A Cup of Water Under My Bed Read online

  I then go about sex like the overachiever from a working-class home I truly am. First, I start taking the pill. Then, I drag Julio to the local clinic to be tested for HIV. There, I carefully read the pamphlets on STDs and abortions. I pepper the counselor with questions. I check the expiration dates on the condoms and examine the rubbers for visible signs of tears. Finally, I am ready.

  Sex with a man is like what I have read in books and Glamour. There is suspense and need, an aching and much throbbing. There is el spot, and when Julio touches it, I understand immediately that this is the reason women cheat on their men, risk their corporate jobs, and abandon their children. And that Judy Blume was right, too. Something else could happen.

  By the time I start wearing a fake gold chain that proclaims “Julio [heart] Daisy 2-14-91,” my mother and aunties refuse to speak to him. It only makes me want him more. At nineteen, I move in with him, setting up our home in a basement apartment while commuting to college and working two part-time jobs. I love Julio against all odds, but mostly against the wishes of my mother and tías.

  When we break up a year later, Julio says my mother was right. He feared what she desired: that I would leave him for the guy with more money and a better car. Guilt-ridden, I tell him he’s wrong. The other guy understands me better. He’s also in college and a writer.

  But Julio is right. The other guy does have a better car. He didn’t emigrate from Colombia and he has the money to attend college. He’s not Italian, but his grandmother is.

  How did I end up heeding my mother’s warnings? Were the romance novels wrong? Does love follow the lines of race and class?

  To the degree that I am disturbed, my mother and tías are delighted. Finally, I am listening to them. I am in college, living back home, working part-time at a newspaper, and dating a gringo.

  The sign in the student center at William Paterson College reads “Workshop on Sexuality for Women * Hosted by the Feminist Collective.”

  I would like to say now that the afternoon, which changed my life, was cinematic. But it wasn’t. One night, I was in the arms of my new boyfriend; the next afternoon, I was sitting in a carpeted room with other college girls, giggling, fully clothed, drawing portraits of our vulvas.

  The facilitator, a woman from Planned Parenthood, is genuinely cheerful and unfazed by our work. “That’s it everyone! You’re doing great!” she calls out. “Fanny, that’s beautiful! I love the colors. Keep going! We’ve got crayons for everyone! Don’t be shy.”

  I glance up and down the table. All the women are drawing vulvas in startling shapes and colors and spending time on the size and details of their clitorises. So engrossed in staring, I almost don’t hear the Latina sitting next to me when she starts talking.

  Fanny is the president of the Feminist Collective and she’s encouraging me to attend the group’s weekly lunch meetings. I nod politely, but I’m too preoccupied with the portrait of another woman’s vulva, which looks like strawberries that have been plucked, washed, and pried opened.

  Fanny introduces me to the white woman sitting next to her, saying, “This is my girlfriend.”

  Maybe it’s the rich colors of all those vulvas in one room or the slow and purposeful way she says “girlfriend,” but I understand her immediately. And as I nod at Girlfriend, I think, “I have never met one.” A lesbian.

  Lesbians happen on television like Iris Chacón. They belong to another country. The idea of actually kissing a girl has never occurred to me. As Fanny and Girlfriend peck each other ever so lightly on the lips, I feel so embarrassed and enthralled that I frantically look around for a place to put my eyes. Finding nothing, I stare down at the crayon drawings of their vulvas.

  What is wrong with me? Qué me pasa? Why had it never occurred to me? A girl. I love kissing boys, but a girl. I could kiss a girl. The facilitator passes by, murmuring, “Daisy, why don’t you add some colors, open it up.”

  I look down and it’s there for the whole world to see: my vulva. I have drawn a small brown mound, a little hill speckled with black ants for curls.

  Not sure of where to meet a girl I can kiss, I head for the weekly meetings of the Feminist Collective. I dress in what I think are my best plaid shirts, but instead of meeting a girl, I find myself immersed in women’s rights. We talk about sexual abuse, organize our school’s Take Back the Night, and analyze the importance of lube. The women’s studies professor gives us impromptu talks about the fluidity of gender identity and desire, and it is all I can do to sit still next to the girl who looks like a boy.

  It is the mid-nineties and multicultural everything is in. I have the books, the teachers, and the new friends to teach me that being queer is about as normal as me being a Latina at a predominantly white college. Sure, Latinas and queers are outnumbered, but now the laws are on our side, and we have a small but visible community.

  The more I listen to Fanny talk about her life with a woman, the more comfortable I also feel. She knows about Audre Lorde and arroz con frijoles, and she throws a Spanish word into the conversation every now and then. She is close enough to remind me of home, the equivalent of my mother and aunties in one woman, with the lesbian and feminist parts added.

  The worst part about trying to date women is that I don’t have my mother’s warnings. There is no indicator if I am doing it right or wrong. And so, my queer friends and the spoken-word artists in New York are my teachers, and they know the formula.

  Sleep with your friend, sleep with her friend.

  Break up and get back together again.

  Write her a poem, show her the piers, pretend you want less than you do.

  One-night stands, one-night nothing.

  You’ll see her at Henrietta’s again and again.

  My friend is Dominican, and she reminds me of Iris Chacón. When we make love, I can’t tell what’s more exciting: her large, naked breasts against my own B-cup–sized ones or the inversion afterwards of gender roles. I am now the one buying dinner, picking up the flowers, driving us upstate. Every time she mixes Spanish and English in the same sentence, a part of myself collapses into what I am sure is eternal love.

  Within months, however, the relationship sours. So, I try dating another friend. She e-mails that she isn’t interested.

  I go out with a Puerto Rican butch, who drinks about as many Coronas as my father. My mother and aunties would be horrified. I am too, after two months.

  I meet another Dominican femme, but this one drives an SUV, has her hair straightened once a week, and keeps a butch lover in the Bronx. After three times in bed, I get tired of being on top.

  Dating a transgender man, I get tired of being on the bottom.

  I go back to what I know and try dating a Colombian woman. But she lives across the Hudson River and doesn’t have a phone with long distance.

  I persevere though—drinking flat Diet Coke at lesbian bars and giving women my phone number—because I do not believe my mother. I have read the romance novels, seen the movies, and heard the songs. Love will work no matter what job I have, what nationality I claim, or what street I want to live on. It will work even if I kiss a woman.

  And it does.

  For a few months, I fall in love with a dark-haired woman who has a way of tilting her bony hip that gives her ownership of the room. Men hit on Lisette and she snaps, “I don’t think my girlfriend would appreciate that.” She is the most feminine woman I have dated (hours are spent dabbing eye shadow in multiple directions), but also the most masculine. She carries my bags, buys me overpriced jeans, leans in to kiss me. She talks to me about the films she will make one day and the books I will write. She follows me into the dressing room at Express and whispers that she wants to go down on me right there. “I like it when you scream,” she tells me in bed. “I need you to do it like this morning. Scratch my back when I’m fucking you.”

  I had heard those lines before from men and from women, but it’s different this time. I am sure I will never date anyone else ever again.
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  When she breaks up with me (yes, by e-mail), I don’t know if I am crying over her or because I can’t talk about it with Mami and Tía Chuchi and Tía Dora and Tía Rosa, the first women I loved. Instead, I tell them it is the rigors of graduate school that now make me sob in my mother’s arms in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.

  After another night of crying about lost love, I call my mother into my bedroom. Unsure of where to begin, I choose the logical. “Mami,” I begin in Spanish, “it’s been a long time since I’ve had a boyfriend.”

  She nods and gives me a small smile.

  I look at the pink wall of the bedroom I have in my parent’s home, the writing awards, the Ani DiFranco CDs, the books. “Estoy saliendo con mujeres.” I’m dating women.

  Her mouth opens, but no sound comes out. She covers her heart with her right hand in a pose similar to the one of the Virgin Mary that hangs over the bed she shares with my father.

  “Mami, are you ok?”

  “Ay, Dios mío.”

  When she doesn’t say anything else, I fill the silence between us with a concise history of the LGBT, feminist, and civil right movements, which combined have opened the door to higher education, better laws, and supportive communities of what would be otherwise marginalized people. “It’s because of how hard you worked to put me through school that I am fortunate enough to be so happy and make such good decisions for myself.”

  By this time, my mother is hyperventilating and fanning herself with her other hand. She stammers, “I’ve never heard of this. This doesn’t happen in Colombia.”

  “You haven’t been in Colombia in twenty-seven years.”

  “But I never saw anything like this there.”

  In the days that follow, Tía Chuchi accuses me of trying to kill my mother.

  We’re on the phone. She’s at Tía Dora’s apartment. As if it’s not enough that I am murdering my mother, Tía Chuchi adds with grim self-satisfaction: “It’s not going to work, sabes? You need a man for the equipment.”

  For this, I am ready. I am not being sassy. I really do believe she doesn’t know and that I can inform her. “Tía, you can buy the equipment.”

  She breaks out into a Hail Mary and hangs up the phone.

  My mother develops a minor depression and a vague but persistent headache. She is not well, the tías snap at me.

  “Don’t say anything to her!” barks Tía Dora over the phone. “The way this woman has suffered I will never know.”

  But she wants me to know.

  Tía Dora stops talking to me. She throws away a gift from me because she can see that the present (a book on indigenous religions in Mexico) is my way of trying to convert her to loving women. Tía Chuchi begins walking into the other room when I arrive home. Tía Rosa alludes to the vicious rumors the other two aunties have started about me. “It’s terrible,” she says, and then: “Siéntate, siéntate. I made you buñuelos just the way you like. Are you hungry?”

  Tía Rosa still complains about the back pains from the accident of years before, but she is living in her own apartment again. In her sixties now, she is a short, robust woman with thick eyeglasses and hair the color of black ash. Her husband is long gone, and since the bed is half empty, Tía Rosa has covered the mattress with prayer cards. Every night, she lies down on that blanket made of white faces, gold crosses, and pink-rose lips.

  That my romantic choices could upset my mother and tías had been a given since high school. A lot can be said about a woman who dates the wrong man. But dating the same sex or dating both sexes has no explanation.

  My mother now is hurt. More than anything, she is bruised, and she wonders what she did wrong. “This isn’t what we expected,” she says quietly one day as we walk toward Bergenline Avenue to catch the bus.

  I keep thinking that if only I could tell my mother how it works with women, she would understand. The problem is I don’t know.

  The closest I have to an explanation is a Frida Kahlo painting titled The Two Fridas, where the artist is sitting next to her twin who holds her heart, an artery, and a pair of scissors. That is how I feel about loving women. They can dig into you and hold the insides of you, all bloodied and smelly, in their hands. They know you like that. But this is nothing I can say to my mother.

  I miss the conversations now. More than anything, I long for the days when I came home to report that Julio had given me flowers or promised to take me to Wildwood. We have, my family and me, including my father (who demanded to know if Julio was gay the whole time), settled into a region called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And it is hard, I imagine, for people who have not experienced this to understand the weight of that silence and how the absence of language can feel like a death.

  Often when my mother tells me about those early days in her relationship with my father, she mentions the postres.

  “He would bring pastries from the bakery,” she recalls, smiling and then adding with a warning, “That’s how they get you.”

  Kristina does it with dulce de leche.

  Our first date is a month after September 11. The city is struggling to be normal. The subways are running and the New York Times is publishing its “Portraits of Grief.” Kristina and I eat burritos on Christopher Street and walk to the piers. In the summers, brown butches and black divas light up the area, their bodies pretzeled around their loves and friends and strangers, but tonight the piers are empty, muted, solitos. With the bone skeleton of lower Manhattan near us and Jersey’s lights across the river, Kristina and I kiss for the first time.

  She’s mixed: white, Chicana, Californian, New Mexican. She reminds me of the women in my family, the shape of their bodies, ni gorda ni flaca. It’s how quick she lights up when I say, “I’ve got chisme,” and the way she talks to her mother on the phone and then laughs and says to me: “I’m on hold. Walter Mercado’s on.”

  This is our routine: I take a bus from Jersey, then switch to the 1 train. She meets me at the stop near her apartment in the Bronx. We make love. Afterwards, Kristina rolls over on her side and asks, “You want some ice cream?”

  She dresses and crosses the street to the deli for small cups of dulce de leche. I eat the cold caramel on her sofa, my head on her shoulder, crying into the helado, because Halle Berry has won the Oscar.

  My mother would like Kristina. She would probably like her more than she likes me. Kristina believes in diplomacy. Like my mother, she doesn’t see why I need to write about sexuality. She values privacy. My mother would appreciate that.

  When Kristina and I break up, almost five years after we first ate dulce de leche together, I call Tía Chuchi to deliver the news. “We’ve ended,” I say in Spanish. “For good this time.”

  I don’t know what to expect from my auntie, but I’m figuring she will say something along the lines of good riddance. Instead, she exclaims, “That’s why you’re taking the martial arts class!”

  “What?”

  “That’s why you’re taking martial arts. I knew this woman who rented a room once from a lady and it turned out the lady was, tu sabes, gay.” The lesbian had terrible fights with her partner. “It was horrible,” my auntie recalls, as if she had been in the room when the arguments exploded. “They threw pots and pans at each other and fought with their fists.” Tía sighs. “It’s good you’re taking the martial arts classes to defend yourself.”

  I start laughing and crying, because my ex-girlfriend couldn’t face a kitchen mouse let alone strike another woman, because I loved her so much and walked away, because I glimpse in my tía’s words some deeper emotion, some love that struggles to be steady even when it hurts.

  Queer Narratives

  The teenagers file into the classroom, an army of baggy jeans and stiff hair, acrylic nails and cell phones. They number at least thirty, maybe forty. Their teacher is forcing them to be here, because a community organization has sent me to talk to them about what it means to be a part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. The idea is that
the more contact young people have with queers, the less likely they will be to hate us or worse.

  “I’m bisexual,” I start. “It’s like you like vanilla and chocolate ice cream, but not at the same time.” I score a few smiles and half of a laugh, the kind you get when the joke was that bad. The boys in the front pause from scanning their cell phones.

  As I talk, photographs of my life migrate around the classroom: aunties gathered around me at a birthday cake, my mother beaming next to me at college graduation. The boys hand the photos off like baseball cards they already own; the girls cradle them with the tips of their nails, careful to not leave any kind of mancha.

  A girl raises her hand. She’s at the back of the room and reminds me of myself when I was in high school (the big earrings, the acrylic uñas, the long hair tucked behind her ear). She asks, “Do you want to marry a guy or a girl?”

  I want to tell her: “Girlfriend, I’d be happy to meet someone I like as much as my cat.” But I can’t say that, because these are teenagers. They are impressionable. They’re young. If I give them the wrong response, they might beat up a queer kid one day or not come out of the closet themselves. “For me, gender doesn’t matter,” I announce, painfully cheerful. “I’m attracted to who the person is on the inside.”

  The moment the words are out of my mouth, I cringe. What I have said is bullshit and the girl knows it and I know it and so does everyone else in the room. It does matter—gender, sexuality, desire, all of it. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be here talking about it, and Gwen Araujo would still be alive.

  Looking at pictures of Gwen, it is her eyes you notice first. Dark and almost arrogant, her eyes seem to leave behind the rest of her, as if the face and body are expendable and all that matters are the verses inscribed in pupils and irises, false eyelashes and arched eyebrows.

  But the shape of a poem counts and the body, too, so in 2004, I traveled to the small town outside of San Francisco, where Gwen had grown up. I was writing a magazine article about her life and what had happened before and after. The facts were these: Gwen had been born in 1985 to a Chicana mother. She had been born a boy. The flat chest, the flaccid penis, the narrow hips—these were not body parts to Gwen but chapters in a book that made her cry.