A Cup of Water Under My Bed

As a young adult, Hernández visits a classroom of teens to talk about her bisexuality. When one of the girls asks her if she will marry a man or a woman, Hernández responds that it is irrelevant because she is “attracted to who the person is on the inside” (90). Hernández and the students both know that her response is “bullshit” because “it does matter—gender, sexuality, desire, all of it. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be here talking about it, and Gwen Araujo would still be alive” (90). The rest of the chapter alternates between Hernández’s experiences and Araujo’s story. Gwen Araujo was a young trans woman who was abused and murdered by two young men when they discovered her identity.

Hernández first encountered Araujo’s story in 2004 when writing an article about her murder. From a young age, Gwen, who was assigned male at birth, liked to wear her mother’s pearls. As a teen, she started wearing makeup and her mother’s clothes. Instead of being asked if she wanted to marry a man or a woman, like Hernández was, Gwen had to deal with the question, “Are you a boy or a girl?” (90).

Hernández’s identity as a bisexual woman blurs traditional boundaries of gender and sexuality, just as her American citizenship and ethnicity cross borders: “One of the first times I realize you can love people that same way the sky in Cuba looks—without the interruptions of skyscrapers, without the boundaries of right and wrong, girl and boy—it is because people are dying” (91). This happens in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic is ravaging communities in the United States. When an educator comes to speak to her eighth-grade class, a student, having been exposed to the stereotype that AIDS is a gay disease, asks how women contract the illness. The teacher explains that if a man has sex with both men and women, the disease can be passed to women. This experience leads to Hernández’s recognition that it is possible to be attracted to both men and women.

The women around Gwen concluded that because she was born male but liked feminine things, she must be gay. When Gwen came out to her mother as a trans woman, her mother was emotional at first but supported her: “If her mother was able to change her story, it was because she had been schooled in Marianismo, the Latino narrative that tus bebés are the North Star” (93).

As Hernández explores relationships with women, many of whom are not bisexual but lesbians, she finds herself, again, feeling as if she exists in a liminal state. Like Gwen, she simply wants to feel “normal” and as if she belongs somewhere. Hernández dates several trans men, experiences that remind her of the world’s cruelty and bigotry and of the dangers transgender people like Gwen face on a regular basis. When the two young men whom Gwen dated and kissed began to suspect that she was not born female, they attacked her in a rage and buried her in the Sierra Nevada foothills. In her final moments, she reportedly begged them not to kill her because she had a family:

In the most terrifying of moments, she reached for that epic placed in the hands of so many Chicanas and Colombianas and Dominicans, and Greeks and Romans and Africans: I have family, I have a tribe, I belong (102).

Hernández returns home with her boyfriend, Alejandro, a trans man whom she assists in taking his dose of testosterone: “He can pass. The women in my family suspect nothing, and neither does anyone else” (103).

After Hernández comes out to her family, one of her aunts, Tía Dora, refuses to speak to her for years because “I used the wrong words. I admitted to kissing a woman” (105). This aunt is focused on practical matters and cares about how others see her.

Tía Dora suffers from an illness known in Colombia as the “kissing disease” or “kiss of death” (106). In 1978, she was infected by a parasite that causes long-term symptoms and eventually death. Those symptoms include heart palpitations, high fevers, and stomach pain and swelling. Hernández wishes she could explain to her aunt “that sexuality is not an illness. Love is not a parasite” (106).

After her arrival in the United States in 1980, Tía Dora undergoes a series of surgeries to treat her illness, none of which is successful. Some of her symptoms became more manageable, and she thwarts death. During the years when a home health aide comes to the Hernández home to tend to Tía Dora, the author is expected to act as translator. When she behaves impolitely, her aunt says “Qué India,” a term intended to insult her by indicating that she behaves like an Indigenous person.

The day after Hernández comes out to her mother, she calls Tía Dora to check on her. Her aunt tells her not to call again. Her illness sends her to the hospital for three months that year, but she tells no one outside the family. She does not want others to know “because unlike me, she was a lady. She had manners. She knew there were some things that should not be said” (110). Ironically, Hernández notes that her aunt’s behavior is apparently “a very Indian concept in my mother’s country” where “Indians […] are stoic […]” (110). Hernández realizes that they are “trafficking in a racial specter meant to keep every woman of color in her place” (110). She waits for her aunt.

Tía Dora was concerned about “Indians” long before her falling out with her niece. She claimed they were all over New Jersey. She identified they by their physical appearance: “[…] they were short, had thick black hair and brown faces, and wore cheap jeans. For Tía, these physical signs indicated illiteracy, poverty, and a lack of cultura” (111). Hernández notes the contradiction in her aunt’s racism: Tía Dora married a Peruvian man who looks like these very men. But he is acceptable because he “was not a real indio. He wore dress pants. He took Tía Dora to the movies. He read the newspaper” (111). José, Tía Dora’s husband, dies before Hernández starts college. She is sure that if he was alive, he would encourage her aunt to accept her. Hernández sees herself in her aunt, but her disdain at this stage of life is directed at the stereotype of the “welfare queen” (112) rather than at an imagined concept of Indigenous people.

The author and her aunt do not speak to each other for seven years. Only after Hernández begins dating a man does Tía Dora begin speaking to her again. She sees a photograph of Hernández’s boyfriend, and “his masculinity confirmed, she wants to talk […]” (115). What she does not know is that the person in the photograph is a trans man. Their reunion is not dramatic, and both women act like the years of silence never happened. Hernández accepts their relationship on these terms because she does not want to lose her aunt once more. After having dinner together, the pair watch a Woody Allen film that shows two women kissing. Tía Dora makes a negative comment. This time, Hernández does not try to convince her that what she sees is not bad or shameful. As she leaves her aunt’s home, she kisses her gently on the cheek, as she is expected to do. She behaves as someone who was raised in a way that her aunt deems proper, with good manners.