by Gigi Anders
Though I got to keep my lamb and tricycle and we flew safely over an ocean and landed just fine, somewhere a trauma clicked and got locked into place. Maybe it was because someone at the Miami airport managed to steal my beloved little red birthday tricycle while we were being interviewed by immigration officers. Whatever it is, ever since I can remember, I’ve had the same two recurring nightmares. One is that someone is stealing something from me and I see them doing it and I accuse them and they always get away with the theft, no matter how much I yell and scream about the injustice. I awake hoarse and frustrated and humiliated. The second one—this one scares the bejesus out of me—is that I’m in cinquecento Venice, sightseeing. The permeating light is that ancient, thin, transparent yellow light seen in oil paintings from that period. I’m with an older man on a suspension bridge, about a mile above the city, only there are no towers supporting the bridge. It’s almost like a bridge made of vines, like from Tarzan movies. The bridge sways and feels very flimsy underfoot. The man and I are crossing it to reach the other side of intricate canals, moldering palaces, and secret Leonardo grottos. The dirty water below is silent but portentous. It’s a hazy, murky green-gray, like a lagoon or a swamp, but deep enough to drown in. A black crow shoots across the sky like an arrow, and my companion turns abruptly to look at it, agitating the bridge. I grasp the rails and they’re rope. I look down and I’m losing my balance and already feel asphyxiated because I know I’m going to fall into fathoms of mysterious water. I wake up to not drown.
But when I was a fearless teenager, I just loved traveling by plane. The more takeoffs and landings, the better. I was sixteen when my parents and I flew to Mexico for a holiday. We stayed with friends in Mexico City. Our hostess, the gorgeous bohemian wife, Nedda, was one of my mother’s best friends in Cuba. With her thick blond hair (the kind that could break a hairbrush), green-blue eyes, tawny skin, and perfect figure, Nedda was considered possibly the most beautiful girl on the entire island in the 1950s. Papi dated Nedda when Mami broke up with him during their courtship. Early on in their relationship, my father had come to pick my mother up for a date one night. Mami was seventeen, Papi was twenty-one. Remember, he was a relatively poor boy going out with one of the wealthiest girls in the tiny Cuban Jewish community. When he arrived at her grand house, Papi told Mami that they’d have to take la guagua, the bus, because his car was broken. Mami said okay. But then Papi said, “No, I have the car. I was just testing you to see if you’d accept riding la guagua.”
She dumped him on the spot.
Papi was devastated. He lost a lot of weight. But he eventually got back at Mami by dating her girlfriend: Nedda. When Mami saw them out together she had a sudden change of heart. Papi made her beg for a looong time before he would deign to take her back. Mami called Zeide Leon and asked him to help her. Zeide Leon encouraged Papi to go see Mami. Mami convinced Papi she’d suffered from temporary insanity. Papi said, “Okay. Let’s give it a try.” That would be the last time Mami would ever beg Papi for anything.
Nedda’s suave Mexican husband, Enrique, was Old World glamorous, like Oscar de la Renta but not bald. Their house smelled of her signature scent, Calandre, and had so much original artwork that paintings were even hung on curtains. We ate roasted cabrito (goat) and steamed cactus. Mami admired Nedda’s collection of black clay pottery, which Nedda explained was a specialty made in Oaxaca. Naturally, Mami had to have some—partly for herself, a compulsive tchotchkes hoarder, and partly to resell for profit at St. Elizabeths to staff and patients alike, whoever could pay—and insisted we fly down there, which would take less than an hour. Papi, of course, didn’t want to go; he’s never wanted to go anywhere or do anything. It was a miracle he came with us to Mexico in the first place. He hates having “new experiences” and meeting “new people.”
But comme d’habitude, as always, Mami got her way. The following overcast afternoon the three of us were en route to Oaxaca. Everything was fine for about ten minutes. Then the sky went dark and rainy, and we hit some serious turbulence.
MAMI (hysterical): ¡Ay, Dios mio! ¡Ay, Dios mio!
PAPI (semiconcerned): ¿Qué pasa?
MAMI (annoyed): What do joo mean, ¿qué pasa?
PAPI (getting nervous about bleeding to death in flight from my mother’s sixteen-inch painted talons digging into his exposed arm skin): Coño, cálmate. Esto no es nada. [Dammit, calm down. This is nothing.]
MAMI: Nos vamos a MORIR. [We’re going to DIE.]
PAPI (chuckling): No nos vamos a morir, gorda. Es un poco de viento. [We’re not going to die, fat girl. It’s just a little bit of wind.] (Gorda is a Cuban term of endearment that is sweet and has nothing to do with actual girth. Just like calling a female “China,” pronounced CHEE-nah, has nothing to do with China.)
MAMI (crying and burrowing inside her grocery bag–size Louis Vuitton purse for tissues and the St. Joseph medallion): Joo are an ASShole!
PAPI (indulging her, as usual): Why am I an asshole?
MAMI (beyond steamed): De fact dat joo even have to ask ees what makes joo one. Look at my face! My makeup ees gehtteengh all a mess because joo. Are. Here. Weeth. Dee. Turbulence! Dees ees from hell! We are all goheengh to DIE an’ den joo have to ask why are joo an ASShole.
GIGI (noticing a fresh scuff mark on her brand-new Corkies, pigskin crisscross sandals with a cork wedge heel, purchased from the FBS catalogue; the French Boot Shop was a fabulous store in New Rochelle, N.Y., that always had all the latest styles): Mom, not to put too fine a point on it, but, uh, this was YOUR idea. Want a Tic Tac?
MAMI: No! I want to get the hell off de damn PLANE!
GIGI: God is protecting us! I wish he’d protect me from scuff marks. Dammit. These are brand-new sandals!
MAMI: I can’t see anytheengh. What I can see ees dat we are here alone on a bumpy plane fool of fohkeengh Mexicans. Dees people do beesness weeth Feedehl Castro! Okay? An’ das why I don’ know how God feels about dees other people because dey are een cahoots weeth de dehveel heemself! An’ we are outnumber-ed by DEM. Johs like our poor Jeweesh ancestors een de Holocaust. De women preesonehrs deedn’t get der periods. Dey totally eh-stopp-ed, okay? Because of de cheer eh-stresses!
GIGI: Outnumbered. Stopped. Not outnumber-ed and stopp-ed. Gahd! HOW many years have you lived in this cute country now?
MAMI: Right, less focus on de American grammars an’ eenveesahbl eh-skohf marks right now as we are crahsheengh to death in de horeebl Mexico desserts!
GIGI (looking in her compact mirror and attempting to reapply Yardley bubble gum lip gloss without getting it all over her face): DEH-zurt. Dih-ZURT is what you eat after dinner. And you love Mexico. You and Papi honeymooned here, remember? Acapulco, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta, Cancún…God, you know, my lips are so dry. I wonder if I brought my Kiehl’s [lip balm #1]? There’s nothing worse than trying to put lipstick directly on chapped lips. You have to have the moisturizing ’tude going on first, and then…
MAMI (talking to the medallion clutched in her Revlon claws): !Ay, San José de Cupertino, ayuuudame! [He-ee-lp me!]
PAPI: Ana, por FAVOR.
MAMI: Coño, Dahveed. Joo are a FEESEESHEEAHN! Make eet EH-STOHP!
Two weeks later in her private office on the mental ward, an unscathed Mami happily counted her cash profits from the Oaxacan black pottery. The psychiatrists and patients all really loved the stuff and coughed up huge big bucks for it. (Mami let some cash-strapped patients pay for theirs in packs of Kools.) The woman had survived the Mexican dessert storm and made out like a Cuban bandit. Works for her.
Was everything bad that happened to us Juban refugees really all Hitler and Kennedy and Castro’s fault? The fact that my family and our friends had been scattered across the earth? Where was North Carolina? What was New Jersey? Where was my pretty ocean where Mami bathed me since I was five months old?
Miami and Miami Beach, I knew firsthand, were backwater honky pits. When my immediate and extended family arrived there in 1960 and 1961, thes
e places were shitty little cracker towns with unbearable heat and humidity and no sea breezes and hideous pastel-painted houses ringed with shiny bushes where slime-green lizards lurked, ready to pounce and give you a heart attack. My parents and I lived in that charming setting for the first year of our exile. We three shacked up (sleeping together in one bedroom in a double bed, which I loved) with my abuelos, Zeide Boris and Baba Dora (they slept in a single bed in the broom closet); Tio Bernardo, my mother’s fiery younger brother; Tia Ricky, his Raquel Welch look-alike Sephardic wife; and Joel, their son and my eighteen-month-old first cousin (they slept in a double bed in the second bedroom). The eight of us crammed into a tiny, cheaply furnished two-bedroom house that was part of a complex of ancient houses on Fourteenth Place in Miami Beach. The rent was $125 a month. We nicknamed the place Las Casitas Verdes, the Little Green Houses, for their yucky, chipped pea-green color.
My grandparents and Tia Ricky, who never worked, took care of me and Joel during the day. Papi was a bottle washer at the National Children’s Cardiac Hospital, not far from Las Casitas. He also worked in their research department with rabbits and other animals. The people there treated Papi well and let him study for the foreign medical boards. Mami was a social worker in charge of medical eligibility at the Cuban Refugee Center. Tio Nano was a bank teller at the nearby Washington Federal Bank. They each earned about $65 a week, and gave all the money to Baba Dora, who paid the rent and bought the groceries (I use the term loosely, as we mostly ate eggs because they were nutritious and cheap). Tio Nano walked to work; the bank was only three blocks away. Papi and Mami needed a car, though, so they bought a $150 gray two-door 1950 Ford with a hole in the floor of the back left passenger side or the front right passenger side; nobody can agree on this. Wherever the hole was, I personally loved it. I thought it was muy fun that you could see the street running below you as you rode.
I whiled my days away by the Orthodox shul, a synagogue that was next to Las Casitas Verdes on the corner of Euclid Avenue. It was called Kneseth Israel Congregation. Twice a day, when the elderly American Jews made their way to and from services, Joelito and I sat on a cement bench out front, dressed in our tiny T-shirts, shorts, and sneakers, wailing in Yiddish, “Goot yontif!” Have a good holy day! Our family didn’t join that shul, or any shul, for a while. First, my parents and I are Reform Jubanos, and second, we believed the Miami Beach crap was a temporary aberration and soon we would resume our normal lives in Cuba.
Two weeks into our exile, I turned three. We celebrated outside Las Casitas Verdes with a small day-old chocolate cake from Butterflake Bakery on Washington Avenue. Our recently arrived fellow Jubano refugees, relatives, and friends always hung out at our apartment, often sleeping over for days or weeks outside on the balcony (which was a pain when it rained; all the macho men would complain about their soaked huevitos—literally, little eggs, slang for testicles)—or else inside, sprawled on the couch or on the floor. The men stayed up till dawn playing dominós and smoking cigars, killing their anxieties, killing time, waiting for Fidel to fall, and he would fall, we all believed. I fell asleep to the men’s sounds, the clacking dominós, inhaling the wafting cigar smoke and repeating the word dominós in whispers to myself over and over and over until I was dizzy and blacked out. Sometimes I varied it with all the domin words I could think of, some of which I had overheard our Catholic Cuban friends say: dominós, Dominus, dominós, Dominus vobiscum, dominós, domino theory. That last one I heard people say that President Eisenhower and later President Kennedy said. Domino theory. Clack-clack, click-click, puff-puff, more laughter, Cuba si, Castro no, coño-coño-coño.
Four months later, on Sunday, April 16, 1961, the day before the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the radio began reporting that Havana was being bombarded by unidentified planes. The preemptive air strikes were said to be destroying Castro’s military planes. Three U.S. airplanes piloted by CIA-trained Cuban exiles had bombed Cuban air bases and killed more than fifty people. (In reality, the few planes belonging to the Cuban air force had been dispersed, camouflaged, and replaced with obsolete planes left out to fool the exile fighters.) Dozens of Jubano families came to our apartment to listen to the news together. When the living room became SRO, the rest of the crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk, waiting, praying, smoking, sipping espresso, cheering, hoping. Dominós, Dominus, dominós, Dominus vobiscum. The next day the news reports were the same, and everybody was convinced Castro’s days were numbered. Soon we could all go home! Mami would remind me of my beautiful air-conditioned bedroom in our Miramar house: all butter-yellow and white, with hand-painted furniture and polka-dot curtains…
The days passed, two or three, and bad news began streaming in. Castro’s forces had easily overpowered our wildly outnumbered exile fighters in a bloody civil war that lasted seventy-two hours. It was a desgracia, a disgrace, and terrible failure. And it was all Kennedy’s fault; that’s what the Cuban exiles were saying. Kennedy had fucked us royally, our mártires tan joven y guapos. Our young and handsome martyrs. ¿Y pa’ que? And for what?
Back at Las Casitas Verdes, our crowded apartment, balcony, and front lawn gradually thinned out, getting quieter and quieter, until there were just the original eight of us left. Mami gave me a glass of sugary café con leche and a soft-boiled egg. I sprinkled salt on the egg and took a spoonful. Yellow and white mixed in my mouth. As I ate the colors of my bedroom, I kicked Joelito, who was hiding under the table and biting my legs.
“¡Me cágo en su madre!” I heard a man cry. I shit on his mother! “¡Cabrón! ¡Que se vaya pa’l carájo!” Bastard! May he go to hell! “¡Nos jodió!” He fucked us!
I disentangled myself from Joelito’s teeth to see why the men were cursing and shouting in the living room. I mean cursing and shouting more than usual, since Cubans, unless they’re expired, are cellularly incapable of lingual propriety, brevity, or reticence. They’re the original anti–Strunk & Whiters. With words, like with shoes and money and lipstick and jewelry and parties, more is better.
I noticed my little toy lamb lying on the linoleum floor and picked it up, holding it to my chest. My grandfather, father, and uncle looked upset. The women were still off in the kitchen, murmuring softly and smoking their mentholated cigarettes, set apart from their men. I heard Tia Ricky warning Joelito, who was whining in there—what a baby!—to shut up or she’d give him la chancleta, the slipper. This is a typical Cuban mom threat, to beat you with her slipper/sandal/flip-flop/house shoe: ¡Te voy a dar la chancleta! I’m gonna give you the slipper! Or the rhetorical ¿Tu quieres la chancleta? You want the slipper?
The night came on, casting its long shadows across the room. It was very calm. My tio’s red hair, in a shaft of dying Florida sunlight, looked on fire. I watched and watched, fondling my lamb’s frayed woolen ears. The triangle of men I loved most started weeping. I’d never seen grown men cry before.
“Se acabó,” they said.
It’s over.
My parents’ marital division of labor never changed much, even after Cuba. Papi was never directly involved in my life all that much. In some ways, he seemed beside the point. With the force of my mother’s outsize persona overshadowing us all, he was relegated to a cameo role, which he expected, accepted, and excelled at. Papi kept the household humming; it was to him, not Mami, that the housekeepers gave their handwritten lists of necessary groceries and cleaning products. Whatever was needed from the drugstore—toilet paper, toothpaste, even Mami’s feminine hygiene products—Papi took care of. If there were letters or packages to be mailed, Mami handed them to Papi, who also paid all the bills. If something in the apartment went wrong—be it a leaky faucet or a faulty lightbulb—Papi dealt with it or had to be the one to call a person to come in and fix it. Papi was both Mami’s and my father, actually, though she was his pet.
My filial allegiance, however, remained steadfastly to my mother, and not one hundred sweet maids or nice dads would ever change that. The minute Mami walked in the door
, the maid in question was abandoned like a worn-out toy. Mami the movie star was home! She glittered aloofly. The maid did not. Children love whatever’s shiniest. Mami was glazzy, my word for one who is glamorous and jazzy. Indeed, falling under the bewitchingly romantic spell of an attractive but elusive one who enchants and beguiles you but who will never give you what you need would become an ongoing theme in my adult love life. My “expander” (never “shrink”—get it?), Dr. Adland, aka Gramps (because he was old enough to be my grandfather, though he claimed that treating me aged him prematurely into a geriatric), would say I was in search of a father figure, messing around with all these unavailable and fucked-up but fucking sexy older guys. I think I was looking for my mother with a penis and some passion, warmth, and intellectual and literary flair. I think I was following my father, too, the kind but remote model for all future lovers.
Meanwhile, I had a Cuban refugee child’s work to do: learning Inglés. Someone had taken pity on my financially ruined family and blessed us with a small black-and-white Motorola TV. I religiously watched Captain Kangaroo and The Lucy Show, with Mr. Green Jeans and Mr. Mooney. I listened to Ella Fitzgerald records—my fave was “A Tisket, a Tasket.” And there was an older girl who lived in our ugly brick building on Southeast Mississippi Avenue, Pamela, whom I met one day on the elevator. She marveled at my pearl earrings, remarking that she’d never seen such a tiny girl with pierced ears before. At the playground behind the dump that was our first real residence in the United States, all the other kids were equally mesmerized, taking turns touching my earlobes just to see if my pierced ears were real. I thought they were weird for not having pierced ears. Didn’t all normal girls have them? These children are so childish and unsophisticated, I thought. They really need to get out more.