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
17 16 15 14 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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
A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 17