A Cup of Water Under My Bed (18 page)

If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, call on Tuesday.

If it’s an even number, call on Thursday.

Enter the weeks for which you are claiming.

The dial-in system is clever. The brochure insists it is to help us avoid waiting at the agency, but it is also the best way to handle the possibility of riots as the economy switches from manufacturing to service jobs. Not making a trip to the agency means we don’t have to see in one room how many other people are going through the same experience. When we do show up (because the phone system is down), the number of people is fewer, even though back on our street we know there are more people out of work. Still, we begin to doubt ourselves. Maybe it isn’t so bad.

Not going to the unemployment agency means we can avoid seeing the pain of other people. We don’t need to know English to understand the black security guard telling someone on the line, “No, sir. According to this, you have nothing left to collect.” We don’t need a translation for the immigrant man’s English words, “But I no find job.” And then that dreaded English word: welfare.

“Sir, I’m gonna need for you to get off this line because we can’t help you here. Get on the line at window four and you can talk to someone there about welfare.”

Calling in now for unemployment, we can avoid that man’s eyes, the way his brown body sheltered under layers of clothes against the winter storm does not go to window four. He turns away and leaves through the front door. And we wonder where he is headed with those empty hands.

Not going to the unemployment agency, we can avoid thinking about what will happen when none of us can collect any longer.

The newspapers and books and the six o’clock news don’t, in those years, say that grown men and women are losing their jobs, that Washington has agreed to let the corporations travel without visas, that people are sifting through the debris after the storm. That will come later. For now, they use short hand: NAFTA.

My father finds new work. He washes floors and dishes at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. He is sixty-three. The dark curls have vanished and the hairline has receded, leaving a thin line of gray hair at the back of his head.

Service work is different from factory labor. It is not only the absence of the large machines or the union benefits. It’s the distance from home. The two buses needed to reach the job. It is the bitterness that slips into the voice, that makes my father snap at me one day, “You’re not the one cleaning up after people every night.”

Sometimes on weekends, I wake up in the dark, dress silently, and drive my father to work despite his protests, his arguments that I sleep longer. He believes I need more rest. “
Gastas la cabeza
,” he says about my job in book publishing.

In those early hours of the morning, the Meadowlands Sports Complex reminds me of the Vatican, a series of gray buildings that thrust out from the land like fists into the air. I am not allowed inside the sports complex. There are identification cards, security guards.

“Leave me here,” my father barks when we reach the main entrance.

I watch him walk toward that fist of a building, his thin body in dark jeans and boots, a flannel jacket and baseball cap protecting him from the wind. It is in those moments that I doubt myself, that I wonder if arranging words on a computer screen and sharing them with others makes any difference, if that is the best I can do with my own hands.

It will take years to understand that writing makes everything else possible. Writing is how I learn to love my father and where I come from. Writing is how I leave him and also how I take him with me.

In a darkroom in Manhattan, I wait.

For the last two weeks, I have been studying photography on weekends. I have learned that taking pictures is about how light enters the world. It is about the speed at which I allow that light to arrive on the page, the choices I make about what to include in the frame.

We wait now with the chemicals and muted light bulbs. My teacher is showing us how to slip the paper into the bins of chemical mixtures, how to move the paper once it is submerged, how to be ready for the arrival of an image. I stare at the sheet I have placed in the bin, my eyes alert. My father is in the paper.

His hands rise to the surface slowly as dark spots emerging from the light. Little by little, one hand comes into view. It’s in his lap; the other is holding a can of beer. He is shirtless at the kitchen table. What the picture did not record is that he had examined his hands, called me over, told me I should photograph this one scar on his index finger. He couldn’t remember how it had happened.

The photograph is blurry.

In the darkroom, the teacher, an older black man, peers over my shoulder. He gives me technical advice for next time, pointers on shutter speeds, lighting, the frame. He examines the photograph again.

“Your father?” he asks.

“Yes.”

A pause.

“He has character,” the teacher says quietly before moving on to the next student.

Blackout

I
didn’t think white people got jobs the way Latinos did, just by talking to each other. But they do, and that’s how it happens for me. My first big job as a writer.

It’s the end of a graduate journalism class at New York University. The room fills with the familiar cacophony of a class ending: chairs scraping floors, students unzipping bags, murmurs about lunch and papers due. The professor, a thin, white woman, fastens her eyes on me.

“An editor at the
New York Times
is looking for a researcher for a book she’s doing on women’s history,” she says, matter-of-fact. “I thought of you. You write about feminism.”

I smile politely, uncomfortably. I’m twenty-five and writing for
Ms
. magazine, but I don’t consider myself someone who writes about feminism. That sounds like work other people do, people who are rich or famous or smart. I’m not a
boba
though. I have spent enough time around white women to know it’s better to not argue with them.

When I meet the editor, I like her immediately. She’s unpretentious and direct but warm in that “do you want water or tea” sort of way. I have no idea that she’s the first woman to run the editorial page at the newspaper. What I do know is that Gail is going to be the first (and only) lady who pays me money to track down what indigenous women used as menstrual pads back in the pre-tampon days. That’s my first assignment, and I set off, gathering phone numbers for anthropologists and historians, generating a spreadsheet to track my interviews and library reading, and returning with my final report. (They used rags, the natural kind.)

Months later, I e-mail Gail an opinion piece I wrote for an online wire service and she shoots back: “
Oye
, you should apply for this internship here in the editorial department.”

She doesn’t write “
oye
,” but she might as well have, because the way she e-mails with such ease is how a woman on the bus tells my mother, “
Oye
, there’s this factory down on Hudson Avenue that’s hiring.”

Oye
, and just like that I send my resume, which now includes research on indigenous maxi pads, to the editor at the
Times
hiring interns, even though I have no idea what an editorial is. That’s right. I am twenty-five, I am writing for a national magazine, I have been in journalism school, and I do not know what an editorial is.

I want to say that it’s never come up, that no one has ever talked to me about editorials. But they probably did, and I didn’t know what it was, and as I’ve been doing since I was in kindergarten, I probably acted like I knew what they were talking about and promptly forgot it.

Now I walk around the block to the Greek deli. I pass the women and men waiting at the bus stop, buy a copy of the
Times
and flip over the A section. A friend has told me to look at the left side of the last page, at the short paragraphs stacked like shoe boxes in a closet.

The writing carries no byline. It’s monotonous, and I realize why I don’t know what an editorial is. I’ve never made it past the second line.

My feelings, though, are irrelevant. This is the
New York Times
. They have Maureen Dowd and stringers all over the world, including countries I have to find in the
Britannica
encyclopedia. If I get the internship, they won’t actually let me write.

But they do.

My summer internship begins on the tenth floor of the
New York Times
building on Forty-Third Street. The first days are heady: the large, revolving doors at the main entrance, the elevator racing upward, a massive desk of my own, the thick, solid wooden shelves in the library filled with old books and newspapers and magazines. It’s nine months since September 11, and Howell Raines is the executive editor. He supposedly has a penchant for the visual, which is why, a staff reporter tells me, the corridors are now filled with large-scale reproductions of photographs that have been in the paper. My favorite ones, the ones that make me pause, are the aerial photographs of New York City, the tops of skyscrapers like the closed beaks of birds.

I’m taken to lunch that week, shown how the computer system works, told to wait a minute while an editor, a white man with sharp eyes, answers a call and laughs about how India and Pakistan need to get it together and play nice. I’m told how to put editorials in a queue, how to see what other people are writing for the next day or the weekend edition, how to answer my editor’s questions online. I’m told to join the editorial board for their meetings in the morning.

The meetings take place in a conference room. Inside are a long wooden table, large heavy chairs, and a television in a cabinet. Men show up in stiff white shirts with cups of coffee in hand, notepads and pens, and the day’s paper. The women show up in slacks and button-down shirts with notepads and pens and the paper. They file in one by one, welcome me, make jokes about this and that, and it begins to dawn on me that they are regular white people.

I’m not sure what I expected them to look like, but I figured that writing for the
New York Times
would turn a person into something close to God, or at least Oprah Winfrey. I expected that they would look different somehow, more beautiful, more pristine, that they wouldn’t have to read the day’s paper because they would have a secret telephone they could pick up and hear about what was happening in the world.

What’s not surprising is that they are white.

It’s about a dozen people, and they’re all white except for one black man and one man who is white (blond actually) but Mexican. I sit at the table, terrified that I’ll say something stupid and more terrified that I won’t be able to say anything at all.

The meetings begin, and they go around the table, pitching ideas, shooting down ideas, bantering. A writer with a head full of white hair, a man who could be a grandpa on an after-school TV special, says, “Now I have an idea you’re not going to like . . .” and everyone grins. There’s much about which to have opinions—the war on terror, Bush, stem-cell research—but this man wants to write about the Superfund sites everyone else wants to forget.

Assignments are made. One writer sighs. “Yes, I guess I’m the one to do it,” he says. Then they retreat to their offices to make phone calls, conduct interviews, and write opinions.

My first idea for an editorial is straightforward, a no-brainer really. I think the
New York Times
editorial board should urge President Bush to grant Colombians political asylum in the United States. The issue is clear: the United States funds the war in Colombia and the people deserve relief.

To back up my idea I start making phone calls, and I quickly learn that people will talk to me. The name
New York Times
, in fact, produces the most spectacular effects on people. Local advocates return my calls with eager voices. Government spokespeople chat me up with fake grins. A number of people bristle at the name; others ask to have lunch with me. Me. An intern.

By the time I call an advocate at Human Rights Watch that summer about another topic, I am covered in arrogance. I announce that I’m phoning from the
Times
, but when I pause for effect, the woman snaps, “Which
Times
?”

I bite my lip, sure this woman has, with female intuition alone, figured out that I’m only a summer intern. “The
New York Times
,” I answer, doing my best to control the pitch of my voice.

“If you don’t say that, I can’t possibly know,” the woman answers, adding that there is the
Los Angeles Times
and
Time
magazine. But I hear it in her voice. The nervous laugh. The slight faltering, the retreating.

The paper, I begin to learn that summer, is not a series of pages bound together. It’s not even the people themselves, the ones sitting at the conference table three times a week or the ones reporting the news. It’s something else. It’s an idea that produces tension in people or arouses their flattery. It has the power to agitate. It’s kind of like God, but not in the way I expected. It doesn’t feel good.

The other discovery I make is about white people.

One of the editors, a skinny man who I’ll call Mr. Flaco, listens to my initial idea for an editorial about granting Colombians asylum. “Why Colombians and not another group of people?” he asks, patronizingly. “If you open the door for them, do you open the door to every other country with internal conflicts?”

Mr. Flaco’s questions are rational, but they also feel odd somehow. When I board the bus for Jersey, I’m still thinking about what he asked.

In Jersey, I step off the bus a few feet from the Greek deli and Chinese restaurant. The street is littered with candy wrappers, the trash bin filled to capacity with soda cans. I walk past the long line at the bus stop, wondering who there is a Salvadoreño with political asylum and who is Honduran and Guatemalan and without
papeles
. They wear, all of them, jeans and jackets and baseball caps. They’re waiting for the 165, the 166, transfer tickets and bus passes in hand.