A Cup of Water Under My Bed (22 page)

Us. We were all there. We sat in twos and alone, in separate corners and in silence. Finally, I called us to the bed. “Make a circle,” I said, quietly. We did. “Hold hands,” I said. We did. After that, I didn’t know what to say. My mother paled. Tía Rosa squeezed her prayer book. My sister ate her tears. Tía Chuchi had the rosary beads in her hands, and she began reciting the Hail Mary, and we followed—
Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros
—and we prayed like that for several minutes, giving my auntie over to a mother we hoped was waiting in the sky.

Después
, we drove back to Tía Dora’s apartment. We tried to sleep, then we called one of her brothers in Colombia. It was dark outside. The kitchen table sat in shadows and so did the bowl of plastic fruit and the glass salt shaker. It must have been five or six in the morning. It must have been later. “
Se nos fue
,” Tía Chuchi wailed into the phone to her brother.
Se nos fue
.

Her brother was confused. He didn’t understand. Someone had to say it to him like it was: Tía Dora is dead. She hasn’t left us. She’s died.

In Florida, my mother tried one factory, and then another. They weren’t hiring. They weren’t paying. They weren’t there. Mami, however, was not a woman to come undone. She registered at the local library for an English as a Second Language class. She sat through lessons about numbers and nouns. She nodded at the teacher and brought cookies for the potlucks. And then, she turned it into business. She did alterations, she told people. She was fast and she didn’t charge too much and she was right there in Hialeah, a few blocks from the library.

The women came to her. At first, one or two, then three and four and more. Women in their thirties and forties, their fifties and sixties. Women from Cuba and Colombia and Venezuela and Argentina. Women in fitted jeans and high heels; women with wide blouses and perfumed ears. They were mothers and
abuelas
and wives. They lived down the street, across town, near the hospital. They didn’t leave their homes without lipstick and their hair done and a pocketbook in hand.

The women brought my mother plastic bags filled with their lives, their husband’s jeans, their own
faldas
, their teenage daughter’s black dress. One woman came with pink pants; another, a bed comforter. They brought my mother their complaints too: the skirt was on sale but it was too long, it was too short, it was impossible to find in life the things you wanted and to the measure that you wanted them.

The women brought news too about car accidents and did you hear about the guy who murdered his girlfriend and three women at Yoyito’s on Forty-Ninth? Shot them in the restaurant, right there in the kitchen, then killed himself in his SUV. They shook their heads and murmured prayers and then inspected the seams on the skirt they wanted my mother to take apart.

Sometimes, the women came for my mother but found my father instead. In Florida, in his sixties, my father returned to Cuba. The backyard had a banana tree and a mango tree. My father began wearing sombreros like his uncle and father in Cuba, to keep the sun off his forehead. He planted tomatoes and
calabaza
, and he collected avocados the size of his forearm, and when the women came to pick up their skirts and jeans and comforters, my father pushed bags of produce into their arms. “Take them, take them,” he insisted, waving the women away, and so it was. The women carried away their clothes in one bag and giant
aguacates
in the other.

Over and over again, this truth: Writing is how I leave my family and how I take them with me.

Tía Chuchi began writing her memoir.

Her apartment was a second-floor walkup in Jersey. The cups of water gleamed from shelves and night tables and end tables. The cups of water were for everyone, for Tía Dora and the Virgin Mary and Santa Clara. The cup under her bed, though, did not have kitchen tap water but instead holy water from church, because the
vasito
was meant for her archangel, for his sword and protection and nearness to God.

In that home, surrounded by cups of water, Tía Chuchi began her memoir on a notepad. She drafted an outline first, and when she started writing, she found that one
recuerdo
led to another and that she had to make phone calls to Colombia and inquire about details, because memories are like thread. They can be tugged and loosened and stitched in different directions.

In San Francisco, I looked for the place I came from—the house a city official wanted to condemn when I was a child. I searched for the factories and the booze, the
cuarticos
with African gods and the kitchens where women would be reading cups of water and talking story. I tried to find the mothers and the aunties who might be cleaning offices or hemming a
falda
or correcting some
mocosa
’s Spanish, but the botánica on Mission Street charged too much for a fortune reading and the bodegas sold organic apples and free-trade chocolate. It took me several weeks to realize I wasn’t looking for a house or a crooked street or even a familiar face.

The bus was heading south. Mission Street was behind us, and the bus windows were clean enough to see the houses in their floral colors like a chorus of women in house dresses. I was thinking about whether I would find a futon bed at the warehouse whose address I had in my pocket, and how I should not have sold my old futon back in New York, and how hard these lessons are when we first move away from family and we don’t know what to take with us and what to leave behind.

We made more stops. The bus grew crowded with brown and black faces and also with plastic bags and tote bags and big purse bags, all those kinds of
bolsas
my mother and my aunties used, because when you don’t have a car you have to carry everything with you, and your worst enemy some days is the bus driver, who leaves you three blocks away from the stop you needed.

A woman’s voice broke through the crowded aisle. She hollered at the bus driver. Didn’t he see that someone had to get off the bus? That someone was trying to get on? That he needed to stop? And I heard what the woman was not saying: That we all wanted to get to where we were going, that the afternoon was long and tired and sun-kissed and everyone here wanted to get home and be kissed in a room they could have all to themselves without their auntie or their mother a few inches away.

The woman’s voice made me smile, but then I woke up, as if from a dream. I was about to miss my stop or I already had, and I darted out of my seat and squeezed frantically past shoulders and elbows and plastic bags, the messenger bag bouncing on my back, the address in my pocket. I wasn’t going to make it. The front door had already closed, the bus was in motion. The woman, though, she yelled at the driver, and the others joined her, and I felt with a jolt that I was back home. Everyone was trying to help me, but it wasn’t about me. It was about us. We all knew what it was like trying to get off the bus.

The bus crawled to a stop then and the door swung open and I flew into the street. I had to walk a little, but it wasn’t too far.

Agradecimientos

A
mi mami, Alicia Hernández Sosa, por enseñarme el amor sin condiciones; a mi papá, Ygnacio Hernández
,
por apoyarme en mi camino; a María de Jesús Sosa quien además de ser mi tía ha sido mi maestra y mi gran amiga; a Dora Capunay Sosa y José Capunay, quienes respaldaron tanto mi escritura cuando niña; y a Rosa Elena Sosa, por su fe y su fortaleza
.

To my sister, Liliana Hernández, who inspires me with her writing and advocacy for foster-care children
y sus familias
, and always knows how to make me laugh.

To Geralen Silberg, my sister-friend, for joining our family with such grace and love.

To Zami, because every writer should thank her cat. Over and over again.

To Erika Martínez and Erica Kremenak, for keeping me on task with love; to Dulce Reyes, for guiding me in the land between Spanish
y el inglés
, and to Bushra Rehman, for
su consejo
to inventory the writing.

To Minal Hajratwala, Sandip Roy, and Peung Vongs, who saw me through the early drafts, and to Catina Bacote, Sunita Dhurandhar, Alberto Ledesma, and Linda González, who gave me feedback and companionship during the revision process.

To David Mura and Maureen Seaton, for reading the manuscript and offering much-needed encouragement.

To Corinne Domingo, who showed up one day with eighty pages of her own writing. I was twenty-one and didn’t know that people like me could write books. Thank you.

To Nancy Nordhoff, Amy Wheeler, and the staff at Hedgebrook, for granting me the most divine place to write, read the work of women writers, and make lifelong friends.

To the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, and Blue Mountain Center, for the generous time and space to draft, revise and be in the company of artists.

To Gary Delgado, Rinku Sen, and the amazing staff at the Applied Research Center and
ColorLines
magazine, for their passion and insights over the years.

To the Center for Fiction in Manhattan, for granting me an affordable office space; to the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, for my first writer’s grant; and to the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Michael Collier, for making my time at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference possible and nourishing.

To Marcia Ann Gillespie and Gloria Steinem, for inviting me to write for
Ms
. and first find this book.
Mil gracias
.

To Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, and the Macondo community, for creating a community
con tanto cariño
; to Elmaz Abinader, for the VONA workshops, the VONA
familia
, the VONA love; to M. Evelina Galang and the professors, students, and staff of the MFA program at the University of Miami, who drew me closer to studying craft; and to Angie Cruz, Adelina Anthony, and Marta Lucia, for their collective visions and for the W.I.L.L. (Women in Literature and Letters) workshops in New York where I first found mentors
y comadres
.

To writer-friends
y maestras
who showed me the way: A. Manette Ansay, Anna Alves, Wendy Call, Joy Castro, Carolina De Robertis, Patricia Engel, Lorraine M. López, and Tram Nguyen.

To Jack Alcantara, Pamela Harris, Tracy Kronzak, Tammy Johnson, Leslie LaRose, Keely Savoie, Alice Sowaal, and Susan Starr, for their friendship and
abrazos
.

To my
padrino
, Carlos Aldama, and my
madrina
, Yvette María Aldama, for their brilliance and their music.

To Laura Berenson, Audrey Cleary, Jacob Gershoni, Tereza Iñiguez-Flores, Cary Okano, Sobonfu Somé, Kathie Weston, and the truly precious Engracia, who helped me to trust what I knew.

To the world’s best speaker agent, Jodi Solomon, and her staff, for connecting me with countless young people across the country to talk about feminism, racial justice, and the stories we all need to write.

To M. J. Bogatin, for his yes-you-can spirit and professional guidance.

To Gayatri Patnaik, Rachael Marks, and the entire staff at Beacon Press, for bringing this book to you.

Beacon Press
Boston, Massachusetts
www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 2014 by Daisy Hernandez
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper
ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

Some chapters in this book were previously published in slightly different versions in
Fourth Genre; Bellingham Review; Hunger Mountain: the VCFA Journal of the Arts; Wise Latina: Writers on Higher Education
(University of Nebraska Press, 2013);
Border-Line Personalities: A New Generation of Latinas Dish on Sex, Sass and Cultural-Shifting
(Harper Paperbacks, 2004); and
Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
(Seal Press, 2004).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hernández, Daisy.
A cup of water under my bed : a memoir / by Daisy Hernandez.
pages  cm
ISBN 978-0-8070-1448-6 (hardback : alkaline paper)
ISBN 978-0-8070-1449-3 (ebook)
1. Hernández, Daisy. 2. Hernández, Daisy—Family. 3. Young women—Family relationships—United States. 4. Colombian Americans—Biography. 5. Cuban Americans—Biography. 6. Bisexual women—United States—Biography.
7. Identity (Psychology)—United States. 8. Women—New Jersey—Biography.
9. Women journalists—New York (State)—New York—Biography.
10. United States—Social conditions—1980– I. Title.
CT275.H5862453A3 2014
920.009268′7291073—dc23
2014000820