A Cup of Water Under My Bed

The wear on her father’s hands acts as a map of his life; it reminds Hernández of the way life has worn at him. When he found himself naively on the wrong side of the Cuban Revolution, he fled the island for the United States. He found employment in a variety of jobs until finally settling into a lifetime of unreliable employment in the textile factories in New Jersey. He works long and often unpredictable hours, usually at night. Sometimes there is little work available, a fact that takes a toll on him. In the late 1980s, factory work begins to dry up as jobs are shipped overseas, and the work disappears entirely by the time NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) passes in the 1990s. He drinks to console himself: “He’s found a store on Bergenline Avenue where the price of beer seems to drop every time unemployment rises” (140). Her parents and Tía Chuchi are forced to apply for unemployment benefits, a process that is difficult and demeaning. Because she can translate, Hernández helps her father with his unemployment paperwork. Her family looks to Hernández’s future as a way out of poverty: “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” (141).

Her father eventually gets a job cleaning floors and washing dishes at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey:

Service work is different from factory labor. It is not only the absence of 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’ (146).

After dropping her father off for his shift one day, Hernández watches him walk into the building and recalls that as she leaves her father literally, she also leaves him when she writes—while simultaneously carrying him with her. Later, she develops photos of her father and his hands that she took for a photography class in Manhattan. Her instructor notes, “He has character” (147).

Hernández lands a job as a researcher at the New York Times through one of her professors from graduate school. Soon she progresses to an internship with the editorial department. When she joins the editorial board meetings, she observes that nearly everyone in the room is white. Hernández suggests that the Times publish an editorial encouraging then-President George Bush to support granting political asylum to Colombian refugees, since the US funds the ongoing war in Colombia and, thus, bears responsibility for their lives. Nevertheless, one of the editors—whom she refers to as “Mr. Flaco” [Skinny]—shoots down the pitch: “[…] from the perspective of this skinny editor, of people who have power, Colombia is not as devastated as Rwanda or even as El Salvador was in the eighties” (154). She notes that there exists a “hierarchy of pain”; that is, the pain “has to be significant in relationship to those in power,” and Mr. Flaco embodies it (154). She ends up writing unsatisfying editorials about issues that do not address the political and social justice issues that concern her.

As her career advances, Hernández moves out of the family home in New Jersey into a small New York apartment. Working conditions at the Times continue to worsen, and Mr. Flaco’s bigotry becomes more brazen. During a conversation about an editorial that addresses a study showing boys are increasingly behind girls in educational benchmarks, the editor tells Hernández that regardless of class, Black boys perform worse. He then promotes the stereotype that Asian students consistently excel, noting, “It’s like it’s genetic” (159). Hernández concludes that she no longer wants to live in Manhattan or work at the Times. However, to give up her job is to disappoint her family. She does not think she has the right to say no.

Hernández begins news reporting for the Times: “It doesn’t take long, though, to see that I am missing a crucial asset: talking to white men” (162). She discovers that being able to talk to them means joking around; making small talk about commuting, sports, or their families; and offering rude commentary on articles. Hernández is not interested in these types of conversations. She also discovers that while she was good at editorializing, reporting is far more challenging for her. The job is exhausting, and there is not guarantee that her hours of work will make it into print. Meanwhile, her father spends his days sequestered in the family basement, drinking. Hernández worries he will die. He once falls and cuts himself, resulting in an emergency room trip during which he confesses that he and her mother do not like the work they do. The following morning, it feels difficult for Hernández to begin the workday.

She works on reporting that exposes the deep class and racial disparities that exist in the United States. Jayson Blair, a young, Black, up-and-coming reporter at the newspaper, turns out to be a plagiarist and a fraud. Some white colleagues speculate that Blair excelled at the Times only because of his skin color, further exposing the racist underbelly of Hernández’s workplace:

[…] I’m thinking about a white man [Times editor-in chief Howell Raines] confessing to his own people that he cared about the black community, that he thought he could single-handedly change a hierarchy. I’m thinking about the whiteness of the news organization and how that whiteness reproduced itself with every hire, every promotion, but that is not a scandal (168).

Soon after the Blair scandal breaks, Hernández finds herself reporting on a Haitian family in Brooklyn who lost an elderly family member to a fire in their apartment building. Distraught by the racial disparities in housing that contributed to the man’s death, Hernández begins to feel a “cracking” (170). She decides to quit her job at the New York Times. Hernández steps into the unknown.

After leaving the Times, Hernández finds a new job based in San Francisco with Colorlines magazine. She compares turning her life inside out to her mother doing the same to a skirt to deconstruct it for alterations. She packs her bags and leaves her mother behind. Her new workplace environment is far more suitable than the previous one: “I […] quickly learned that a small magazine is like a big family” (175).                 

After her move, San Francisco becomes a flashpoint for the struggle for the right to marriage equality. It is legalized there in 2004, making national news, which her family sees. Her mother does not answer Hernández’s many invitations to visit her in her new home. Her partner asks why she continues speaking to her narrow-minded family. She has trouble answering but finds that newly elected President Barack Obama helps her to explain when he refuses to abandon the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a Black minister who publicly criticized the United States for its past and current injustices: “Some stitches cannot be undone” (177).

Hernández’s family “unravel[s]” after her departure, moving to various locations in the US and Colombia (177). Tía Dora succumbs to her illness, dying in an ICU ward after yet another surgery, surrounded by her family, including Hernández. Her parents move to Florida, where her mother takes English courses and starts a small alterations business, and her father grows produce in the backyard. He finally returns to visit Cuba. While working on the fruit trees behind his new home, “My father began wearing sombreros like his uncle and father in Cuba, to keep the sun off his forehead” (179). Tía Chuchi begins to author her own memoir, and Hernández’s third aunt, Tía Rosa, returns to Colombia with the intention of dying one day in the land of her birth. Her sister moves to Washington, DC. Hernández notes again that writing is the method by which she keeps her family simultaneously close and at a distance.

She looks in San Francisco “for the place I came from—the house a city official wanted to condemn when I was a child […] It took me several weeks to realize I wasn’t looking for a house or a crooked street or even a familiar face” (180). Lost in thought on a city bus, Hernández realizes that she is about to miss her stop. Other passengers notice her predicament and shout at the driver to stop, “and I felt with a jolt 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” (181).