A Cup of Water Under My Bed (9 page)

Everything, however, has changed, because when I slide out of bed and kneel on the cold floor and see the cup, I do feel better. I have some power. I can fill a cup with water and slip it underneath my bed.

We are a year or more out of high school when my best friend Geralen decides she wants her future read. Tía Chuchi is delighted at the news. She fancies herself an intermediary between the women who officially know and the rest of us, and it is with her that we take Geralen to see Conchita, who lives off of Bergenline Avenue in one of those apartments where the steps shift beneath our feet and make me wonder about public-safety regulations.

Inside Conchita’s home, the air is cool, a reprieve from the warm streets, and at the window, the curtains billow as a breeze passes through. Conchita ushers us in, waving big arms laden with gold bracelets. I have met her before and I am reminded now that I don’t like her. She reminds me of Juana, who blamed me for what my father did. It’s the way Conchita keeps her back so straight, the way her eyes fasten on us, the quickness of her lips. She reminds me of an exclamation point: arrogant.

Geralen and I sit on a bed across a table from Conchita. Tía Chuchi perches on the edge of the bed behind us. I am nervous. Geralen came here from the Philippines when she was a girl. She doesn’t speak Spanish, so I am here to interpret for her. Whatever the dead and the angels have to say will come through me, and I am worried that I will choose the wrong words in English.

On the table is a cup of water large enough to drown a hamster. Conchita closes her eyes. She prays in Spanish and Yoruban. She inspects the water, glances at Geralen, and then back at the water. In a booming voice, Conchita declares, “
Aquí hay una mujer
!”

I interpret in a low voice—“Here, there is a woman”—but this sounds odd, as if I have forgotten a word.

“
Una mujer poderosa que la protege
!” Conchita continues, her voice almost as deep as a man’s.

“It is a powerful woman,” I begin, raising my voice. “A woman who is protecting you.”

“It’s my grandmother,” Geralen says in a firm voice
sin duda
.

I share this with Conchita and my auntie, both of whom smile broadly. From there, Conchita goes on to talk about the dead grandmother’s help, the spirit of a man who is bothering Geralen, and a woman at work who is envious of her. As Conchita issues her declarations, I find my voice straining to match hers. My hands begin to gesture like hers as well, swinging up and out.

“
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

M
y 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 steal, 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.