When two people have been close, you can say in Spanish that they were fingernails and dirt. Eran uña y mugre. That’s how close they were.
My father and I are not like that. His hands are too dangerous. They open a beer can and then another. They yank the telephone cord until it snaps from the jack in the wall. They poke my shoulders and slap the back of my head and pull me into hugs that stink of vodka and dirt.
In the late eighties, the world begins to shift. It happens at first in comments. My mother hears from women on the bus that they have found work as home attendants and that it’s not so bad. Most days. You convince the old people to eat their microwave dinners and later you lift them onto the toilet. Most of the time, the viejos are only grouchy. Sometimes, they turn disrespectful. But you can quit and find another old person to care for.
Tía Chuchi leaves one factory, but can’t find work at another. She knocks on doors, calls old friends. No one is hiring. Finally, she signs up for state training and starts working at a day-care center. She comes home, exasperated. “There’s two of us and twenty children,” she complains, opening a bag of crackers next to her shelf of miniature saints. “You tell me: How is that fair to anybody?”
For my father, the loss begins with the hours.
Twelve-hour days at the factory turn into eight hours and then six. I begin finding Papi home in the evenings, and after some weeks, I stop asking what happened, because all he says is, “Se terminó el trabajo.” The work came to an end, as if it were a line in a poem.
In the basement, he marks job listings in the Spanish newspaper in red ink with circles and x’s. At the unemployment agency, he sits alongside Pakistanis, Dominicans, and Nigerians, and he comes home to us with the English words for the work he does: embroidery worker, machine operator.
Factories begin closing for a week, a month, and we wait for the phone to ring. The calls come randomly. At first, the voices are pure American English. It is a language that rarely falters, that enjoys the certainty of punctuation marks. It begins with a “Hey, your dad home?” and ends with a casual “Thanks.”
I am never to say that my father is out looking for another job or that he’s found a part-time one. I am never to reveal anything on the phone. Just take the message and translate it into Spanish.
Sometimes, the factory has not closed, but they call to say: “Tell your dad to come at eight, not five.” “Tell him we need him tonight.” “Tell him to call next week.” “Tell him he can file for unemployment.”
The factories change hands. The American voices are replaced by those of immigrants, by an English that has learned the significance of proper names, verbs, and dates but not of conjunctions or prepositions. “Ygnacio?” they demand.
“He’s not home.”
“Tell him: No work, come Friday.”
Men’s factories lay off workers, but the ones for women keep them without pay. Sometimes, three weeks go by without a paycheck. Some women leave, but new ones show up, desperate to take a chance.
Sometimes on a Friday, the forelady announces she will have paychecks.
The women punch the clock and race each other to the bank. The ones who arrive last, like my mother, find a teller saying, “There’s not enough funds to cash this check.”
The women who have cars, used Toyotas, used Hondas, the women who have boyfriends with these cars, are the lucky ones. They reach the bank first and drive home with their pay: a hundred and eighty dollars for forty hours of work.
The dreaded question comes on Wednesday afternoon when my father drags the trash can to the curb. That’s when the Colombian lady from across the street spots him. She asks about his job and when he tells her the factory is closed por ahora, she tilts her head like she already knew. “Y estás colectando?”
She has noticed my father at home lately and what she really wants to know is if he’s collecting unemployment benefits.
“There’s no work to be found,” my father answers. His pants are falling from his narrow hips and he yanks them up with his left hand.
“Pero, estás colectando?”
My father shrugs his shoulders. “Es la misma basura.” It’s the same garbage.
He wishes the Colombian lady well. From my bedroom window, I watch him walk into the house. In the basement, he finishes a six-pack of Coors beer and listens to Radio Wado. He’s found a store on Bergenline Avenue where the price of beer seems to drop every time unemployment rises.
While my father and Mami and Tía Chuchi begin to collect unemployment, I am in high school, learning from school teachers and textbooks that Americans are trying to keep up with a family named the Joneses. These Joneses are a mystery of the English language, a fictional family that inspires anxiety in grown men who drive American cars and work in office buildings. My mother, however, has never heard of La Familia Yoneses, and if I told her about them, she would tell me to quit worrying about what everyone else is doing and focus on my own self.
In our part of the world, no one is keeping up.
We belong to a community based in part on the fact that we are all doing somewhat badly. When someone does a little better, there is an unspoken betrayal. We force a smile at them and murmur how good it is that they have a new job or are going to Puerto Rico for a visit. When they leave, we talk about how they are lying for their welfare checks, working por la izquierda, putting on airs. When we are the ones doing better, the women snack on arepas and complain, “It’s incredible, but it’s true. Any little good thing you got, somebody else wants.”
In our own kitchen, we discuss la envidia, how envious people can be, how it is a sickness that eats away at a person. We make the sign of the cross and thank God for not making us too ambiciosas. It is a comforting ritual to talk like this. It keeps us from admitting that people have a right to want something better. It keeps us from thinking that we want something better.
It takes years for me to understand that the Joneses happen in houses where people cook in one room and eat in another. The Joneses do not happen in places where people are called white trash and spics, welfare queens and illegals, and no one asks the Joneses if they are collecting.
Spanish is a Romance language, except when you are trying to make ends meet.
The Spanish we share at home is a language where life is reduced to saying what you need, what’s working, and what isn’t. No hay trabajo. Media libra de chuletas. Van pa’ la iglesia. Estás colectando?
Are you collecting?
The rest of that sentence, the words “unemployment benefits,” does not crossover into Spanish. There is no need for translation because everyone here knows what is meant when the question is asked. No one says we are entitled to the money, because no one here believes we have such rights.
I come home to find my mother watching a telenovela. “Your father’s in the basement,” she says. “They called from work, said to not come today.”
In the basement, my father talks with Elegguá. When he’s collecting unemployment, he feeds the orisha more chocolates and Cuban coffee so the god will open the door to another job. My Elegguá is in the writing. Everyone tells me so at the barbecues for my mother’s and sister’s birthdays. “Girl, you’re going to be something someday. You’re going to make it. Amparo, look at this thing the girl wrote for the school paper, her name and everything.”
No one ever says where I am going, but they are sure that a place is waiting for me. By the time I am nine years old and translating my report card for my father, I know he is not going with me.
There are many stages of development for a child who translates.
First, you are brought out among family and friends like a much-anticipated Christmas present and told to recite nursery rhymes from school. No one understands what you’re saying, but everyone smiles, cheers, applauds.
Next, you are trusted to interpret on the bus, at the dentist, before schoolteachers. You stumble over verbs, insert nouns from the other language, hope you got enough of the informatio
n correct.
Then, you are called to answer the phone, because it’s the electric company or the cable company or the Italian running for mayor again, and your father grumbles, “Yo no sé lo que dice,” or your mother calls out in alarm: “Ven, que es en inglés!”
Finally, after years of interpretation, you are trusted with paper. The final act: translation.
I am assigned to read and fill out my father’s unemployment papers. Pen in hand, I sit at the kitchen table, terrorized. One false move, an error in my understanding between English and Spanish, could result in what I can only imagine as devastation: the absence of those checks in the mailbox.
Positioning myself stiffly in the seat as my high school teachers do when they are about to administer a test, I ask my father the cold, bitter questions:
Have you had the chance for employment in the past week?
Have you had offers of employment that you’ve turned down?
Have you worked during the weeks for which you are claiming?
We repeat this exercise, my father and I, over the years. By the time I am in college, it is routine. I don’t ask the questions. I run my pen down the unemployment form, checking off the answers while munching on dry cereal. Then, I drop my father off at the unemployment agency in Englewood on my way to a college class on microeconomics.
Sometimes, as my father walks away from the car, I linger. I consider if I should skip class and accompany him. I wonder if he will make it through with the English he knows. I worry that he’ll be assigned to an unforgiving woman at the agency. There’s always one, sometimes more, women with dull eyes and no patience, no Spanish.
But I drive away. It is what my father expects of me, what we all expect of me. I am to avoid manual labor, to graduate from college, to work with white people, to earn enough money to buy a house in a white neighborhood. I am to be one of those people who say they are of Hispanic heritage, who say they grew up in difficult circumstances, who see the assimilation of one person as the progress of a community.
My father and I—we are not uña y mugre—but we have no way of knowing that my lingering outside of the unemployment agency, my thought of going in, of speaking up, might signal that I am on a road neither one of us has seen before.
My father always comes home to my mother.
He arrives with bloody hands. Sometimes it is because of a simple cut. Sometimes because he stubbed his thumb with a hammer. He is probably not fit for work as a handyman, but it pays. And it sends him home needing my mother. Wanting her.
On a Sunday evening, after dinner, after my mother has washed the dishes, my father sits at the kitchen table and opens his hands, palm up.
My mother examines the skin and squints. “There it is. I see it.”
“A splinter?” he asks.
She nods and saturates a cotton ball with rubbing alcohol. Holding his hand in hers, she wipes the skin with the moist white cotton. Then, she examines a small stuffed animal that’s punctured with sewing needles. She chooses a needle and wipes it with alcohol. Her head bent over the wounded hand, she slowly begins pushing the needle into the thick skin, the metal tip nudging the threadlike piece of wood, coaxing it from its sanctuary.
My father stares out the kitchen window where his black jeans hang on the laundry line, a stone expression on his face. A few times, he winces.
When someone asks my father how he is doing, he looks at his hands, studies the scattering of scars and the dryness of skin. His answer is always the same, “Ahí caballero, en la misma lucha.”
When I ask him what it means to say you are in the same lucha, my father says it means you are doing the same old thing.
Years later, surrounded by feminists, by activists, by artists, I hear that word again: we’re in this lucha together. The word means struggle, someone tells me. The same old thing, the struggle, la lucha.
I sit in an organizing meeting, my hand clasping a pen. It’s hard to explain how someone translates a word and your understanding of your family and your history and everything that’s come before turns around, opens to interpretation.
In the nineties, the unemployment agency sends a notice: we need to call in to a new dial-in system to collect. The brochure comes in Spanish and English.
My mother studies it carefully. My father’s hands can do many things but handling money is not one of them. Making phone calls is not one of them. It is my mother who writes the checks, pays the bills, and besieges me when it’s time to fill out the unemployment forms. It is she who calls in to the new dial-in system.
My father’s hands shake me until I wake up in the bottom bunk. It is early morning and he is still sober. “Your mother called unemployment and couldn’t get through. Come on, get up, call them.”
The dial-in system is efficient. Much more so than the factories that closed.
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.
A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 13