A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2 page)

My mother searches for the only English words she knows on the report card: parent signature, and there in her best penmanship learned in Colombia, she signs her name: Alicia Hernández.

We are both proud of her signature. The poverty in Latin America means that many people do not know how to sign their names, let alone read or write. Penning your name is a sign of progress, no matter what you are signing.

My mother makes recordings on cassette tapes to ship to her sisters and mother back home. She documents local gossip, my father’s business ventures, and me at the age of four recounting the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Spanish. She insists I say something in English. Anything. But I am four. All I know are a few numbers. She says that’s fine.

I begin: “One, two, three, four . . .” I pause, turn to my mother. “
Y después qué va
?”

Her voice, an accented English that so many years later strikes me as the voice of a stranger, replies, “Five,” and I repeat the word. She says, “Six,” and I repeat it, my voice dancing after hers, until we reach the number twenty.

Numbers are important in our lives. There are the two black garbage bags filled with fabric that a man brings to our apartment every few days. The dozens of women’s pants my mother can produce on her Merrow sewing machine. The hundred dollars she is paid when the man comes for the bags at the end of the week.

Numbers are why my mother came to New Jersey, why she spent nights crying, wishing she could go back to Colombia, to her mother.

The author Minal Hajratwala has written, “Perhaps only we of the next generation—raised among strangers, eating the fruits of our parents’ risks—can taste the true proportions of bitter to sweet.”

By the end of kindergarten, my mouth is full of fruit, and as each year arrives, I stuff myself with more English words. I memorize nursery rhymes and numbers, and I sit on my bed with vocabulary books, committing to memory nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, while in the kitchen, my mother hollers, “
Llegó Walter
!”

Walter Mercado arrives on the television screen. He has blond hair that has been set with hairspray into the 1980s look of being eternally windswept. Thick layers of foundation coat his pale face, and a deep coral lipstick shapes his lips. He sports elegant suits and over his shoulders capes studded with glittery
piedras
that look like rhinestones, diamonds, and emeralds. Each cape is said to be worth ten thousand dollars.

But Walter is like us. He speaks Spanish. He looks directly into the television camera and into our hearts, lifts his right hand, and, quickly and authoritatively, proclaims our daily horoscope. We can expect a gift. We can expect the doors to open. We can expect good health.

Walter Mercado is normal. White women are a different story.

We move, as Mami would say,
al Norte
.

In 1982, this means about five miles north of Union City and four miles from the George Washington Bridge. I am seven years old, and Papi has found the two-story house with no basement or closets. Our own home, and in the front yard, a tree. A few blocks away is the factory where he works nights. A block away is my new school. Into the large shed in the yard, Mami squeezes her two sewing machines and plastic bags of
telas
and extra bobbins and scissors and fat spools of thread.

Fairview is a quiet town, a white town, an English-only town. The neighbors bring us tomatoes. “They think we’re Italian,” my mother giggles, as if she has snuck a puppy into her parents’ house.

In Fairview, white women teach at my school and shop at a place called Macy’s. They go to Florida in the winter, even though they have no cousins there. They have aunties who do not live with them, and they are not like the white kids in my class whose grandmothers speak Italian and walk them to school in the mornings. The white women’s grandmothers are dead. When they mention Poland, Ireland, or Germany, it sounds like they are talking about a sock they lost in the laundry. They are white now. American. They have no history, no songs, no past.

But they do have power.

They have the sharpness of chalk, the sting of chemical cleaners for the blackboards, the clean earth smell of sharpened lead pencils. They have the respect of my parents. By virtue of their English and the light color of their faces, these teachers determine the words that creep into my dreams at night.

I envy them. I want what they have. I want my words to matter.

My mother’s sisters come and go over the years, but finally they arrive, one by one, to stay. No more back and forth. They have no children and no husbands in Colombia. Their mother is dead. Their father, too. They are three pieces of thread cut from the spool.

Tía Dora. Tía Rosa. La Tía Chuchi.

The three were school teachers in Colombia. Tía Dora is the youngest, a piece of silk
hilo
. In Jersey, she scrubs toilets for a white lady down the shore and later gets a certificate to teach Spanish. Tía Rosa is the oldest, with hair like black cotton and
tacones
with thick heels. She cleans up after a white woman in the city. Tía Chuchi wears lush red lipstick to church every day and has stories better than the Bible’s. Like my mother, she stitches sleeves to women’s blouses at the factory. When the three aunties are home, they dote on my baby sister and work on me and my Spanish.

I call the carpet
la carpeta
, and Tía Dora shakes her head. She lifts her thin, fairy-like hands. “
Se dice alfombra
,” she says, and then slowly pronounces the word for me:
al-fom-bra
.
Carpeta
is the word for folder.

My mother tells me that my new friend has called. When I reply, “
La voy a llamar pa’ tras
,” Tía Maria de Jesus, better known as La Tía Chuchi, puckers her bright lips. In Spanish, she lectures, “You never say, ‘I am going to call you back.’
Eso es del inglés
.” The verb, she declares, is
devolver
. “
Voy a devolver la llamada
.”

If Tía Rosa is there, she comes to my defense, wrapping me up in her arms, the top of my head smashing into her large bosom. “Leave the girl alone,” she says to her sisters, crooning like a bird at her nest. For a moment, I believe this auntie will call a cease-fire. But no, Tía Rosa thinks the war is over. “Stop bothering the girl. She’s Americana.” She pats the top of my head hard, as if I were mentally disabled.

My mother is different. She believes in truces, neutral zones, even treaties. Together, we stick the Spanish
el
or
la
before English nouns, producing words like
el
vacuum,
el
color purple,
la
teacher. We say, “
Abra la
window,” “
Papi está en el
basement,”
y
“
Ya pagamos el
mortgage.” This is not easy. It takes time, negotiation, persistence.

In the morning, late for school, I call for my mother, alarmed. I can’t find
mi
folder.

“
Tu qué
?”

“
El
folder,” I answer, panicked. “
Donde pongo mis papeles pa’ la escuela, Mami
.”

“
Ah, el
folder,” she says, quietly repeating the English noun to herself.

I begin resenting Spanish.

At first, it happens in small ways. I realize I can’t tell my mother about the Pilgrims and Indians because I don’t know the Spanish word for Pilgrims. I can’t talk about my essay on school safety because I don’t know the Spanish word for safety. To share my life in English with my family means I have to give a short definition for each word that is not already a part of our lives. I try sometimes, but most of the time I grow weary and finally sigh and mutter, “
Olvídate
.” Forget it.

This is how Spanish starts annoying me.

I suppose it’s what happens when you’re young and frustrated, but you can’t be angry at the white teachers because that would get you nowhere, and you can’t be too upset with your parents because they want what they think is best for you. Spanish is
flaca
and defenseless, so I start pushing her around, then hating her. She’s like an auntie who talks louder than everyone else, who wears perfume that squeezes your nostrils. I want her to stop embarrassing me. I want her to go away.

That’s how the blame arrives. I blame Spanish for the fact that I don’t know more words in English. I blame her for how bad I feel when the white teachers look at me with some pity in their eyes. I blame Spanish for the hours my mother has to work at the factory.

“If only I knew English . . .” my mother starts, and then her voice trails because none of us, not her, not even La Tía Chuchi, who knows everything about everyone, knows what would happen if only my mother knew English. I am the one who is supposed to find out.

But to make that leap, to be the first in a family to leave for another language hurts. It’s not a broken arm kind of hurt. It’s not abrupt like that. It’s gradual. It is like a parasite, a bug crawling in your stomach that no one else can see but that gives you a fever and makes you nauseous.

Because I have to leave Spanish, I have to hate it. That makes the departure bearable. And so I never learn to read or to write the language. I never learn more than the words my family and I need to share over the course of a day—
pásame la toalla, la comida ya está
—and the words spoken on the nightly news, the telenovelas, Radio Wado, and
Sábado Gigante
, which all combined leave me with a peculiar vocabulary of words in Spanish about dinner foods, immigration law, romantic fantasy, and celebrity gossip.

As I become more immersed in English, I also start to distance myself from my family through unconscious gestures. I walk around the house with headphones on my ears and a book in hand. I speak only in English to my little sister. I eat my
arroz y frijoles
while watching the TV sitcoms
Diff’rent Strokes
and
Facts of Life
. The two shows—centered on children who don’t have parents and are being raised by white people—make sense to me. I begin to convince myself that I am like my white teachers: I have no history, no past, no culture.

My father, however, still worries that I might become like him.

Sitting in the kitchen, slightly drunk, mostly sober, he grabs my arm. I am nine at the time, and he has my report card in his hand with the letter
F
in social studies.

“You have to study,” he says, his brown eyes dull and sad. “You don’t want to end up like your mother and me, working in factories, not getting paid on time. You don’t want this life.” His life. My mother and my tías’ lives. And yet I do—though not the factories or the sneer of the white lady at the fabric store who thinks we should speak English. I want the Spanish and the fat cigars and Walter Mercado on TV every night. To love what we have, however, is to violate my family’s wishes.

Years later, an Arab American writer smiles knowingly at me. “You betray your parents if you don’t become like them,” she tells me, “and you betray them if you do.”

If white people do not get rid of you, it is because they intend to get all of you.

They will only keep you if they can have your mouth, your dreams, your intentions. In the military, they call this a winning hearts-and-minds campaign. In school, they call it ESL. English as a second language.

They come for me again in fourth grade. Me and a girl whose parents are from Yugoslavia. Down the hallway we trudge. In the room the table is the color of wet sand, and the teacher nods at us. She has books and consonants and vowels.

I memorize more words. I roll the marbles in my mouth and spit them out on tests and at English-only friends. I get a card to the town library and start checking out books by the dozens. I come to know the way the words in English hit each other on the page, and I begin reciting lines from
Romeo and Juliet
.

This affection for English happens the way some women talk about their marriages: you do it at the beginning because it’s practical, because you need the green card, because all the jobs are here, but then the
viejo
grows on you. You come to know the way he likes his
café
or how he snores when he’s having a bad dream. That is how it is for me with English. The affection comes later and settles in.

My mother warns me to not drown myself in a cup of water.

“
No te ahogues en un vaso de agua
” could be translated as “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” but because I am learning English from British novels and hours spent diagramming sentences, I don’t know American idioms. I don’t know how other children are counseled to not worry about a lost pen. I only know that, according to my mother, I shouldn’t mistake a glass of tap water for the deep end of the swimming pool.

Quietly, over the years, I create literal translations in English for everything my family says in Spanish.
Échate la bendición
. Throw yourself into the blessing.
Dios le da carne al que no tiene muelas
. God gives meat to those who have no teeth.
Me ronca el mango
. The mango does something terrible to you.

When I consult my sister, Liliana, about a friend’s dilemma, she shakes her head. “
No tienes velas en ese entierro
,” she answers solemnly. You don’t have candles at that funeral, and if you don’t have candles at a funeral in Ramiriquí, Colombia, where my mother and her sisters were raised, it means the dead person is not your family. Everyone there knows the dead need four
velas
to light the corridors from this life to the next, and it is the responsibility of the dead person’s family to bring those four candles and place them alongside the body. If the dead person is not your auntie or your
primo
or your own mother, then you should mind your business and not add your candles to someone else’s funeral.