49 pages • 1 hour read
Angie CruzHow Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Senior Workforce Program, New York, United States”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of domestic abuse and suggestions of anti-gay bias.
In exchange for attending 12 vocational skills training sessions and participating in job counseling, interview training, and application help, Cara Romero has received an extension of unemployment benefits. Her Dominican-descended caseworker, Lissette, offers the session transcriptions that follow as evidence of Cara Romero’s job readiness.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Session One”
Cara Romero, age 56, attends her first Senior Workforce Program session after her employer, a lamp factory, outsourced jobs to Costa Rica. Instead of discussing her credentials and experience, Cara reveals intimate details about her life, beginning with her choice to leave the Dominican Republic at 26 because her husband planned to kill her after her affair with a man named Cristián. Her best friend, Lulú, encourages her to attend school even at her age. Lulú is the one who saved Cara from depression after her son, Fernando, ran away. They now share coffee in the morning and wine and telenovelas at night. They also email regularly. Cara also receives spam emails from a psychic hotline. Despite Lulú’s insistence the email is a scam, Cara believes in Alicia the Psychic, who emails predictions about Cara’s future even though Cara never sends her any money.
Despite Lulú and her professor’s confidence in Cara’s skills, Cara does not believe that she will find a job. Unlike her younger sister, Ángela, and Ángela’s husband, Hernán, who save each month, Cara puts her money in a bank in the Dominican Republic, where currency depreciation eliminates her savings overnight. She wants a job but has many unpaid responsibilities, such as watching Ángela’s children, taking care of the building’s oldest resident, la Vieja Caridad, and supporting her friend Glendaliz, whom she saved from cancer by detecting the smell with her sensitive nose. Cara understands that she rambles but insists that her stories prove that she is a strong person and excellent job candidate. In the application that follows, Cara fills out questions for the job that she wants. Her answers to key questions contain the same rambling and conversational style and ignore American conventions for job-seeking.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Session Two”
Cara struggles to identify her strengths and weaknesses. After recounting a story in which she injured her 13-year-old son Fernando by shoving him away from the door to keep him from joining some neighborhood ruffians, she concedes that she is sometimes too heavy-handed. Her sister Ángela blames her authoritarian parenting methods for the 10-year estrangement between Cara and Fernando. (In a much later interview, Cara will reveal the extent of her strong parenting when she recounts throwing an iron at the door and hitting 16-year-old Fernando by mistake, prompting him to run away and file a restraining order against her.) Now, however, Cara insists that her strength kept Fernando safe from the city’s temptations and made him successful. She accuses Ángela of forgetting that her sacrifices, extra shifts, and encouragement enabled Ángela and their brother Rafa to succeed.
While getting water, she mentions an operation and reveals that she was still recovering from a cyst removal during her last session with Lissette. Relying on her own strength, she refuses to bother others and comes to the meeting and gets herself home from the hospital alone. She then laments how unobservant the people around her are, accusing Ángela and Hernán of being too absorbed with their own troubles to notice her pain.
When her caseworker asks about her interests, Cara reveals that she and Lulú interpret dreams and like to watch the lobby security feed that was installed by the new owners who are gentrifying the building. She laments the new rules that forbid sitting in the hall to exchange meals and music but appreciates being able to watch over her community on the security feed. Lulú recently spotted her son Adonis on the security feed, but he left without visiting, which upset Lulú. Although Cara appreciates that Lulú now understands the pain of a wayward son, she disapproves of Adonis. Cara feels that Adonis is spoiled and that Lulú’s daughter writes disrespectful poetry about her. She believes that American therapy encourages children to blame mothers and wonders if this is why Fernando will not visit her.
In the Unemployment Insurance Benefit document that follows, Cara’s answers to security questions tend to ramble, revealing her misunderstanding of their purpose. However, she declares that the questions fail to understand her Dominican upbringing and asserts that she simply cannot provide an answer for questions that are designed to align with American experiences.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Session Three”
Cara is late because Lulú does not join her for their morning café. Lulú’s trouble with Adonis leads Cara to reflect on how their sons both owe their success to their mothers’ sacrifices. She regrets that both sons focus only on the harsh treatment that their mothers sometimes used. Cara fears that her son will have a hard life because he is gay. She recounts catching him one Christmas dancing with Hernán’s cousin, Elvis. She feared that his sexual orientation would endanger his chances for a quiet life, but compelling him to adopt Dominican masculinity strained their relationship.
Although she has not visited Fernando in years, she knows that he is safe because he lives with Alexis, whom Cara deems trustworthy because he is a Pisces. She recounts an incident in which Ángela’s husband Hernán discovered Fernando’s address through connections at the hospital. Cara visited Fernando’s home, and when no one answered, she beat on the door and caused a scene. Alexis answered and brought her inside for coffee. He had a poster of Walter Mercado, and they bonded over their love of the Puerto Rican astrologer. She made a deal with him, agreeing to leave Fernando alone on the condition that Alexis promised to call her if Fernando ever got in trouble.
She sends Fernando his favorite takeout and puts his name on her own electric bill. The Gentrified Rent Stabilized Building document that follows shows that utility bills can be used to make succession rights claims to assume a relative’s rent-controlled lease. The building lease invoice that follows shows that Cara has only made half on her lease and owes back rent totaling $1,200.
Prologue-Chapter 3 Analysis
In the opening chapters, Angie Cruz introduces and then subverts the established format of a typical job training session in order to implicitly challenge reader assumptions, establish the protagonist’s history and character traits, and build a narrative that explores The Complexities of Immigrant Identities. Because Cara’s opening lines about her decision to leave the Dominican Republic are too intimate for the circumstances and violate both social and linguistic conventions, Cruz immediately establishes Cara Romero as a proud and unapologetic Dominican woman who defies conventions to make her own way in a world built for others. Likewise, the rambling life story that follows characterizes Cara more effectively than any of the accompanying documents or polished interview responses. By contrasting Cara’s explanation of her own life story with the narrow documentation and social conventions that Americans use to identify a person, Cruz reveals the reductive nature of these practices and suggests that storytelling is a powerful antidote for this form of dehumanization.
Cara’s storytelling style is as unique and complex as her character, and Cruz uses these early chapters to establish Cara’s dialectical habits, which incorporate Spanish vocabulary, Latin idioms, and imprecise direct translations. These habits challenge America cultural biases and encapsulate Cara’s multicultural identity. Because her life experiences and nonstandard linguistic habits contrast sharply with the answers that employers expect her to give, each session establishes a distinct tension between who Cara is and how others perceive her. With this idiosyncratic presentation, Cruz implies that Cara is smart, capable, and hardworking, but it is also clear that her answers to the questions on official documents are exacerbating her existing hardships, for the narrative implies that typical employers will unfairly judge her worth against American cultural norms and deny her opportunities on that basis alone.
Specifically, Cara’s answers and storytelling lack the concision, command of standard grammar, and formal register expected of American jobseekers. Even her storytelling style defies these conventions; instead of the linear progression of events around a single protagonist that is favored in English storytelling, Cara’s circuitous storytelling often features neighbors and estranged relatives. Additionally, the story itself rarely ends, and each thread and subplot is cut short by session timing rather than by the delivery of an actual conclusion. As the narrative demonstrates, Cara’s stories are as interconnected, ongoing, and complicated as she and her fellow Washington Heights community members are in their daily lives. In each chapter, the rich intricacy of Cara’s life is contrasted with the dry, soulless official documents that follow, and Cruz uses this contrast to highlight the cruel indifference of American bureaucracy, which is incapable of encapsulating the essence of an individual. By demonstrating the narrow scope of the accompanying documents and questionnaires, Cruz establishes that American biases and assumptions undervalue people like Cara. Cruz also illustrates the fact that reductive concepts such as strengths and weaknesses flatten complexity by contrasting the inadequacy of American identifying tools with the highly contextualized modes of Latinx cultures.
Cruz relies on her own Latinx linguistic context to establish Cara’s complexity and subvert expectations about those of Latinx backgrounds. First, by having Cara explain the foundational concept “desahogar” or “undrowning,” to her caseworker, who is of Dominican descent but not fluent in Spanish, Cruz demonstrates that labels do not always match assumptions. This small exchange reverses the women’s roles, since Cara is meant to learn linguistic norms from Lissette. By blurring the lines between who must learn and who can teach, Cruz exposes underlying assumptions that reduce immigrant identities to the status of foreign dependents. In this scene, Cara shows that immigrants have much to teach Americans, including how to build and sustain community ties. The exchange also provides context for the novel’s title and underlying witticism. In Latinx culture, using the idiom “drowning in a glass of water” is a hint that someone is “desahogar”; in this context, they are “undrowning”—venting, or sharing more than is appropriate for the situation or circumstances. As the novel progresses, Cara will share far more than is appropriate with Lissette, but her caseworker never tells her that she is drowning in a glass of water. Rather than forcing Cara to use the Senior Workforce Program for job training as intended, Lissette’s patient listening becomes the instrument of Cara’s character transformation.
