I have been getting candy this way since I was a toddler and the clay dish was tucked under my parents’ bed. Over the years, I’ve learned to distinguish the new dulces from the old ones by examining the wrappers for dust and tears. I don’t know why my parents hide the plate like this, but it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t even annoy me. I’m used to it.
What does upset me in the cuartico is the other plate.
It’s made of clay also but filled with tiny iron toys: a shovel, machete, rake, and anvil. In theory, a collection of toys sounds appealing, but the iron pieces appear angry, and I always have the nagging suspicion that they are about to fling themselves at me. I’ve learned to take the candy, avoid the little machete, and run out of the shed.
There’s nothing odd about any of this, because it has always been this way. In my house, grown people hide candies and toys, even roosters.
I walk into the kitchen one day as my mother stands barefoot on the kitchen counter. She’s dressed in a white T-shirt and a violet skirt, and she’s carefully placing a tin rooster with bells at his feet on top of the cupboard.
She climbs down with some effort but also a look of satisfaction on her face, like she’s Moses returning from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. She sees me and asks a normal question, like if I want pizza for lunch. If I ask her about the rooster or the candy dish, she will have the same answer: “Son cosas de tu papá.”
From the top of the cupboard, the tin rooster’s bells are silent, but I can feel him watching us, his eyes soft and gray.
In Catholic elementary school, I read about how Jesus turned water to wine, and I examine the wings of the guardian angels in my children’s Bible. I study the Ten Commandments and write that I will have only one God and never steal my friend’s wife. Once a month, at St. John the Baptist Church, I share my sins with an old man through the screen wire in the confessional: Forgive me, Father, for I said three curse words this week.
I am happy with Catholicism. The songs are catchy, the incense smells good, and on Sundays, I get to put a quarter in a tin can and light a candle to the Virgin Mary.
My father, though, does not go to church. When I ask my mother about this, she replies, “Your father doesn’t go to church.”
I stare at her, not sure how she manages to answer my questions by repeating them as sentences. “Why not?” I inquire.
“He doesn’t go,” she says.
Instead, Papi walks down Bergenline Avenue on Sunday mornings or joins his friend Pedro on plumbing jobs. Home by early evening, my father starts drinking Coors beer in the kitchen if it is winter or in the front yard if it is summer. I sit nearby with a book in my hand and watch him.
A man who drinks too much is an open secret. No one talks about it because everyone drinks. Everyone has a father or uncle or cousin like that. There is nothing to hide. But there is plenty to see.
At first, it is ordinary, a man wading into the ocean, enjoying himself. He remembers a joke he heard at the bakery. He laughs hard and for a long time. He feels larger than life, like God or the sky. But the longer he’s in the ocean, the less he chuckles, the stronger the undercurrents become. He starts to complain that we’re making too much noise, that we’re talking on the phone too long. The television has to be turned off because the sound bothers him. The taut string of the horizon begins to waver before him. His eyes lose focus.
Then the waves come, furious and punishing, and he’s cursing at me, at my mother, at the kitchen sink. We’re stupid. We’re in the way. We need to get out of the way. Or he’s yelling about Fidel Castro and the cost of heating the house. Or he’s falling down, breaking his head open, the blood trickling down his forehead. In the emergency room, the doctor stitches him up, asks how much he had to drink that night. My father grins, raises two fingers. The doctor smiles, shakes his head, says he can smell the alcohol on him.
Only one night ends in the hospital. Most nights, my mother sighs in relief when my father’s body finally bends forward at the kitchen table, his forehead resting in the crook of his arm like a boy who is counting to ten in a game of hide-and-seek. He has passed out. Again.
My mother thinks the problem with my father is that his mother died when he was born. But I know the truth. The problem is my father’s godless.
Every Sunday, the priest lectures in English on those who stray from Jesus and his flock of sheep. The temptation to lie and steal torments them, the devil slips into their skulls, and then God punishes them when they die.
Unlike my classmates who conjure up sins for confession, because they are horrified at the idea of confiding their secrets to a viejito, I kneel in the confessional behind the dark red curtain and tell the truth. I said a curse word. I had a mean thought. I got angry with my mother. This is my fear: If I don’t tell the whole truth, a fat white man will fall from the sky and smack me.
My father doesn’t confess, and he swears about corrupt priests who pocket the Sunday limosna. But his sin—the one that is the worst—is being far from God, standing outside that flock of white sheep, alone on a hill, at a distance from where all the good stuff in the world takes place.
My mother’s older sister, La Tía Chuchi, does not believe in secrets.
She arrives from Colombia the year I turn fourteen to live with us. A former girls’ basketball coach, Tía Chuchi begins by assessing the players, the opponents, the court. She scrubs floors, throws out old newspapers, and empties the kitchen cupboards to find what is viejo and what is still good. She discovers everything: the tin rooster, the candy dish, the plate of iron toys.
“I told your mother,” Tía Chuchi begins, her voice clear and commanding, her lips coated in a bright pomegranate lipstick. “I told her she has to take care of your father’s things—that’s his religion.”
“Papi has a religion?”
“Of course, he does,” she says, as if I had asked a silly question, like whether Jesus is the one and only savior. “It’s Santería.”
It’s difficult to know whether to believe Tía Chuchi. She’s not like my mother, who sighs every time I ask a question as though I were the cause of a headache. Tía Chuchi is a library. She carries fantastical stories, like the one about the girl in Colombia who was so sick that she was taken to a farm where a bull was about to be slaughtered. At the precise second that the knife was plunged into the animal’s fat neck and blood leapt into the air, the girl had to drink it, la sangre. And that, according to Tía Chuchi, is how the child was finally cured.
It wouldn’t be surprising then for Tía Chuchi to make up a story about a grown man praying to a plate of candy, because that is what she tells me. The clay dish with its rock and sweets is part of my father’s religion. The rock is named Elegguá. He’s a guerrero, a warrior.
“It’s a kind of spirit your father confides in,” she says. “Like a santo.”
I consider this information and conclude that it is impossible. My father is not the kind of man who shares the quiet places of his soul with anyone, not a rock, not even my mother.
The candy dish being a santo, on the other hand, makes sense. In our town, saints occupy churches and hold court in front of Italian homes, protecting the families and their tomatoes. The santos are made of polished stone and bathed in flowers and candles. On Bergenline Avenue, they line the shelves at the botánica, where it is easy to buy miniature saint statues to receive help with finding lost items, lost lovers, even lost jobs. Like people, the saints come in all colors. San Martín de Porres clasps the gold cross with soft black hands and Santa Bárbara has a doughy white face and round chin. San Lázaro’s bruised legs are like my skinny piernas: if he lay in the sun, they would grow as dark as his two crutches.
I add Elegguá to the long list of santos in my life. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have arms or a human face. His cowrie-shell eyes gaze at me like those of a Baby Jesus: curious, lively, los ojitos of a friend.
Tía Chuchi doesn’t know about the other guerreros, the tin rooster or the
other clay dish with the tiny machete. She qualifies her stories about my father’s religion by saying, “I don’t know much about these things, but. . . .”
But she does know. “They say you need a padrino,” she tells me. “The godfather is important. . . .”
“Where’s Papi’s padrino?” I ask.
Tía Chuchi shakes her head. “I don’t know. He died years ago. Now your father has women, santeras, they know about these things and they come and do the work with the santos.”
“What’s the work they do?”
“It’s like talking to the santos, but I don’t know.”
I examine my auntie’s face. She does know, but she’s not saying.
I step into the cuartico and reexamine the boiler. The older I get, the harder it is to squeeze around the machine, but I still manage it. Now, however, I am fourteen, and I look at the candy dish and greet it silently with the name Elegguá. There are a few new candies, but this time I don’t take them. I apologize to the santo about the stealing. I examine the plate of angry iron toys—the anvil, the machete—and wonder if they will swing themselves at me. Again, I apologize. Nothing happens, but when I leave the shed I feel that I have had a long conversation with a good friend. I feel completely understood.
My father appears to me as a different man now, not one who drinks too much and works too often, but a man with a life of his own.
I start paying attention to the disappearing days, those days every couple of months, when my sister and I are sent to spend the day with an auntie, leaving behind my mother who claims she has too much housework to join us. This is the first clue that something else is happening because a) my mother hates to clean and b) when I plead that my mother come with us, I receive a lecture from one of the aunties on the importance of Mami having time to herself, which is definitely a lie since the only thing my mother hates more than mice and roaches is being alone.
At the end of a disappearing day, the house smells better. The air has been scrubbed clean. It feels like people have been washed away from our home, like a woman with big arms used a mop to push out the nasty town official who said our house should be condemned. My mother, though, acts as if we were filming a scene from The Godfather. She wears a matronly house dress, stirs tomato sauce in a pan, and pretends to be preoccupied with frying pescado for my father, all the while making eye contact with my auntie and talking in code.
“How did everything go?” Tía Chuchi asks casually.
“Good,” my mother answers. Her eyes meet my auntie’s for a second and then shift back to the tomato sauce.
Once my father’s had dinner and my sister and I are tucked away in the living room with the television set blaring, my mother starts whispering to my auntie in the kitchen, a low murmur like a book that’s being quietly read. The only snippets I can catch are a few words about the limpieza and the woman saying that such-and-such was because of envidia.
The year I turn fifteen I decide to leave Jesus and his flock of sheep.
I am a freshman at Paramus Catholic High School, which is a forty-five-minute bus ride from my home and filled with teachers who used to be nuns. That someone could leave a nunnery is shocking. I observe my religion teacher, Ms. Langlieb, for a sign that she is tormented, but she appears tranquil, like an egret with her white hair and skinny legs.
According to Ms. Langlieb, the stories from the Bible didn’t necessarily happen. “They are parables,” she says, “ways Jesus shared his lessons about love and forgiveness.”
I march back to my church, up the stairs, and into the ornate wooden confessional. This time, I don’t have any sins to confess. I want an explanation because I have been reading my children’s Bible since I was seven and I believed every word of it. I believed that dead people came back to life, that women talked with angels, and that God kept track of any curse words I said.
“It’s okay to have doubts,” Father Carroll whispers through the screen window of the confessional. “But don’t lose your faith.”
That’s all he says. Not “Let me explain” or “Yes, I lied to you,” but an instruction to decide for myself what is true. I thank him and storm out of the church. I will not be part of a religion that lies to me. A few months later, the fat white man in the sky smacks me.
A friend’s cousin crashes his car into an electrical pole at close to a hundred miles an hour, almost cutting off electricity to parts of Jersey City. That is what I am told later, after I am pulled out of the car, after I wake up to find my body in the middle of the road, my right arm dangling above my shoulder, my left leg loose and twisted below my hip. Both the arm and leg are broken, as if God had cut a diagonal line across my body.
I know God has singled me out for punishment, because there were six people in the car that night and everyone else has minor bruises. I, on the other hand, spend three weeks in the hospital, undergo a blood transfusion (I’m anemic), hobble along for months on crutches, and undergo two surgeries. None of this convinces me to return to Catholicism. I would rather be alone on a hill with the truth and broken huesos than to be told stories that are mentiras.
My father comes to the hospital once.
He’s wearing his leather jacket and black work boots, and he yells at me about the mess I got myself into, about what I’ve done to my body, to him, to the family. My left leg is lifted in traction. My right arm is hidden in a cast. In a few days, on my quinceañera, surgeons will open my skin and slip steel-like rods into my body so the bones will grow straight alongside the metal.
I stare at the hospital wall while my father barks at me. My mother focuses on the floor; Tía Chuchi inspects the bed sheet. My father’s friend Pedro, who drove him to the hospital, searches for something out the window.
When my father and his friend leave, the room is silent. I will myself not to cry. Usually when my father has one of his rages, I run to my bedroom or to the pages of a book. But this time, I can’t move. The white bed sheet is draped over me like a giant bandage. I close my eyes and slip for a moment into my own made-up story about a boy who loves me but can’t exactly be with me, and yet in the end it all works out because really he does love me.
When I look over at my mother, her eyes are sad and quiet. My father hates hospitals. That much I know. Later on, I will learn that he hates anything that makes him afraid—syringes, broken bones, doctors. Yelling at us, about us, about the world, is the way he knows to talk about fear. But right now Tía Chuchi wants me to know that my father does love me.
“He kept vigil the night of the accident.” She pauses, but this is not another story from Colombia. This is true. “He prayed with the velas lit, with Elegguá and the guerreros. He didn’t sleep. He prayed all night.”
The sweetest part of my father is his candy dish.
A year after the car accident, we sell the house on Fourth Street. It has not been bulldozed. My parents have sold it to another family and found a new home a few blocks away. All the holy ones come with us.
In the new living room, Tía Chuchi hammers a thick nail into the wall and hangs the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It’s not a painting but a wood carving of Jesus with his white palms in supplication, his chest cut open to reveal his shiny red heart.
Elegguá and the plate of angry toys are tucked in the basement, where my father watches baseball on a portable television set and drinks Coors or Budweiser or whatever brand of beer is cheap that week.
The tin rooster is in the kitchen as always, atop the cupboard, his pale-silver eyes watching over us.
I interview two atheists in high school, not formally, but casually, over lunch, while waiting for a class to start, during group projects.
They have never had a god. They don’t miss the days when they prayed, sang songs, and read books about saints. They have not walked away from the feeling that a man in the sky is both punishing them and taking care of them. They are free and (it seems to me) lonely.
Tía Chuchi, on the other hand, places her miniature plastic saints on
the board covering the radiator in the living room. In the basement, my father keeps his santos in an old cardboard box. I watch the two of them with envy and longing and awe that nothing has shattered their beliefs. And then I take a step back, proud that I have given up foolish ideas.
The only crack in my defense is Elegguá.
Alone in the basement with him, I say a quick prayer: Help me with this exam, keep me safe tonight, make it so I pass the driving test, please.
I don’t know why I do this except that the rock with cowrie shells and candies has been with me ever since I can remember, since before the saints on the radiator, since before Jesus even. And he has never lied to me.
December is the month of visitas.
We pull out the plastic Christmas tree from the attic and shop for paper icicles at C. H. Martin. On Bergenline, my mother stocks up on apples, popcorn, and white candles. Before Baby Jesus and Santa Claus reach us, San Lázaro arrives. It is the seventeenth of December, his feast day, and he is crippled.
San Lázaro is also half-naked. A single piece of muslin covers his private area. He has open sores on his body and a beard that hasn’t been shaved in weeks. He walks with two crutches and carries a halo over his head. Two stray dogs lick the wounds on his legs.
All statues of San Lázaro are like this, depicting the beggar from the Gospel of Luke who is repeatedly neglected by the rich man in this life but admitted into heaven after he dies. My father bought the statue, about seventeen inches in height, when he married my mother. When I ask why, he answers, “For protection.”
The statue takes its place on the dresser in my parents’ bedroom next to a cup of water and a picture of my mother’s dead mother, a short, white-haired woman with a matching violet skirt and blazer. At night, my mother plugs in a small electric candle on the dresser, like the ones they have in church for the saints. The candleholder is bright red with ornate gold-plate trimmings. The red light shines on my mother’s mother and the crippled saint with his two stray dogs.
A Cup of Water Under My Bed Page 4
