Gravity

Escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for an object to leave the gravitational influence of a massive body. The bigger the object, the stronger the gravity, the more energy is needed to propel it off the ground, trails of smoke ebbing out before the sudden flood of flames, a comet rising into the sky.

Poverty is a black hole: cold, massive, invisible to an untrained eye, and almost impossible to escape. If you’re born poor, you will likely continue to be poor, and die poor.

It’s almost never a question of working hard – the hands of my mother withered from scrubbing plates and squeezing mop heads, sweeping and cleaning the homes of rich, old couples who hand over envelopes of cash with tight smiles, their disdain palpable; or the slow bend of my father’s back from years of running cables through airless attics, sweating rivers in the heat of Miami summer, testament to this fact. No, escaping poverty is a matter of luck.

Will anyone in your family have a medical emergency? Will your father catch pneumonia from cutting sugarcane from fields in Homestead at four in the morning in the rain? Will the family car, the old gold 1998 Nissan Quest that needs a jump almost every time, finally give out? How many paychecks will it take to repair it, and how many paychecks will be missed in the process? Will your second daughter be born with an incurable disease, a costly disease, where the only way to afford her surgeries is to be poor enough to qualify for Medicaid?

There is no greater lesson that you are never in control than to be born poor.

Poverty is like being inside a black hole, or what I imagine a black hole to be. Like swimming through a thick dark that reaches up to your neck, and all you feel is the slimy cold, clenching your throat right before the point where you can’t breathe. It takes all of your power to keep your breath even, your body still, your eyes trained on the horizon, praying for someone, something, to pull you out.

Sometimes escaping is like planning to launch a rocket, slowly and carefully over years, teams of dedicated researchers pouring over charts and graphs, a vertical ascent into the heavens calculated to the thousandth decimal. That’s rare.

Sometimes it’s like that lottery ticket you bought after another late night scrubbing toilets, each number hand-selected, a memory of your eldest daughter’s birth, or your mother’s death, or the first day you came to America, a number whose magical strength glows in that pink ticket you grasp, your eyes squeezed tight as you wait for your daughter to read the winning numbers for the PowerBall.

And always, it’s a sacrifice. It’s like you’re sinking beneath thunderous waves, and every person you love, every sleepless night they’ve worked to build you up, is a skin you must shed, a pair of thick denim jeans or heavy boots you must strip off, to leave yourself bare, to reach the surface.

But some do escape. I watched it happen – the bright star of my sister exploding out of the gravitational well we were trapped in, propelled by a greater force.

The first time I learned being poor was something to be ashamed of, I was thirteen. I was leaving the movie theater with my sister and her friends one afternoon, trailing behind them. I tagged along on a lot of their hangouts, which they didn’t seem to mind because I was quiet and only a year younger.

They talked about the movie for a few minutes as we all waited for our parents to pick us up. Then, one girl turned to my sister and said, “Next week we should all go ice skating!”

Before my sister could reply, I answered, “No, we can’t afford that.”

I remember my sister’s flushed cheeks as she looked down, staring at her scuffed-up off-brand sneakers that pinched around the toes, as the group got quiet. One guy spoke after a moment, changing the conversation, but my sister remained silent until our mother’s minivan pulled up. Seconds after the doors slid shut, she turned to me.

“How could you embarrass me like that?” she yelled. I didn’t know what to say.

My mother quickly stepped in to mediate, telling her I didn’t know. Eventually, my sister stopped huffing, her bursts of anger like flares – hot and bright, but momentary.

Poverty had always been the equalizer in my mind, the common denominator, the gravity that drew people together. If you weren’t poor, you used to be poor, and mostly people were. At least, that’s how it was for my family.

My parents told me they left Cuba in different ways. My mother boarded a plane after her family won a raffle, taking with them only a handful of possessions as supporters of the Communist government pelted them with rocks on their way to the tarmac, calling them gusanos, worms.

Only when I was older and started asking questions –what the plane was like, where she boarded, how did all these people know where to show up and throw rocks – did the story change.

“We got here on a boat,” she said in Spanish. “I always said we came to the United States on a plane because there are Cubans that look down on people that came here on boat.”

Then, she tells me the real story.

My mother was twenty years old when my grandfather was released from prison, and her family took the chance to leave Cuba for the U.S. They took a bus from Cienfuegos to Havana where there were boats ferrying people the one hundred miles between Cuba’s capital and the southernmost point of Key West, Florida.

My mother, aunt, uncle, and grandparents arrived in Havana a week in advance, but they were not given seats on a boat for a month. That month they ate scraps of food provided by the government for those waiting to board, a couple pieces of bread and scrambled eggs dotted with egg shell pieces.

When they finally were granted access to a boat, it was the very last boat, the shoddiest available. Twenty minutes into the forty-five-minute trip, water began to seep in, and everyone began grabbing buckets, cups, any container they could find to throw the water out and keep the boat afloat. They had to do this for three hours while they waited for the US Coast Guard to rescue them and take them to Key West. My mother thinks their boat was sabotaged because almost everyone on the boat was either a political prisoner or related to one – the last effort of the government to purge their opponents.

Once in the US, they were seen by doctors, fed, clothed, and even given some money to fend for themselves. My mother’s family didn’t stay long, taking a plane to New Orleans and only returning to Florida after she met and married my father.

My father was alone, his parents lost to lung cancer and his siblings scattered across the island, so he took a riskier approach, earning him the nickname balsero. He got to the U.S. by raft, escaping Cuba and landing in Miami thanks to the wet feet, dry feet policy.

I questioned my father on this story, too, after hearing the drastic change in my mother’s narrative, but his stories always begin in one place and end in the other. He has the oddest tales he’s tried for years to convince my sister and me of – like the time he was deployed to the Congo and supposedly ate monkey, then almost died of an unknown disease, staying for three weeks in a military hospital.

With him, it’s difficult to tell fact from fiction, but what I do know is this – my mother wouldn’t tell me if he ever had to kill someone; or what he did to survive after his parents died; or why his much older siblings, Tio Manco or Tio Victor, didn’t help or support him after.

To an outsider, these stories of struggle, suffering, almost death, are shocking and eye watering testaments of the endurance exiles develop as they flee authoritarian regimes in the hopes of a better life. After the tenth, twentieth, fiftieth retelling at the kitchen table, my heart hardened.

These stories were never told at random; instead, they always resurfaced when I had a problem at school, a painful joint, a grumble about never getting to see my friends. The answer was clear: you haven’t starved, you haven’t lost both your parents, you haven’t fled your home, never to return – so you have nothing to complain about.

Whether these stories were true or not was irrelevant; I just wanted my parents to stop talking and let me eat in peace.

As a child, my mother told me stories of the weeks she, my aunt, and my uncle went to bed with nothing but milk and bread from the morning in their stomachs. After the revolution, food became harder and harder to come by; everything was rationed, and the good food was saved for friends of the revolution or traded on the black market.

My grandmother would slowly boil near-curdled milk over the stove, saving the few slices of bread that didn’t have mold growing along the sides for her son and two daughters. Every morning they’d tear the bread up and dip each piece into the milk, letting it get heavy and sweet before taking a bite. There was barely enough for two, let alone four, but my grandmother refused to eat, reserving only the most mold-ridden pieces for herself, or eating nothing at all.

She told me about the wounds and scars that pitted my grandfather’s body once he was finally released from prison, tortured for a decade after a relative accused him of being anti-Communist. One morning they heard hard pounding on the door; men burst in and dragged my grandfather out by the neck, beating him with sticks, clubs, hands.

Or when she cared for a tiny pink pig she named Mariposa, her first pet. They would feed her café con leche and scraps of leftover food, back when they had scraps. But one morning my mother woke up to see my grandmother’s sunken face, heard her plea to stay inside, heard the shrill squeal when my grandfather brought down the cleaver.  That night she refused to eat dinner, forced to sit at the table where her pet was served. She cried for weeks.

My father was more reticent, instead sharing uplifting stories about learning to fish with my grandfather or writing and selling poems on Valentine’s Day to his classmates, or ranting about the evils of Communism, which was usually a sign to go back to my room before I got roped into another lecture.

Before that day at the movies, I thought poverty was the invisible force that held people together. I felt connected to all my friends, even if they had nicer things than I did, because I knew they had been where I was. The things I read about – treehouses and giant TV screens and trips to Europe – were distant fantasies, as impossible as waving a wand to transform pencils into chocolate bars.

It was only when my mother sat me down and explained we were not like others, that most people didn’t wear their prima’s worn jeans, didn’t keep the air conditioning at 80 degrees, or didn’t sleep in the same twin-sized bed with a pink, itchy Barbie bed cover for fourteen years, and only then because that same prima got a new queen-sized bed from her parents, so I inherited her full-sized mattress and bedroom set. The people around me were not held together by the same infinite dark of gravity that pulled my family close: they were stable solar systems of seemingly endless light, brimming with planets that carried complex life.

We don’t see black holes the way we see other stellar bodies. Their gravitational force is so strong that not even light can escape their magnetic pull. It’s only when dust and gas are pulled in that scientists can spot them, the last blips of light surrendering to invisibility, to non-being.

Asking questions or making requests became taboo. What was once a weekly family trip or ritual – when we lived in Miami Beach and my father’s handyman business had seemingly endless jobs with new clients – became a rarity. I didn’t ask to visit friends, no matter how close they lived, because the minivan was old, delicate. We couldn’t drive it much in case it broke down. I stopped asking to check out books from the library for the same reason. I didn’t ask our parents to buy me anything, ever, because every single cent was stretched as far as it could reach. As long as you had a plate full of arroz y frijole, what else could you possibly need?

I still remember what felt like a year of eating chicken, rice, and beans every single day, with the same adobo seasoning, the same cracked green and white plates, the same threat from my parents, imploring us to eat it all, porque no se sabe cuando no va a ver mas. That was the year my grandfather was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and moved in with us, his hospital bed permanently positioned in my parent’s bedroom, my parents sleeping on an inflatable mattress in the living room instead, back when they still shared a bed, and always a pillow between them.

Thanksgiving that year was the exception: each month my mother scanned my grandfather’s face, waiting for a sign. And once he made it to the holidays, she wanted to send him off with the best Thanksgiving we could muster. 

My mother got a big turkey and cooked it in pineapple juice, pineapple chunks, and layered the skin with slabs of bacon. My sister and I lingered in the kitchen, intoxicated by the tangy sweet smell, and even my grandfather managed to leave his bed, he too escaping his prison of vegetable and starch mush to have a few bites of juicy turkey, chunks dripping with sauce as we reached into the pan in the middle of the table, dipping everything from the biscuits to the platanos maduros into that golden pool.

It was only a month later that I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of our dog quietly howling; when I followed the sound, I found our dog at my parent’s bedroom door. I opened the door and saw my grandfather in his medical bed, blood pouring from his nose. I screamed for my parents.

That night was the last time my grandfather slept in our home. After the ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital, he held on for a week before officially declared brain dead, his body only kept alive with machines. My mother, the eldest of the three siblings, made the decision to pull the plug. She still won’t look at family pictures.

So I learned to give things up; to not want. I learned to lie to my friends, making up excuses about sick cousins or babysitting responsibilities, and going home to read books I checked out from the school library. I learned to say no to everyone, even my parents the few times they could offer a little money to see a movie or get a new pair of shoes. I wore my loose grey pants and sneakers that were falling apart with pride, superior in my detachment from material things. Mentally, I had already detached myself from my body, my bow-like leg that gave me a permanent limp, so giving up material possessions was just the next step.

My sister didn’t follow my approach. She wanted things – makeup, clothes, boys. A normal teenage girl by most standards, but not in a Cuban exile household. She fought hard with my parents to hang out with her friends, to get rides, to wear eyeliner and brand-name clothes. She did not succumb to poverty the way I did.

That’s what made her shine so bright. She resisted the nihilism of being poor, of tee shirts with garish designs that read “Kiss Me I’m Irish,” the hard gold letters cracking after the first wash; of long lines at churches where the white Americans of Miami would surface, handing over baskets of almost expired Winn Dixie bakery goods; of those hard plastic green chairs at the local Department of Children and Families, the cafeteria-sized room packed to the brim with Cuban refugees donned head to toe in American Eagle, cheap cologne exuding from every pore.

No, she was different. She was shimmering all over, the accretion disk of stellar matter that spiraled around our family’s black hole. We may have been in the same gravitational field, but she was fighting the force pressing down on her, pushing her way out.

Black holes are made up of three parts: the outer event horizon, the inner event horizon, and the singularity.  The horizon is where matter is drawn in, the “point of no return.” Escape velocity is the speed of light, and once you’re in the event horizon, there are no paths out. You only spiral inward, into the inner event horizon and finally down into the singularity, the center of the black hole, where mass is almost zero.

My parents fell somewhere in between. They never gave up hope that they could escape poverty, even when their arrival to the United States was not the gilded roads and Coca Cola bottles on every corner they had expected. Even when coming to the US meant giving up everything else.

My mother’s years as a nurse were meaningless here, her certifications stuck in Cuba, her expertise null and void. Imagine being twenty years old and everything you had experienced, everything you had achieved, becoming instead a past you had to recreate. Every late night with a patient, drawing veins and cleaning bedpans. Or the time your cousin almost had you imprisoned after claiming you were anti-Communist like your father, all because she was in love with your boyfriend.

That was my mother, arrested by the police on her way home from the hospital and thrown in jail for the night. They claimed she had broken a blood pressure machine at the hospital to sabotage the people and the government – the easiest excuse they could find to throw her in front of a court the very next day and bring up her father’s imprisonment as proof that treachery was in her blood.

It wasn’t until one of my mother’s patients, a woman she had treated for gangrene whose son was a prominent member of the Communist party, came to testify that she was loyal to the party and a good nurse, that the charges were dropped, the judge calling the false claims levied at my mother ‘an abuse of the system’.

In this new world, she had to pay for English classes, the language like a hard slap of t’s and p’s and k’s, with those strange s’s her teacher kept explaining were different than e’s, but my mother’s tongue didn’t move in these ways. And after that, she had to go back to school, school that wasn’t free, but she was already working a job and it would take years to afford to get her license back, and at this point she was almost thirty with no husband.

It wasn’t until the death of my grandmother that I think my mom finally lost hope, too. My grandmother passed away due to medical malpractice after a surgery for a blood clot in her brain. My mother always describes it in the same way: Es duro, cuando se te muere tu unica madre, en una cama de hospital, y te deja sola en este mundo frio.

My father was an intellectual. He earned a PhD in History, was gifted at math, and could recite information he read years ago perfectly, every word carefully locked away in the vault of his mind. He swallowed books at the same rate I would eventually read, sifting through the small children’s selections at his school and libraries, then venturing into more complex titles way above his age. He was even sent to Russia as a child for a math competition, something he still tells stories about to anyone who’ll listen.

In university, he was assigned a subject to study by the school officials – mathematics. But his girlfriend/first ex-wife to be was given history, which she disliked. So he switched with her, happy to be in any subject area if he had a book in his hand.

Like my mother, his degree was stuck in Cuba because they left during a time when exiles weren’t allowed to take anything with them. The quest to get his history credentials transferred to the U.S. looked bleak. Instead, he took up every manual labor job he could find, eventually finding himself in truck driving.

My parents met shortly after my grandmother’s death. They had been sending each other letters and making late-night phone calls to one another for weeks, my grandmother leading the effort to make my parents a couple before her passing.

My mother was destroyed after my grandmother’s death, and in my father she tried to find something stable, to build something good. Meanwhile, my father was trying to redefine his purpose, to start a family, another wife, more children to bring into this world and then abandon. They married in a week.

Poverty was more than just the black crease of an empty wallet. It was poverty in being, poverty in respect. In the way my mother pronounced words into the phone, making appointments with physicians or calling telephone service providers to question high bills. Her slippery tongue trying to find footing around the rough edges of English, cut again and again in her jumbled speech.

The exasperated sighs of customer service representatives. The “ma’am I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My exasperated sigh when I was given the phone, the burden solely my own after my sister left, as I translated the booming instructions from my mother in one ear, and the emotionless murmur of representatives in the other. 

Over the years my parents relied on government aid, food stamps, housing assistance, disability checks, and Medicaid. But they learned that this aid is just another revolution of poverty, a spiral into a life of inspection dates, forms, and frantic phone calls when something on their end was written wrong. The less you make, the more aid you receive, but the aid is just a bandage on a gaping wound.

My father would do a bit better, get a few more clients, repair a couple air conditioning units, and assistance checks were slashed like we had become middle class in an instant, offering fifty or fewer food stamps for a family of four. Every inch of success is followed by a mile of punishment, until it becomes safer to be poor, the right level of poor, enough so that you never have too little to survive, but never enough to thrive.

We lived on the event horizon, aid appearing like flashes of light, that fabled form of escape, but the only way to see it is to sink deeper. And the moment you begin to rise out of the black hole, the light flickers out.

Escape was no longer an option for my parents. They surrendered that possibility to their children, pushed us toward education with the hope we would see a modicum of success. They even convinced me, at age ten, that I wanted to be a genetic engineer – never mind the armfuls of fantasy books I carried from the shelves to the checkout counter in half a dozen trips, my small arms too weak to carry them all at once. It didn’t take long for me to discover that the maximum you can check out at one time is fifty books.

Never mind the melodramatic poems I scribbled along the edges of papers or, more famously, on the side of my dresser, etched in red Sharpie because it was the only color that could reflect my pre-teen bleeding red heart; or the dozens of stories I started but never finished, saved on an ancient hard drive my father guards closely, about super-powered girls who lived among the stars.

To want anything non-essential was a betrayal, another step further into the singularity. I had to be someone, for myself and for them. There were no grandparents, no hordes of aunts and uncles, no spacious family property in the countryside to fall back on. We were a closed system, the dense black hole of a collapsed star.

My sister escaped through her boyfriend. A rich Cuban American with more money than manners, but he was willing to use his gravitational pull to slingshot her out of our vacuum. I resented my sister for years after she left, but not for leaving me behind.

The well of my mind had been poisoned by my mother, who would come every night to my bedroom and bemoan the callousness of my sister towards my mother, the abuse my sister and her boyfriend supposedly levied at her by staying over and eating plates of beans and rice my mother all but thrust upon them. She convinced me that my sister was an awful person who took advantage of my poor, destitute mother.

I eventually realized that the reality my mother convinced me of was not the same one I lived in, after opening up to my sister when she reached out. In my mother’s pain, she had made everyone the enemy, lashing out at even her children when they saw success in ways she never did. Poverty can make a person lose their humanity, forget they’re a person and not just a ‘poor person’.

My father was next, emboldened by an affair and divorce. He too used his new partner to slip free of our black hole, packing his things over a series of weeks and disappearing on buses to unknown parts of the city. It wasn’t until the last day that we saw his girlfriend’s tan van pull up in front of our house. My father loaded the last of his things, his computer, handyman tools, and final batch of clothes into the trunk.

His departure was the least surprising and the most necessary after years of watching shouting matches, my mother’s flying hands, my father’s puffed-up bravado, but it was his betrayal with another woman that broke my mother. To see him do what she never had the courage to, and then finding someone else at the same time.

I thought about paving my own way out too, applying for jobs online I knew I couldn’t physically handle, my curved leg straight now for years. But the effects of a deformed leg lingering in my imbalanced walk and posture, my lower back and knees incapable of staying upright for more than a few hours before bone deep aches begin to settle.

My next options were leaving with a boyfriend, making plans to take up an entry level job that was less arduous on the body, like a secretary or call representative. But I could never make that leap, latch onto enough energy to push me out of the pull of my home. I was afraid.

I knew my mother would fall apart when I left her; her first reaction would be to lob endless barbs, insults, mistakes and memories to cut deep where she knew it would hurt me. Call me a slut if I left with a boyfriend, ungrateful if I left alone. Shout around the house while I packed, about how she raised vipers, snakes, about how no one loved her in this world after my grandmother passed.

It took me years; three boyfriends, two sexual assaults, two jobs, and many unfruitful attempts at therapy, but I did eventually launch myself out of that gravitational well. My mother reacted just as I suspected, screaming ceaseless tirades of the injustices life had thrown at her, despite how much she had sacrificed for all those around her.

I packed my clothing, books, every belonging I knew I could claim as mine, into plastic bags and old luggage and every open crevice in the beat up sedan I had purchased with a loan, earbuds lodged deep into my ears and stone faced whenever my mother approached me. Her face was splattered with blotchy red patches as she shouted, pointing her finger at me close enough that I could almost feel it.

Trunk, back seats, and passengers seats full, I slipped into the drivers seat and didn’t look back as I pulled out of the driveway, and into the endless expanse of the universe around me.