Read Online A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Daisy Hernández
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smile again, hoping that she will say more, but she only nods and ends the reading. My auntie tucks a few dollars beneath La Caridad’s toes.
As we leave, I chastise myself for having believed that an old lady who looks like corn would know anything about something as important as the future and college and books. When I call the scholarship office at the local state college, they tell me they still don’t have an answer. I call again and again, and the third or fourth time, the man says, “Yes,” and I can hear him smile. “You got the Trustee scholarship.”
“How much will that cover?” I ask, anxiously.
“Four years of tuition and fees.”
La Viejita Maria. New Jersey is filled with women like her. They read tarot cards and cups of water. They swear by herbs and honey, cowrie shells and Florida water. They come from Cuba, but also other places south of Jersey: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Alabama, Mississippi. When Frederick Douglass needed protection from the white man, his elders in Maryland insisted he carry hierbas on his right side. Roots, they called them.
In Jersey, the women run botánicas, selling religious candles in the front of the store and reading the cards in the back room. They see people in their kitchens, prescribing remedies for a bad cold or a job that has been lost. They sell powders that when added to a lover’s orange juice render the querido faithful. They do limpiezas , cleaning kitchens and bedrooms of bad energies with cigar smoke and holy water. They talk with the dead, with the gods, with the cartas , and then come back to us with messages.
The women are gorditas and flacas . They wear gold rings, gold chains, gold bracelets. They walk around their homes in housedresses and chanclas . The women are black, blanquitas , brown, yellow. Some are episodes of Sábado Gigante with the volume turned all the way up. Others are thick Spanish-English dictionaries, quiet and serious. To reach them, we take the bus down Bergenline Avenue, down that glorious stretch of sixty blocks crammed with banks, panaderías , shoe stores, liquor stores, and the cabinas to call Latin America. La Viejita María lives off of Bergenline, and so do Conchita and Ana and Juana.
My mother and my father and Tía Chuchi believe these women know something we do not, like why my father’s stomach hurts and when the factories will open again. We don’t visit the women very often, but somehow there they are—at the center of our lives.
There is a peculiar power to naming a person. It is unlike anything else we do in this life, this tattooing of a word on another person. In Spanish, we constantly name each other. Usually, it is a descriptor: el moreno , la gordita , el cabezón , la gringa . Sometimes the names refer to family roles or character traits that manifested early in life. A man in his sixties is still called El Niño, or the one who threw temper tantrums as a toddler remains El Terremoto, the earthquake, into his thirties.
With the women who read cards, however, no one can decide on a name. One of my aunties calls them brujas , insisting the women know nothing. “Those women are nonsense,” Tía Dora says, scowling. “They’re witches.”
“They are brujas ,” Tía Rosa confides to me in her bedroom, her thin lips whispering because she thinks the neighbors in the apartment next door can hear. “I know they put curses on me. I went to a woman and she told me.”
My father skips the formalities of names and defines the women by the work they do: Ana, la que echa cartas .
My mother, always firm in her practice of not stating the obvious but still discussing the subject at hand, refers to them as the women who know. When she returns from seeing one of them, she murmurs, “ Ella sí que sabe .”
Tía Chuchi nods, pulls from her pocket another story: “There was this family I knew en Colombia, and they took their daughter to a woman, because the girl was sick, pero muy enferma of a broken heart,
As we leave, I chastise myself for having believed that an old lady who looks like corn would know anything about something as important as the future and college and books. When I call the scholarship office at the local state college, they tell me they still don’t have an answer. I call again and again, and the third or fourth time, the man says, “Yes,” and I can hear him smile. “You got the Trustee scholarship.”
“How much will that cover?” I ask, anxiously.
“Four years of tuition and fees.”
La Viejita Maria. New Jersey is filled with women like her. They read tarot cards and cups of water. They swear by herbs and honey, cowrie shells and Florida water. They come from Cuba, but also other places south of Jersey: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Alabama, Mississippi. When Frederick Douglass needed protection from the white man, his elders in Maryland insisted he carry hierbas on his right side. Roots, they called them.
In Jersey, the women run botánicas, selling religious candles in the front of the store and reading the cards in the back room. They see people in their kitchens, prescribing remedies for a bad cold or a job that has been lost. They sell powders that when added to a lover’s orange juice render the querido faithful. They do limpiezas , cleaning kitchens and bedrooms of bad energies with cigar smoke and holy water. They talk with the dead, with the gods, with the cartas , and then come back to us with messages.
The women are gorditas and flacas . They wear gold rings, gold chains, gold bracelets. They walk around their homes in housedresses and chanclas . The women are black, blanquitas , brown, yellow. Some are episodes of Sábado Gigante with the volume turned all the way up. Others are thick Spanish-English dictionaries, quiet and serious. To reach them, we take the bus down Bergenline Avenue, down that glorious stretch of sixty blocks crammed with banks, panaderías , shoe stores, liquor stores, and the cabinas to call Latin America. La Viejita María lives off of Bergenline, and so do Conchita and Ana and Juana.
My mother and my father and Tía Chuchi believe these women know something we do not, like why my father’s stomach hurts and when the factories will open again. We don’t visit the women very often, but somehow there they are—at the center of our lives.
There is a peculiar power to naming a person. It is unlike anything else we do in this life, this tattooing of a word on another person. In Spanish, we constantly name each other. Usually, it is a descriptor: el moreno , la gordita , el cabezón , la gringa . Sometimes the names refer to family roles or character traits that manifested early in life. A man in his sixties is still called El Niño, or the one who threw temper tantrums as a toddler remains El Terremoto, the earthquake, into his thirties.
With the women who read cards, however, no one can decide on a name. One of my aunties calls them brujas , insisting the women know nothing. “Those women are nonsense,” Tía Dora says, scowling. “They’re witches.”
“They are brujas ,” Tía Rosa confides to me in her bedroom, her thin lips whispering because she thinks the neighbors in the apartment next door can hear. “I know they put curses on me. I went to a woman and she told me.”
My father skips the formalities of names and defines the women by the work they do: Ana, la que echa cartas .
My mother, always firm in her practice of not stating the obvious but still discussing the subject at hand, refers to them as the women who know. When she returns from seeing one of them, she murmurs, “ Ella sí que sabe .”
Tía Chuchi nods, pulls from her pocket another story: “There was this family I knew en Colombia, and they took their daughter to a woman, because the girl was sick, pero muy enferma of a broken heart,
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