A Cup of Water Under My Bed (11 page)

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.

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

T
he 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.

She tried to defy the narrative of her body like so many before her. She wore pearls as a child. I can imagine her like that, her brown face smiling, her skinny shoulders pushed back, the pearls gleaming from her neck. She’s waltzing through the kitchen, a Chicano son in pearls, wanting the women who love her—her mother, her sister—to approve of her.

Later, as a teenager, Gwen applied mascara and eyeliner and eye shadow. She grew her hair, wore it in a bob. She painted her nails. She borrowed her mother’s peasant blouse. The question of “Do you want to marry a girl or a boy?” was for Gwen “Are you a girl or a boy?”

One of the first times I realize you can love people the same way the sky in Cuba looks—without the interruptions of skyscrapers, without the boundaries of right and wrong, girl and boy—it is because people are dying.

It is 1989. I’m in eighth grade and the science teacher is subjecting us to another lesson about AIDS. For the last year or two, it’s been this way. Maybe it hasn’t gone on that long, but it does feel that whenever we walk into our science class at St. John the Baptist School, the teacher has written the words “AIDS” vertically on the blackboard and what the acronym stands for: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

It is no small task to talk about HIV and AIDS in a Catholic school, and our science teacher sticks to the facts: the virus wreaks havoc on the immune system, you can’t get it from being in a room with a person who has it, and scientists think it started with monkeys in Africa. We know, however, that the virus has to do with gay people and not having your clothes on, but we can’t ask our science teacher about that. It would embarrass her and us, and we have to see her every weekday, which is why God invented substitute teachers.

We march into homeroom one day to discover a teacher who doesn’t have white or even gray hair. Miss Substitute tells us she sometimes teaches at the public school. This is code for: You are now free to talk with me about sex, because I come from the public school, which is godless.

A hand shoots up. “How do women get AIDS? They’re not gay.”