A Cup of Water Under My Bed (3 page)

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

M
y 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 like 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
d
ó
lares
, 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.

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
.