Free A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández

but another girl, a girl who cannot be beaten or lied to, a girl who, like a river, cannot be caged.
    “That must have been Juana,” my mother answers, her lips tightening.
    I am in my thirties now, and she is upset that I have asked her about that time in our lives, about the red scarf and Juana, who was a santera , my father’s religious godmother.
    When I ask her for more details, my mother hesitates, as if she is opening the door of a house she does not want to visit. She squeezes her thin lips so hard they almost vanish into her face, and I change the conversation and shut the door for us both.
    According to books at the public library in New York City and the libraries at New York University and the New School, I am not the first person to think about the women who know. Historians have studied these women, not La Viejita María or Juana in particular, of course, but these kinds of women, and they have found the following:
The women engage in a kind of folk Christianity.
Or the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha.
Or Espiritismo, talking with the dead.
Or any of these religious practices mixed together.
    In short, the historians know little. To be fair, it is difficult to study a subject that shifts for migration, for necessity, for colonization. It is impossible to put under a microscope a group of women who have no central authority, who protect themselves by not naming themselves, who change the rules depending on whose home they walk into.
    Many of the women only know one truth: envidia .
    My mother goes for a consultation because the factories are paying so little, because my father owes some back taxes, because it is always good to check in with these women about what we don’t know. The answer is the same. “The woman said it was envidia ,” my mother whispers to Tía Chuchi at home. “But why are people going to be envious of us?”
    Tía Chuchi points to the home my parents own, the fact of having any job at a time when so many have none. Tía nods her head. “The woman is right. Es envidia .”
    And so the floors are cleaned by rolling coconuts over them with a broom and my parents wash in baths of Florida water and white carnations. My mother urges me to not tell anyone our business because this much is true: any little good you have someone else covets.
    Envidia is the primary way we have to talk about what we want. While my mother would deny she ever envied another person, I can hear it in her voice, in the tone of the questions she and the aunties pose to each other:
Did you hear they went down the shore?
And he bought a new house where?
She never worked a day in her life and now she’s collecting. Te imaginas?
    No one here can afford to believe in dreaming, in planning, in the pursuit of happiness. The good stuff in life is bestowed by God, by luck. Everyone knows that one call from Colombia can mean that money being saved for a vacation will now be sent to a brother in jail. Or that this could be the afternoon when the factory forelady will say, “There’s no work tomorrow.” Or that next week, immigration officials could show up at the factory and haul away an auntie, a cousin, a father. It happened to my mother’s friend. It could have happened to her.
    The good moments come to us by chance, and if this is the case, all we are left to feel is envidia .
    In Old English, the word knowledge means to identify, to recognize. It is taken for granted that knowledge is information based on observation, on investigation, on questions asked and answers tested. It is exactly what I want now.
    I want knowledge that can be placed on page forty-six of a thick volume, knowledge that can be typed up, indexed, handed out to people, made permanent. Here’s how you know if the girl gets to go to college. Here’s how you know if she made her father beat her up. Here’s how you know if another woman knows or doesn’t know. Here’s who you can trust and who you cannot.
    My mother