A Cup of Water Under My Bed (15 page)

A white man shuffles up to my register at McDonald’s one day. He’s old and his voice is muddled, as if his mouth were full of marbles. When I ask him to repeat his order, he snaps, “What’s the matter? You don’t know English?”

Without thinking, I twirl around and walk away, past the fry machine with its crackling oil, and into the kitchen, where the guys are peeling slices of cheese and tossing them on burger patties, then wiping their foreheads with the back of their hands. I stop at the freezer. I’m not breathing right. My hands are shaking, and a minute later, the manager wants to know why I left the register and he ended up having to take the gringo’s order. But I don’t know how to say that I didn’t trust myself to be polite, and I can’t lose this job.

When my first paycheck from McD’s lands in my hand, it is for a total of about $71 and change. I cash the check and take it to the beauty store on Anderson Avenue. There I spend close to an hour, inspecting rows of matte lipsticks and lip glosses and lip liners with names the colors of precious stones and wild flowers and sand dunes. The price tags are glued to the front of the display case, the numbers in thick block print: $3.99, $4.99.

The women in my family buy 99-cent lipstick. The women in my family are their lipsticks. My mother is a pale strawberry. Tía Dora, a warm peach. Tía Chuchi, a pomegranate. Tía Rosa, a plum. And I am a black raspberry. The fruit never lasts. It smudges. It hardly sticks. It vanishes when you take a sip of soda. Tía Chuchi, who knows everything, schools me in how to eat a meal without losing your
pintalabios
. “You put your tongue out like this,” she says, and then she sticks her
lengua
out at me and maneuvers the spoon’s contents onto it (some melon, a
pedazo
of
yuca
), careful to not touch the edge of her lips. “See?” she says, chewing. “I knew a woman who did that. She kept her lipstick on the whole day.”

Sometimes, Tía Dora splurges on a $3.99 tube. Sometimes, a friend gives her a makeup bag from the mall, the kind they include as a freebie after you’ve spent $75. The color from those lipsticks is thicker, like hand cream.

Now at the beauty store, I choose the items I could never ask my mother to buy, because a $4.99 lipstick would make her shake her head and ask, “What’s wrong with the 99-cent one?”

It is a question I never know how to answer because I don’t know that what I am trying to say is this: “I’m buying lipstick to make myself feel better about the class, racial, and sexual oppressions in our lives. The 99-cent lipstick ain’t gonna cut it.” Instead, I roll my eyes at the suggestion. “Mami,
por fa
. It’s ugly.”

With my own paycheck, I buy the lipstick I want, which with tax turns out to cost something like $5.07. I also pick up face powder and eyeliner and mascara. In a single hour, half of my paycheck is gone. Back at McD’s, I plead to work more hours, and when I get longer shifts and more pay, I am almost earning as much as my mother does in a week at the factory. Close to $200.

In her book
Where We Stand
, bell hooks writes about a time in American life, or at least in Kentucky where she grew up, when people did not spend their earnings on lipstick, face creams, or even television. People valued what they had. They enjoyed homemade fruit jams, scraps of fabric, and each other’s stories. They didn’t even blame the poor for being poor.

If a black person was poor back then it was because the white man was keeping them down. The day would come when racism would be wiped out and every black man, woman, and child would eat with only fine linen napkins and not worry about their lipstick smudging. Class wasn’t the problem; race was.

Unfortunately, when the lunch counters and the schools were integrated, the wealthy black families got out of town, the white activists went back home, and the rest of the country turned around to look at poor and working-class black people and found them to blame for not having the good napkins, the kind Bill Cosby has.

Bill Cosby was on television in the eighties, the father of a rich black family, a doctor married to a lawyer whose lipstick must have been named after rubies or topaz. He was making me laugh, charming me and the country with the story that skin color didn’t matter anymore. Community didn’t matter. A person could buy anything in this country now. All they needed to do was to work for it.

A manager at McD’s approaches me one day.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she starts and explains how we can make money from the till, how easy it is, how you can pretend to ring up an order but not really do it, how, you see, it isn’t a big deal. We’ll split the money. It’ll be cool. And I say, “Sure,” not because I want to steal, not because I understand that she’s asking me to do that, but because I’m afraid that if I say no, she’ll be angry with me. I’m a teenager. She’s in her twenties. I want her to like me.

At the end of the shift, she finds me in the break room. She has light brown eyes and a wide forehead. She grins at me, places a small bundle in my hand, and walks away. I shove the money in my pocket, and, alone in the McDonald’s bathroom, I count the bills.

$20. $40. $60 . . . $300.

That’s the number that stays with me decades later. It might have been less or more, but what I remember is $300 and that I had never held so much money in my hands, never seen so many twenties all at once, not even in the envelope my mother got at the bank when she cashed her paycheck.

I know exactly what to do with the money, too. Or at least a part of it. I take it to the dentist on Bergenline Avenue.

Fragoso is a crabby old Cuban who works out of a back room in his apartment. We owe him hundreds of dollars for filling the holes in my mouth. Now, however, I enter his apartment the way Bill Cosby must feel all of the time—on top of things. Here I am, with hundreds of dollars to put toward the bill, hundreds of dollars my parents won’t have to worry about. I am single-handedly taking care of business.

Among the drills and jars of cotton balls, Fragoso counts the twenties. “That’s it?” he asks, looking over at me.

My face freezes. The room grows smaller, suffocating. I nod my head, bite my naked lip, the shame running through me like a live wire, and I promise to bring more next time.

Although he was a part of our lives, I never saw how Bill Cosby got to be Bill Cosby, how his fictional character became a doctor and saved money and bought a house and paid the dentist. What I knew back then about money was that you could work for it or you could take it. In college, I found out people I had never met would also give it to you.

He’s wearing a business suit. A dark suit. The tie is some brilliant color, a red perhaps. He smiles at me the way Bill Cosby has done on television, warm and confident, but this man is younger. He can’t be much older than me, twenty-five at most, and he is white or Italian or maybe Latino. He calls out from beside a folding table at my college campus. The sun is bright and the man is offering free mugs, free keychains, free T-shirts. All I have to do is apply for a credit card.

I fill out the form the way you would enter your name into a raffle. It is all a matter of luck. I am eighteen and I don’t know about credit scores. My parents pay in cash for everything. Credit cards are a phenomenon that happens to other people, rich people.

When the credit card comes in the mail, however, I know exactly what to do. I march into a shoe store in Englewood and ask to see a pair of dark-brown Timberlands, size seven. It’s the early nineties, and everyone is parading around school in that brand. You wear them with baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans and dark lipstick, and when people dress that way, they look special, like the white plates with gray flowers my mother brings out for Thanksgiving.

The shoes cost close to $100, a little more than half of my weekly pay from my two part-time jobs. But I don’t have to give cash now. I hand the woman the plastic card the way I have seen other women do in stores, as if the price doesn’t matter, and I’m grateful that my hand doesn’t shake, even though I’m outrageously nervous.

She hands me the receipt, a slip of paper that fits in my palm like a secret note a girl has passed to me in class. Just sign here. That’s all. My signature. My promise to pay.

Back home, my mother stares at my feet. “$100?”

The question hovers at her lips, as if she has come across a cubist painting and is trying to untangle the parts.

First
pintalabios
, now shoes. Tía Chuchi doesn’t know how I turned out to be such a materialist. “No one in our family is like that,” she insists, and I would like to believe her.

It is a strange comfort to think that some aspect of being raised among strangers brought out the worst in me, that if I had been born and raised in my mother’s native land, I would have known the Kentucky that bell hooks writes about.

But this is an illusion. Colombia is where I sometimes think it began.

I am walking down the street in Bogotá, holding my mother’s hand. We are visiting for a few weeks, spending days with my grandmother and enough cousins to fill up two of my classrooms in New Jersey. The civil war reveals itself here and there, mostly in the rifles of the security guards at the airport.

As we stroll down the street, a boy my age, about six or seven, his arm thin as a twig, his lips cracked, extends a hand toward me. Our eyes meet, the same eyes I have, the same small voice except his pleads, “A few coins please, to buy a little milk.”

His hand is a tiny version of my father’s. It is dirty and scarred in places. I cringe, afraid of something I cannot name.

My mother snaps me close to her and quickens her pace, my head close to the fat on her hip.

“Why is that boy asking for money?” I ask.

“To buy
leche
.”

“But why?”

“That’s what children here have to do.”

Language is a rubber band. It bends and stretches and tries to hold in place our mothers and the plaza in Bogotá and the boy asking for milk.

In English, they are street children. Abandoned children. Neglected children. Thrown-away children. The adjectives expand to make sense of little boys having to ask strangers for the first taste we are entitled to in this life: milk at the tit.

In Spanish though, in Bogotá, there is no need for extras or explanation. These boys are everywhere. They are
gamines
, a word borrowed from the French and meaning “to steal.” A boy who steals.

“You were so afraid of the street kids,” Tía Chuchi remembers now, fondly, as if, as a girl, I had been frightened by spiders or ladybugs or wingless birds.

After my first credit card, an offer arrives in the mail for another one. I call the 800 number nervously, as if I were asking someone on a date who has shown a bit of interest. When the person says, “You’ve been approved,” I feel it in my body, an elation like warm water.

The offers continue to come in the mail, and I buy a large, red fake-leather wallet and fill each pocket with a credit card: Discover, Visa, MasterCard, Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Victoria’s Secret. I sit in my bedroom, admiring the little plastic rectangles and feeling genuinely accomplished, because in my home, in my community, people do not have credit cards. “
Nada de deudas
,” my father declares, and my mother agrees—no debts.

Down on Bergenline Avenue, storeowners are used to people buying even large purchases like refrigerators with cash. Only
ricos
have credit. My mother doesn’t even believe in lay-away plans.

At the Valley Fair department store, she explains, “It’s better to wait until you have all the money.”

“The dress will be gone by then,” I argue, to which she gives me her maddening standard answer: “There will be another one.”

During my last semester of college, I study abroad in England with a group of white students from private schools. I am there on a scholarship with a $5,000 student loan and a wallet full of Visas and MasterCards. With every purchase, I tell myself why it’s necessary.

When will I be in London again? Never!

You can’t find sweaters like these back home
.

What would people say if I returned without souvenirs?

This is my only chance to see a real Oscar Wilde play
.

And the classic:
All the other kids are going
.

None of this is to say that I don’t keep track of my spending. I do. I review my new credit card charges, mentally checking off why each one was required. I monitor my bank account frequently, careful to slowly chip away at the student loan.

One night, standing in line to use the phone in our student house, I overhear one of my classmates, a tall white girl from a state I’ve only seen on maps. She’s going through her own list of justifications for charges on her father’s credit card. “I had to buy the boots, Daddy.” A pause. “I know they were expensive, but I needed them. It’s so cold here.”

I shake my head, quite smug that I would never do anything like that to my own parents. My credit card bills, and I am very pleased to say this, are my responsibility. So caught up in this perverse pride, I fail to see that I am a college student with two part-time jobs back home and a student loan here, trying to pay off the kind of credit-card balances a grown white man in the Midwest is struggling to handle.

My mother is pleased that I traveled to England. She knows it’s a good place. It’s like here. Children have
camitas
and
leche
, and they don’t wake up in the middle of the night with hurting bellies or having to steal. When I remind her that children
are
homeless in the United States, she sighs. “It’s not the same.”

Over the years, her sisters board airplanes for Colombia, like migratory birds. Once a year, twice a year, every other year. They hear an echo of their homeland, and suddenly, they are spending weeks packing suitcases and shopping for jackets and medications and
chanclas
for their brothers and nieces and nephews. On the day of departure, they dress in matching skirts and blazers and
tacones
, like women who are traveling on business. They wear their 99-cent lipstick and take pictures at the airport.