirty years I have been waiting for a woman like Juana but not her, a woman my mother would have consulted, to comfort me.

  A small knot in my chest loosens, and the memory of Juana, the anger toward her, falls away, and somehow too all the doubts I have ever had about these women. It was not knowledge I was seeking, not a definitive version of the truth, but rather the solace of a woman’s words.

  Sometimes now when I think about the women my mother called on, I consider how they may have helped her to feel less alone in this world. At least there was a woman to talk to, to ask questions of, to sit with, because no one ever mentions the silence that follows the painful moments. Everyone talks of what happened when the forelady announced the factory was closing, when a man beat a child and the police were called, when a girl realized that going to college would cost thousands of dollars. But of what happens afterwards, no one ever speaks.

  It is an empty room, that afterwards, a soledad, and it sits there at the center of a person’s life and waits to be filled.

  two

  Even If I Kiss a Woman

  My mother and tías warn me about dating Colombian men: “Esos no sirven.” They say the same thing about the 1970s television set in our kitchen. “That TV no sirve para nada.” It doesn’t work.

  As a child, I think being married to a Colombian man will be like fighting with our old television. It only gets three channels, but we make it work because it is the one we have. We switch between channels by turning the knob with a wrench. Then we spin the antennas in circles, and when one points at the sink and the other out the window— past the clothesline with Tía Chuchi’s three-dollar pants—we find it does work, and we have the telenovela Simplemente María.

  Although my five uncles are in Colombia, phone calls between New Jersey and Bogotá bring stories of my charming, whiskey-drinking tíos and all the evidence for why Colombian men don’t work. From the kitchen, my mother and aunties dictate warnings that over the years come to sound like twisted nursery rhymes.

  Colombian men get drunk, beat their women,

  cheat on their wives, and never earn enough money.

  They keep mistresses, have bastard children,

  and never come home on time.

  They s
teal, lie, sneak around, and come home to die,

  cradled in the arms of bitter wives.

  The same could perhaps have been said about men in other countries, but it’s easier to believe the worst about the people you know best.

  At sixteen then, I know to stay away from Colombian men. I know that Julio is Colombian. But he works the grill at the McDonald’s where I have my first after-school job and he winks at me. While I know the dangers of Colombian men, I have also been reading Harlequin romance novels since fifth grade, and I have been waiting for a man to wink at me. Men do this with beautiful women, and those women are always happy. They do not work at fast-food places. They get to go to college. They speak English perfectly and French as well.

  Julio talks to me in Spanish. Querida, mi amor, mi cielo. In Spanish, there are so many words to love a woman—words I have never heard before. When things are slow in the kitchen, Julio stands behind me at the register and helps me with the orders. “Ya mi amor, I got that for you. Get the next customer.”

  I give him my phone number, which is to the say the number at my mother’s house.

  Most women stick to their own kind. They base love and their marriages on the lines drawn between countries. My high school friends have mothers from Chile, Perú, Ecuador, and Argentina, and these mothers have married men from their homelands. Some wed there and migrated together. Others met their husbands here in Jersey among friends, at a house party, a work place. Coming from the same country was the start of connection, the entry point to love.

  The women in my family do not believe in such intimacies.

  My mother married my Cuban father, Tía Rosa settled with a Puerto Rican, and Tía Dora a Peruvian. They married men with dark eyes and papeles, men whose wallets had Social Security cards. Tía Chuchi never bothered with any man since everyone knows that God is the only man who truly works.

  The women in my family then teach me a complicated formula of what works with men. My father’s alcoholism is better than womanizing or, worse, a man who can’t hold down a job. My Peruvian uncle is snobbish at times, but he drives a Chevrolet and takes us to Great Adventure, Action Park, and Niagara Falls. My Puerto Rican uncle is fat and has kids from a first marriage, but he reads tarot cards and cooks a good arroz con pollo for Thanksgiving. Finally, God does nothing to stop the war in Colombia, but he is reason enough for Tía Chuchi to wake up early every morning and have someone to think about other than the violencia over there and the unemployment lines here.

  My mother and aunties advise me on what to look for in love:

  A man with a college degree is best, but choose white over black because no one sees the diploma on the street, in churches, and at the supermercados.

  Forget Caribbean men. They want sex all the time, speak Spanish with missing syllables, and if they are not black, their grandmothers might be.

  Forget Central Americans. They want sex all the time, do not grow any taller, and if they are not indios, their grandmothers might be.

  Consider Argentineans. They want sex all the time, but most are white, have law degrees, and if they are not Italian, their grandmothers might be.

  Remember to ask if he grew up in the capital or some no-name campo. It is the difference between marrying the Bronx and Fort Lee.

  When Julio begins calling, I get under the bedcovers with the telephone receiver. My mother and aunties roll their eyes, sure that it is a passing interest. They are certain I will marry American. Anything made in America works. The cars, the washing machines, the light bulbs, even the men.

  Of course, they hear the same accusation, “Esos no sirven,” hurled at Americans. They even know a woman who left her husband and children for an Americano. Months later, the gringo dumped her.

  “No better than a Colombian,” declares Tía Dora, tucking a stray hair behind her ear. “He wanted her for you know what y nada más.”

  But it is the Colombian men that my mother and aunties knew best. In our kitchen, they are the guiltiest.

  Julio is a paradox for my family. He has hazel eyes and pale skin and looks more American than the Italians who run my mother’s factory. He calls my mother Doña and returns from fishing trips with trout for my father. My mother is suspicious; my father delighted about the free seafood.

  Six months later, my tías and mother don’t know what to say. The last time a woman in our family dated a Colombian was almost two decades earlier in a country where that was the only choice. My mother gives me an accusatory look that calls to mind the writings of Achy Obejas: “We came all the way from Colombia so you could date this guy?”

  I continue dating Julio, however, because I am confident in the love of the women in my family. Despite their dictates about men, my mother and aunties teach me that our primary ties are to each other as women. The four of them rely on each other for the cleaning, the shopping, the respite of a good chisme. It’s a woman who will fry you a good salty bistec, and it’s a woman, a sister, who has now pulled out the sofa bed in the living room, because Tía Rosa’s husband left and a commuter van hit her on Kennedy Boulevard, leaving my auntie in the middle of the street like a mashed-up bird. She’s been released from the hospital and has come to live with us.

  In a home run by women, I hold high court. The three aunties have no children of their own, and as the first born to my mother, I am la consentida and also their American brat. National identity can carry many meanings; in our home, it is a get-out-of-jail-free card that extends to dating a Colombian man. Everyone—my mother, my tías, and even me—we blame my transgressions on my American side.

  My own concerns, though, have to do with another border. I am a virgin, and Julio has said he will wait until I am ready. I expect to be ready soon.

  The women in my family do not talk to me about sex, and women’s magazines do not mention poverty or race. My mother and tías tell me that men either work for you or they do not. Romance happens between seven and nine in the evening on Spanish soap operas. Sex comes later.

  But at the library, I read the truth about multiple orgasms in Cosmo. I rely on a library copy of Judy Blume’s novel Forever to tell me I can have sex with a boy and not marry him. Something can happen between a broken hymen and baby showers. College and a career, of course, but mostly it will be a lot of sex. My best friend and I spend our teenage summers reading Judith Krantz novels and watching porn videos from her father’s collection. We see that women can have sex in swimming pools and hotel rooms and even on a spaceship. They can do it with different men and with each other. I observe this, analyze it, and come to my final conclusion: sex is good.

  By the time I watch women have sex with each other on my friend’s nineteen-inch TV set, I have already heard about women like them.

  I am ten years old and sitting at the kitchen table when a friend of my mother’s tells her and the tías the latest chisme: a woman they all know from the neighborhood has left her husband and children to be with another woman. Gasps make their way around the kitchen table where café con leche is being served.

  “Can you believe it?”

  “She’s that way?”

  “I never would have thought it!”

  Everyone is shocked that a woman was so moved by love that it flung her into the arms of another woman. I, for one, find it terribly romantic. It’s like a Harlequin romance novel but without the stoic, rich guy, or like Romeo and Juliet but without the suicides. Two women in love confirms for me that there is a love that can push you beyond what everyone else says is possible.

  I am also not sure why the women in my family are so startled about a woman going off with another mujer. Besides discussing how Colombian men don’t work, all we ever do at home is talk about women.

  There are two types of women in this world. The telenovela one is a fair-skin lovely who works as a maid, suffers public humiliations, and marries her well-to-do man in the last episode. Then, there is Iris Chacón.

  On Saturdays, my family gathers to watch a variety show on
Spanish-language television, where Iris Chacón is all sequined thong and big brown ass, and salsa is a side note. She is a curve of glitter on the screen, an exaggeration turned into art of what it means to be a woman, and we are very much in love with her. Or at least, my father and I are.

  My mother and tías talk endlessly about Iris Chacón.

  “Look at her tetas!”

  “Qué grandes, no?”

  “And her backside!

  “Cómo lo mueve!”

  They discuss other dancers and performers, debating who has silicone implants and fake behinds. I stare at the screen, wondering how real Iris Chacón is.

  “She might as well wear nothing!” my mother declares, as if to chastise us for looking.

  My father and I nod but keep our eyes on the screen, grateful that the reception is good on the old television set.

  After a year of dating, I am very much in love with Julio, his old white Camaro with its black doors, and the tender way he kisses me. He takes me down the shore at night when the world is flooded with stars and the sound of crashing waves, and life feels so much bigger than what I ever imagined. I am seventeen and in love.

  I am also beginning to resent my mother and tías for finding any fault in a man who takes me to the movies, the mall, and upscale versions of McDonald’s, like Houlihans. The more they raise their dark eyebrows and ask if Julio ever plans to attend college and amount to anything more than a fast-food job, the more I call him and tell him I will love him forever.

  Sex is a different matter.

  Growing up in a small town where love easily means nine months of gordura and no high school graduation, I am determined not to become a teenage mother. I tell Julio that sex between us shall happen after my high school graduation, when I am on my way to college with a four-year scholarship.