A Cup of Water Under My Bed (5 page)

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

M
y 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.

I have been getting candy this way since I was a toddler and the clay dish was tucked under my parents’ bed. Over the years, I’ve learned to distinguish the new
dulces
from the old ones by examining the wrappers for dust and tears. I don’t know why my parents hide the plate like this, but it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t even annoy me. I’m used to it.

What does upset me in the
cuartico
is the other plate.

It’s made of clay also but filled with tiny iron toys: a shovel, machete, rake, and anvil. In theory, a collection of toys sounds appealing, but the iron pieces appear angry, and I always have the nagging suspicion that they are about to fling themselves at me. I’ve learned to take the candy, avoid the little machete, and run out of the shed.

There’s nothing odd about any of this, because it has always been this way. In my house, grown people hide candies and toys, even roosters.

I walk into the kitchen one day as my mother stands barefoot on the kitchen counter. She’s dressed in a white T-shirt and a violet skirt, and she’s carefully placing a tin rooster with bells at his feet on top of the cupboard.

She climbs down with some effort but also a look of satisfaction on her face, like she’s Moses returning from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. She sees me and asks a normal question, like if I want pizza for lunch. If I ask her about the rooster or the candy dish, she will have the same answer: “
Son cosas de tu papá
.”

From the top of the cupboard, the tin rooster’s bells are silent, but I can feel him watching us, his eyes soft and gray.

In Catholic elementary school, I read about how Jesus turned water to wine, and I examine the wings of the guardian angels in my children’s Bible. I study the Ten Commandments and write that I will have only one God and never steal my friend’s wife. Once a month, at St. John the Baptist Church, I share my sins with an old man through the screen wire in the confessional: Forgive me, Father, for I said three curse words this week.

I am happy with Catholicism. The songs are catchy, the incense smells good, and on Sundays, I get to put a quarter in a tin can and light a candle to the Virgin Mary.

My father, though, does not go to church. When I ask my mother about this, she replies, “Your father doesn’t go to church.”

I stare at her, not sure how she manages to answer my questions by repeating them as sentences. “Why not?” I inquire.

“He doesn’t go,” she says.

Instead, Papi walks down Bergenline Avenue on Sunday mornings or joins his friend Pedro on plumbing jobs. Home by early evening, my father starts drinking Coors beer in the kitchen if it is winter or in the front yard if it is summer. I sit nearby with a book in my hand and watch him.

A man who drinks too much is an open secret. No one talks about it because everyone drinks. Everyone has a father or uncle or cousin like that. There is nothing to hide. But there is plenty to see.

At first, it is ordinary, a man wading into the ocean, enjoying himself. He remembers a joke he heard at the bakery. He laughs hard and for a long time. He feels larger than life, like God or the sky. But the longer he’s in the ocean, the less he chuckles, the stronger the undercurrents become. He starts to complain that we’re making too much noise, that we’re talking on the phone too long. The television has to be turned off because the sound bothers him. The taut string of the horizon begins to waver before him. His eyes lose focus.

Then the waves come, furious and punishing, and he’s cursing at me, at my mother, at the kitchen sink. We’re stupid. We’re in the way. We need to get out of the way. Or he’s yelling about Fidel Castro and the cost of heating the house. Or he’s falling down, breaking his head open, the blood trickling down his forehead. In the emergency room, the doctor stitches him up, asks how much he had to drink that night. My father grins, raises two fingers. The doctor smiles, shakes his head, says he can smell the alcohol on him.

Only one night ends in the hospital. Most nights, my mother sighs in relief when my father’s body finally bends forward at the kitchen table, his forehead resting in the crook of his arm like a boy who is counting to ten in a game of hide-and-seek. He has passed out. Again.

My mother thinks the problem with my father is that his mother died when he was born. But I know the truth. The problem is my father’s godless.

Every Sunday, the priest lectures in English on those who stray from Jesus and his flock of sheep. The temptation to lie and steal torments them, the devil slips into their skulls, and then God punishes them when they die.

Unlike my classmates who conjure up sins for confession, because they are horrified at the idea of confiding their secrets to a
viejito
, I kneel in the confessional behind the dark red curtain and tell the truth. I said a curse word. I had a mean thought. I got angry with my mother. This is my fear: If I don’t tell the whole truth, a fat white man will fall from the sky and smack me.

My father doesn’t confess, and he swears about corrupt priests who pocket the Sunday
limosna
. But his sin—the one that is the worst—is being far from God, standing outside that flock of white sheep, alone on a hill, at a distance from where all the good stuff in the world takes place.

My mother’s older sister, La Tía Chuchi, does not believe in secrets.

She arrives from Colombia the year I turn fourteen to live with us. A former girls’ basketball coach, Tía Chuchi begins by assessing the players, the opponents, the court. She scrubs floors, throws out old newspapers, and empties the kitchen cupboards to find what is
viejo
and what is still good. She discovers everything: the tin rooster, the candy dish, the plate of iron toys.

“I told your mother,” Tía Chuchi begins, her voice clear and commanding, her lips coated in a bright pomegranate lipstick. “I told her she has to take care of your father’s things—that’s his religion.”

“Papi has a religion?”

“Of course, he does,” she says, as if I had asked a silly question, like whether Jesus is the one and only savior. “It’s Santería.”

It’s difficult to know whether to believe Tía Chuchi. She’s not like my mother, who sighs every time I ask a question as though I were the cause of a headache. Tía Chuchi is a library. She carries fantastical stories, like the one about the girl in Colombia who was so sick that she was taken to a farm where a bull was about to be slaughtered. At the precise second that the knife was plunged into the animal’s fat neck and blood leapt into the air, the girl had to drink it,
la sangre
. And that, according to Tía Chuchi, is how the child was finally cured.

It wouldn’t be surprising then for Tía Chuchi to make up a story about a grown man praying to a plate of candy, because that is what she tells me. The clay dish with its rock and sweets is part of my father’s religion. The rock is named Elegguá. He’s a
guerrero
, a warrior.

“It’s a kind of spirit your father confides in,” she says. “Like a
santo
.”

I consider this information and conclude that it is impossible. My father is not the kind of man who shares the quiet places of his soul with anyone, not a rock, not even my mother.

The candy dish being a
santo
, on the other hand, makes sense. In our town, saints occupy churches and hold court in front of Italian homes, protecting the families and their tomatoes. The
santos
are made of polished stone and bathed in flowers and candles. On Bergenline Avenue, they line the shelves at the botánica, where it is easy to buy miniature saint statues to receive help with finding lost items, lost lovers, even lost jobs. Like people, the saints come in all colors. San Martín de Porres clasps the gold cross with soft black hands and Santa Bárbara has a doughy white face and round chin. San Lázaro’s bruised legs are like my skinny
piernas
: if he lay in the sun, they would grow as dark as his two crutches.

I add Elegguá to the long list of
santos
in my life. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have arms or a human face. His cowrie-shell eyes gaze at me like those of a Baby Jesus: curious, lively,
los ojitos
of a friend.

Tía Chuchi doesn’t know about the other
guerreros
, the tin rooster or the other clay dish with the tiny machete. She qualifies her stories about my father’s religion by saying, “I don’t know much about these things, but. . . .”

But she does know. “They say you need a
padrino
,” she tells me. “The godfather is important. . . .”

“Where’s Papi’s
padrino
?” I ask.

Tía Chuchi shakes her head. “I don’t know. He died years ago. Now your father has women,
santeras
, they know about these things and they come and do the work with the
santos
.”

“What’s the work they do?”

“It’s like talking to the
santos
, but I don’t know.”

I examine my auntie’s face. She does know, but she’s not saying.

I step into the
cuartico
and reexamine the boiler. The older I get, the harder it is to squeeze around the machine, but I still manage it. Now, however, I am fourteen, and I look at the candy dish and greet it silently with the name Elegguá. There are a few new candies, but this time I don’t take them. I apologize to the
santo
about the stealing. I examine the plate of angry iron toys—the anvil, the machete—and wonder if they will swing themselves at me. Again, I apologize. Nothing happens, but when I leave the shed I feel that I have had a long conversation with a good friend. I feel completely understood.

My father appears to me as a different man now, not one who drinks too much and works too often, but a man with a life of his own.

I start paying attention to the disappearing days, those days every couple of months, when my sister and I are sent to spend the day with an auntie, leaving behind my mother who claims she has too much housework to join us. This is the first clue that something else is happening because a) my mother hates to clean and b) when I plead that my mother come with us, I receive a lecture from one of the aunties on the importance of Mami having time to herself, which is definitely a lie since the only thing my mother hates more than mice and roaches is being alone.

At the end of a disappearing day, the house smells better. The air has been scrubbed clean. It feels like people have been washed away from our home, like a woman with big arms used a mop to push out the nasty town official who said our house should be condemned. My mother, though, acts as if we were filming a scene from
The Godfather
. She wears a matronly house dress, stirs tomato sauce in a pan, and pretends to be preoccupied with frying
pescado
for my father, all the while making eye contact with my auntie and talking in code.

“How did everything go?” Tía Chuchi asks casually.

“Good,” my mother answers. Her eyes meet my auntie’s for a second and then shift back to the tomato sauce.

Once my father’s had dinner and my sister and I are tucked away in the living room with the television set blaring, my mother starts whispering to my auntie in the kitchen, a low murmur like a book that’s being quietly read. The only snippets I can catch are a few words about the
limpieza
and the woman saying that such-and-such was because of
envidia
.

The year I turn fifteen I decide to leave Jesus and his flock of sheep.

I am a freshman at Paramus Catholic High School, which is a forty-five-minute bus ride from my home and filled with teachers who used to be nuns. That someone could leave a nunnery is shocking. I observe my religion teacher, Ms. Langlieb, for a sign that she is tormented, but she appears tranquil, like an egret with her white hair and skinny legs.

According to Ms. Langlieb, the stories from the Bible didn’t necessarily happen. “They are parables,” she says, “ways Jesus shared his lessons about love and forgiveness.”