by Gigi Anders
The following Thanksgiving up in suburban Germantown, Maryland, I was seated with my family (minus Papi, who was not up to it, and the fiancé, who had temporarily broken up with me in order to, among other things, avoid this very Juban social obligation) at my brother Big Al and sister-in-law Andrea’s tarmac-size tiger maple French Country dining room table.
“I legally changed my name,” I announced to no one in particular. Nobody was listening. You couldn’t hear much above the din of Juban chewing and slurping. I cleared my throat.
“Hello!” I hollered. “Hello?” A herd of well-coiffed heads full of turkey, gahntze tzimmes (a big, sweet Jewish stew of brisket, carrots, prunes, dried apricots, and sweet potatoes), and frijoles negros (black beans) turned in my direction. “I wanted to let you all know that I legally changed my name.”
“¿Qué?” Mami said, puzzled.
“Yep. I am now legally Gigi Anders. I went down to the Raleigh courthouse and—”
“Wow,” said Big Al, aka Big Red, high-fiving me with the tip of his black bean–encrusted drumstick. “Pretty cool, Geeg!” The boy is a Little League coach who somehow has managed to turn himself into a physician.
Mami was still fixated on my latest name-dropping bomb-shell.
“Say again, joo went WHERE an’ deed WHAT?”
“Courthouse,” I said. “Legally changed my name.”
“To WHAT?” You could tell Mami was getting worked up because she emphasized each word by stabbing the table with the lit end of her Kool. Observing this, Andrea, who’s vigilant over her furniture and disallows smoking in her home, silently, mentally strangled her.
“To WHAT?” Mami repeated.
Now here’s the thing: Mami has perfect hearing and a master’s in psychiatric social work. She looks and acts like a young, redheaded Lana Turner. She’s lived in this country and has spoken its language, sort of, for more than four decades. She’s a worldly, accomplished, professional person with more outfits than poor dead Princess Diana ever dreamed of owning in her sadly abbreviated lifetime, and more shoes than Imelda Marcos (in fact, Papi’s nickname for Mami is Imelda). Yet Mami makes me repeat and reexplicate everything I say as though she’s a dimwitted, illiterate, recently arrived, monolingual refugee.
“What do you mean, ‘to what?’” I told her. “To Gigi Anders. Have you ever once called me Rebeca? Rebby? Bex? Beca? Becky? Beatriz? Bea? Beckay? Triz?”
“Triz?” Dr. Big Red Al said. “What the F is that?” He recapped his gigantic jockstrap laugh, shaking his abnormally huge head of fire-red hair. Andrea languidly glanced at him with no expression, returning her gaze to the two smoldering spots darkening her imported tiger maple runway table.
“No, you have not,” I continued, trying futilely to be logical and unsentimental—two adjectives rarely associated with Jubans. “I mostly did this because my taxes—”
Andrea was now up and alternately patting the table burns with a damp cloth and some orange oil.
“My father,” Mami tearfully commenced, verbally italicizing every word, “my father never ask-ed me to do anytheengh for heem. De only theengh my father ever ask-ed me to do was to name joo after hees mother.”
Satisfied with her ministrations, Andrea, the soul of Jewish-American tact and brown lipstick, correctly determined it was time to extricate herself and the babies, my niece, Lauren, and my nephew, Jack, from what smelled like a looming Juban shit storm. She feels lucky not to be Cuban at such moments, and really, who could blame her?
“Ooo-kay, it’s time to say good night,” Andrea said, dipping each baby straddled on her hips to kiss each guest.
“Well, you can call me Rebeca or Beatriz anytime you like,” I told Mami, kissing Lauren and Jack. “It’s still on my birth certificate.”
Mami shot me The Look. It is not a Good Look. It’s a withering combo platter of brutal disapproval, derision, outrage, insultedness, condescension, resentment, woundedness, and wild rage. It’s beyond words.
Mami wouldn’t speak to me for the entire 22.41 miles home, seething silence being one of her favorite punitive techniques. She just turned up Vivaldi’s Il cimento dell’Armonia e dell’-Invenzione (Trial Between Harmony and Invention) to decibels heretofore unknown to civilization, lit up a Kool, and drove like a fucking NASCAR freak. She doesn’t think of a car as a motor vehicle; for her, it’s a weapon. Years ago I gave Mami a Cathy Guise-wite key chain with a picture of a crazed Cathy behind a steering wheel. The caption read, “I OWN the road!” Mami took it to heart, and whenever she’s in this state of mind, even hard-core maniac Capital Beltway drivers timidly yield to her white Honda SUV.
“I like to scare dem,” she always says. “Sohkehrz.”
Yiyita, my grandfather Boris called me. Born in poverty in czarist Russia, Zeide (Grandpa in Yiddish) Boris came to Cuba from Kraisk, a place so obscure that no map shows it, in Belarus, near the capital, Minsk. In 1941, during the German bombing, Minsk was pretty much decimated, and my grandfather’s parents and siblings were killed, or so we believe. They didn’t exactly keep strict shtetl records in those days.
Zeide Boris never spoke of his childhood. He said he didn’t want to burden us with so many sad stories. Mami gleaned a few biographical details: Zeide Boris had never had toys back in Russia, so he improvised by playing with stray bullet shells and casings he found on the shtetl grounds. He had two brothers, and the parents, one of whom I’m named after, only had enough money to get one son out of Russia in order to not have to serve in the army. So they sent Boris, who at sixteen was within the then-draft age. My grandfather’s skin was dark and swarthy, olive. His thick, straight hair was so shiny and black it was almost blue, like Hawaiians’. He was big, compact, dignified, and hardly ever smiled. He loved fine cigars and playing dominós and drinking a shot of good whiskey every night after work. Zeide Boris had a wise, compassionate, sad, faraway look behind his green semi-Asian eyes. Mongolian eyes. Achinados, Cubans call it. Chineseified. When I was a little child I once asked Mami why Zeide Boris had such unusual and striking features.
“Are joo keedeengh?” she answered, incredulous. “Back den een dos days everybody rap-ed everybody else! Pogroms, joo know? What ees a pogrom?”
“When they come and hurt poor Jews, like in Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Das right.”
“And when they come and hurt poor black people, like in To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“Exactly! Ohldoh Gregory Peck was so beauteefool den, joo know. Ahteekohs Feench. I lohvee.”
“And when they come and hurt poor women, like Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha.”
“Eet was johs rape, rape, rapeenghs,” Mami said, “all throughout de heestohrees. Johs beeleeohns an’ zeeleeohns of eh-sperms an’ eggs just goheengh krehsee! Dat ees why der ees no such theengh as a ‘pure’ race. Pure, dat ees totally crap!”
“Ivory soap, that’s pure.”
“Not all de way. Ees only 99 44/100s percen’ pure. I prefer Dove an’ so should joo. Ivory’s too harsh, joo know?”
“I don’t feel clean when I use Dove. It doesn’t lather up. I like that squeaky—”
“Dat ees so wrong! Squeaky ees really, really bad. Squeaky means dry, joo know? Dove ees better because eet moisturizes an’ das what joo want every damn day.”
“I just SAID that I didn’t want that because—”
“An’ also Dove ees a symbol of freedom an’ peace,” Mami continued, cutting me off. “Ivory ees what?”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s what?’ What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Ay, que bruta!” Oh, what a dunce! “Ivory ees from de many, many, many dead elephan’s een Ahfreeca dat dey steal for de eh-tusks. So many dead ones! Das really, really bad. Also eeleegahl.”
Sigh.
Mami has normal skin and never uses an après bath body lotion. If I did that I’d desiccate. Mami must be blessed with low-maintenance, naturally soft skin. I, on the other hand, am so not. With the exception of the size, shape, and color of m
y nice but Helen Keller–blind green-golden eyes, I’ve had to work it and work it hard from head frizz to discolored toenail (from self-tanning overdose, hence the perpetual need for red polish) my whole life just to approximate nonhag normality.
I like to be fairly squeaky out of the shower, then I use industrial strength lotion (Lubriderm Advanced Therapy for Extra-Dry Skin or Johnson’s Creamy Baby Oil, or, in the summer months, Lubriderm Daily UV Lotion with SPF 15—I’m delicate and I fry in the sun) from the neck down while I’m still damp, giving special emphasis to elbows (with the addition of Aquaphor Healing Ointment), butt (aforementioned Lube mixed with any good firming body lotion containing alpha hydroxy acid—you’d never want an unsmooth, saggy butt—plus Blisslab’s Lemon + Sage Soft Oil Spray Silky Soothing Skin Soak, which smells delicious and helps the first two ingredients to “slide”), and feet (regular Lube and several squirts of Johnson’s Baby Oil, or Burt’s Bees’ Coconut Foot Creme with Vitamin E, followed immediately by a pair of thick white cotton socks). Then I sprinkle Johnson’s Baby Powder with Aloe & Vitamin E Pure Cornstarch under my breasts and in between my legs to absorb any excess lubrication. Otherwise I’d literally stick to myself all day. (I repeat the baby powder routine at night before I go to bed because, at risk of sounding like a douche commercial, it makes me feel fresh.)
Unfortunately, this means that everything in my bathroom—the floor, especially—perpetually has a filmy white layer of polvo, powder, all over it. Which is why I’m a maniac about cleaning my bathroom at least once a week.
At any rate, my feet are so soft from having performed the daily moisturizing sacrament for decades, that some years ago my friend Sharyn began referring to them as “the pounded veal cutlets,” which eventually got shortened to “the PVCs” or simply “the cutlets.” A navel-pierced Raleigh News & Observer colleague once noted that my toes are so little and round, they look like grapes. My Vietnamese aesthetician, Christine, always says there’s no point in charging me for a pedicure because there’s nothing to do to my feet except paint the toenails. She means there’s no yucky dry skin, calluses, or corns to fix, smooth, cut, exfoliate, and/or sandblast. The fiancé once remarked that my entire body is a cutlet because I take care of it. That was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever gotten. What do American women do, just never moisturize? And who are these men’s first wives who don’t?
Suddenly bored with both the topic of the right body soap and the fact that I wasn’t agreeing with her choice, Mami abruptly changed thematic lanes without signaling, signaling being for sohkehrz.
“De point ees,” she declared, lighting a Kool and exhaling an elegant plume of mentholated smoke into my face, “everybody ees an eenterracial meex of everytheengh. Probably Heetlehr was part mulatto like hees demon eh-spawn, Feedehl. Dey both bought eento dat beegehst lie dat white ees right. Dey were de two beegehst, most self-hayteengh beegohts! Dat was der whole problem! Ees so ohbveeohs.”
“What was their whole problem?” I asked, dodging her Kool line of fire.
“Dat dey couldn’t accept een dehmselv-es, ‘I AM MEEX-ED.’”
“Well,” I told her, “then that means we’re mixed.”
“Das right,” Mami said. “But de deefehrehnce ees, we lohvee!”
Zeide Boris met Dora Baicowitz in Matanzas, the lovely Cuban province just east of Havana known as the Athens of Cuba. They married in 1929.
Baba (our Yiddish version of Grandma) Dora was a buxom, attractive, fair-haired woman whose round nose, pale skin, and pendulous breasts my mother and I both inherited. By the time Baba Dora and Zeide Boris had finished having their children, in the thirties and early forties, there were some twelve thousand Jews in Cuba, out of a then-total population of seven million. (Today it’s more like eight hundred Jews and twelve million Gentile Cubans.) The Benes kids were Jaime (blond, low-key, and easygoing, with his father’s Asian eyes), Mami (redhead, head-strong, tempestuous, attractive, narcissistic), and Bernardo (redhead, brainy, prone to inappropriate and very loud opinionated emotional outbursts, visionary, narcissistic). They were officially Privileged People, high-ranking members of Havana’s Jewish elite. Zeide Boris may not have been the wealthiest Jubano, but he was certainly among the top twenty wealthiest.
Mami was Zeide Boris’s favorite. She was a serious child, didn’t smile much, and watched everything around her very intensely. She took ballet classes (de rigueur for upper-class Cuban girls), loved music and pretending she could play the piano. When Tio Bernardo was born a year and four months later, he and Mami bonded like twins; they were close in age, appearance, and superior attitude.
Being a girl, Mami wasn’t supposed to be good in math and science, so she wasn’t. Besides, Zeide Boris never expected her to be the breadwinner once she got married. That’s why, before tests and final exams, Zeide would always tell Bernardo, “Let your sister copy.” This created a trend that spread. During one particularly tough exam, Bernardo uncharacteristically got some stuff wrong, and everybody else in the class got it wrong, too, because they’d all copied from him.
“De professor was so puzzl-ed,” Mami recalls. “He was, like, ‘Maybe I taught eet wrong?’”
Later in life, when my two less intellectually inclined American-born brothers would be challenged with writing assignments that I could have nailed in my sleep, Mami would get incensed if I refused to do their work for them, particularly the essay portions of their college and med school and business school applications.
From Mami’s point of view while I was growing up, if you worked hard without cutting corners, asking for favors, using your feminine wiles or your ethnic minority-ness, you were a sohkehr. When I was a schoolgirl and Mami saw me poring over homework for hours, she’d get a stricken, pained look and say, “Ay mamita, joor workeengh so hard.” As if making an effort for more than two minutes was akin to working on a lesbian chain gang in the Mississippi Delta heat: an unattractive, back-breaking, deadening thing. Way too masculine a pursuit for a girlie gal. That quintessentially Cuban position is violently at odds with both the typical working-class illegal economic immigrant position, which is to work like a mule until you’re dead, as well as classic Judaic values, which stipulate that talent is beautiful, that it’s good to be smart—and that applies to girls, too.
When you’re bicultural, oops, make that TRIcultural (I’m American, too), not every message you’re given by your family and Juban community is synchronized or harmonious. Sometimes they switch into Cuban expectation gear, other times only the Jew ’tude will do, and at other times a nonethnic North American performance and persona is what’s called for. Wouldn’t you be a Messopotamia trying to integrate all that? It’s one thing to be fluent in Spanglish, which I obviously am. But being triculturally fluent, now that’s an art form unto itself.
Which self was I supposed to be, and when, exactly?
My family’s apprehension and cluelessness about my aspiration to be a professional writer seem slightly odd, since Mami, who from birth bucked trends, has always been a professional. That was a huge big fact in the fifties, when most upper-class Cuban women didn’t work. My mother certainly didn’t have to. Her parents were filthy rich, and my father was doing great as the general practitioner co-owner of Centro Médico Nacional, his private hospital in Havana. But Mami wanted to work. Bored easily, she needed a lot of different kinds of stimulation, much more than running a household and raising a little baby girl could offer. She earned her master’s degree in social work from La Universidad de la Habana, and took a position at the Ministerio de Bienestar Social, Cuba’s social welfare department. When it comes to work, my civil servant mother has always been a driven, disciplined, competent, energetic, multi-award-winning achiever.
In Cuba, all her newlywed girlfriends were upset when she “abandon-ed” them for an office job. They even offered to pool their considerable financial resources to pay her salary so Mami would quit and go back to playing cards with them in the afternoon. But like me, Mami has always b
een on a different wavelength than the people around her (she also looks light-years better than her coworkers and makes it look effortless). The difference is that Baba Dora supported Mami’s differentness, whereas my differentness has always been something that Mami deals with—what choice does she have?—but does not exactly celebrate.
“My mom joost to tell me how happy chee was dat I had a profession an’ dat I work-ed,” Mami says. “Chee said dat her generation deedn’t have dat choice, an’ dat chee would have lohv-ed to have had de opportuneety to do de same.”
However, Zeide Boris’s ideas about getting ahead in life—“Let your sister copy”—stuck with Ana and Bernardo. Mami was and remains deferential to Bernardo, whom she calls “un genio,” a genius. She has a blind spot when it comes to his mishigas. This has created friction, because I don’t. That abrasive, macho, finger-snapping “Tráeme un café AHORA”—Bring me a coffee NOW—attitude compels me to verbally electrocute him. This outrages him. Tio Nano can be very hyper and domineering, especially around females. This subspecies of Homo jubano brings out the Homo jubana americana ovaria strap-ons in me every time. As for Zeide Boris, Mami likes to say that he was “a lion” when it came to defending his children. She remembers her father as being creative and hysterically funny. I remember a big, sad, elegant Russian bear of a guy who bought me all the Archie comic books I ever wanted.
Mami’s impressions and recollections are her right, though they do not always jibe with the facts. My former psychoanalyst, Marvin L. Adland, says that when it comes to memory and perception, what you believe is true is more important than what is true. That must be the case in my family.
Okay. I’m out of Mami and home in my beautiful new hand-painted, imported crib, canopied with a mosquitero, mosquito netting, to prevent errant flies from getting anywhere, God forbid, near la niña, the little girl. I’ve got a huge dresser with hand-painted knobs and baby bears in assorted pastel colors, bulging with adorable outfits. I’ve got two very wealthy, young, movie star–gorgeous parents. I’ve got a táta, a nanny, named Panchita; a cocinera, a cook, named Carmen; and a criada, a housekeeper, named Candita, who is Panchita’s sister. I’ve got four grandparents—two dominant babas, two semiwhipped zeides—and one glamorous godmother living nearby, who all think I’m the cutest thing alive. I’ve got hundreds of aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and parties. I have a zillion fantastic dolls, stuffed animals, books, and assorted toys imported from FAO Schwarz, and accountrements from El Encanto, The Enchantment, Havana’s version of Bergdorf Goodman. I’ve got my own air-conditioning in my bedroom. My hair is full of Violetas, my pierced ears sport tiny cultured pearls, my wrists are bejeweled with pearl and 18-karat rose gold ID bracelets, my pima cotton T-shirts, jumpers, and dresses are pinned with an azabache, a jet-black semiprecious stone said to ward off the evil eye, and I get endless sterilized bottles full of heavily sugared warm milk every single time I cry.