by Gigi Anders
Papi and Mami always left and entered the building by way of the basement laundry room. They didn’t want to socialize with the truckers, soldiers, and electricians—i.e., our neighbors—who assembled daily on aluminum folding chairs out front, drinking beer. It was hardly a matter of snobbery on my parents’ part: What the hell did they have in common with rednecks, or them with us? Plus, who knew, there might be another coup in Cuba, and soon we could put this fucking nightmare behind us and return to our normal lives. Meanwhile, until we bought our new “coats,” Mami was still using Baba Dora’s mink stole to ward off the cold, and Mami’s diamond engagement ring, which she’d managed to smuggle out of Cuba, was the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It was all just too much to explain to outsiders. The Americanos—especially these charming neighbors of ours—would never understand it.
Some years ago, Mami, a civil servant, finally caved to the constant comment of people about her ring and placed it in a safety deposit box in the bank. Her replacement diamond ring is actually bigger than the original and so sparkly it could blind you. She keeps it that way with Windex. That is because it is a fabufake from Bijoux Terner, the only costume jewelry boutique that any self-respecting Miami Cubanita-Cubanasa would ever set a spike heel in. The Terners are old friends of my mom’s, and they, too, arrived in this country with nada. Theirs is a really good story, how they saw gold in them thar fakes and built up this ersatz jewelry empire. The boutiques—there are several scattered across Miami—are the size of warehouses. You go crazy in there because there’s just so much great stuff—Chanel knockoffs, amazing hair ornaments, all the grooviest, trendiest accessories you see in fashion mags—and the prices are so cheap.
But in those early days in Southeast, in D.C., what little we owned and wore was real. Poor = real; settled = fake. Very strange. So that when my new friend Pamela complimented my pearl earrings or my 18-karat yellow-and-rose gold ID bracelets (which all Cuban babies wear) as we dangled from the jungle gym outside or played inside with her many dolls—so many dolls! I was in heaven!—it was real. Pamela was the daughter of a sergeant stationed at Bolling Air Force Base in nearby Alexandria, Virginia. She was nice and pretty and blond. She gave me a bunch of books I still own: Pat the Bunny, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Tales from Grimm, The Cat in the Hat, Curious George, Ellen’s Lion, Just So Stories, and Charlotte’s Web.
Early reading came a little easier to me because Mami had taught me to read in Spanish in Cuba using La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age), by our poet laureate José Martí, one of the only Cubans all Cubans can embrace. Martí was great. The cover of the book has a color illustration in the Renoir style, with a touch of rococo: a kindly and handsome man surrounded by beautiful, placid, elegantly dressed turn-of-the-century children surrounded by their fancy little imported dogs. Very French, very sugary. Mami repeatedly read me the long poem called “Los Zapatitos de Rosa” (“The Little Rose Shoes”) about a rich mother and her daughter, Pilar. They go to the beach in a luxurious coach to see and be seen. Pilar is all decked out in her plumed hat and silken rose-colored slippers. As Martí describes the individuals Pilar and her mother encounter at the beach, he’s in effect describing all of Cuban society and the distinct partition in class that existed during that period. There are las señoras, the Cuban, English, and French ladies who sit conversing como flores, like flowers, under their parasols. There’s a creepy little rich girl named Magdalena, dressed all in ribbons and bows, who enjoys burying her armless dolls in the sand.
Pilar wanders off to the other side of the beach, where, Martí tells us, the sea is brinier, saltier. That’s where the poor and the old people sit. Pilar meets a sickly, barefoot girl and gives her the precious zapatitos de rosa and the plumed hat. At first Pilar’s mother is furious, but later she realizes what a good girl she has, and ends up also giving away to the poor girl her cape, her ring, a carnation, and a kiss.
Sounds mawkish by contemporary American standards. But as a Jubana child I just loved the poem because it made me cry and it was a reminder to share what you have with people who don’t have anything. In Martí’s world, that sharing is moral and voluntary. But in Fidel’s world, that “sharing” is achieved through fiat, like a perverted Robin Hood having his way with those he deems gusanos. Worms. Worms like my mother and father. Fidel called everybody in my family that. I mean, not personally to our faces, but collectively to all who fled (and still flee) his regime. Was I too young to be a worm at age three? I may have been born with little rose-colored slippers on my soft little pounded veal cutlet feet, but now, exiled, the cutlets were bare. And I, a worm or the child of worms—which would have made me a worm or maybe a wormlette—had to learn to depend on the kindness of American strangers.
Pamela helped me make the transition into my second language by reading English-language stories to me and making me read others back to her, correcting me whenever I made a mistake. The most useful and helpful book she gave me was The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary; the basic words—camp, friend, happy—were each illustrated and used in sentences. I loved that book. Or rather, I relied on it to expand my new lexicon. To master English was the most important and intense thing for me then. Learning it, getting it, using it confidently was as exciting and unfolding an experience as I could imagine, like Helen Keller making the connection between water and the word water. I deeply identified with Helen Keller, as I did with Carson McCullers’s Frankie, and those two characters would become more significant in my life as time went on.
Emily Dickinson, with whom I share a birthday, wrote. “There is no Frigate like a Book/To take us Lands away,” and truly, little made me happier than getting into bed with a pile of books. Whenever Mami went someplace she’d ask, “What do joo want me to breengh joo back?” and I’d always answer, “A new book.” Unknown to any of us, at least consciously, I was already moving in a certain direction; my vocation was calling me by my name. When your child would rather stay inside reading books than go out and play kick-ball with the neighborhood kids—it’s a sign. Mami would say, “Joo have to get out DER!” and I’d say, “Out where?” After all, I’d just been all the way up past the firmament with a dead girl named Karen who suffered, really suffered, even worse than we did for Castro, all for having red shoes:
“The bright sunbeams streamed warmly through the windows upon Karen’s pew. Her heart was so full of sunshine, of peace and happiness, that it broke; her soul flew upon a sunbeam to her Father in heaven, where not a word was breathed of the red shoes.”
It’s hard to go from that height down to kids with unpierced earlobes fighting over who’s safe and who’s out on the street. Who cared?
Unlike me, my parents would always have problems moving between Spanish and English. As recently as two years ago, when a raccoon found its way into their suburban house, my broom-wielding father chased it through the living room yelling “¡Vamos! ¡Vamos!” while my mother shouted, “Speak to eet een Eengleesh!”
What happened to our old life? The balmy days of ease and Mami pushing me in a stroller on Saturday mornings with the tropical sun freckling our skin as we squint along the beach. Stopping at a café and kissing and hugging her girlfriends, Estela, Berta, the drop-dead beauties Anitica and Nedda, all with their babies, the sun sparkling off the women’s bloodred fingernails and smiling red lips. Somewhere the handsome, strapping men were off playing clickety-clack dominós, puffing masculine clouds of earthy tobacco, punching the air with the pungent bouquet of cigar smoke. I sucked on the nipple of my guava nectar con vitaminas and drifted off to the song of surf, golden bracelets, and women’s laughter; the perfume of Agua de Violetas, espresso, L’air du Temps, and imported cigarettes.
The American snow and ice were cold and bitter affronts in winter. “Ees like a constan’ eensohlt,” Mami said, shaking her head and looking heavenward from behind her big black Jackie Kennedy sunglasses as white snowflakes fell on the lenses. She furiously flipped the bird at the wan, gray sky.
“Los Ameri
canos deal with it,” I told her. “Their children make snowmen with carrots in the nose and scarves around the necks. Then they drink the chocolate caliente. With the mini marshmallows on top. Can we get those marshmallows?”
“Leesehn,” Mami said. “Een de first place, dey do dos theenghs because dey are peasants! Dey theenk deyr Eskeemos! Dey don’ know any better. Ees like de Wahndehr Brayt. Gross! An’ dos marshmellons, dey are totally deesgohsteengh, so forget eet. Everytheengh here ees so WHITE! De brayt, de weather, de people, de melons. White, white, white, white! ¡Ay, Cuba!”
“Yo, bitch,” I said. (I’ve always called my mother “bitch.” Term of endearment.) “It wasn’t MY idea.” As in, to come here to this charming foreign albino country.
“Fohk Fidel! Okay? Say dat weeth me. Loud an’ proud. Go ahead. Fohk Fidel!”
I removed one ever-present caramel-colored pacifier from my mouth. I say “one” because I wore an entire string necklace of rubber tetes, or pacifiers, each one in a different state of attrition. It was sort of like a security charm. One tete was designated solely for stroking my forehead, for example, and another was strictly for the right eyelid. We called the necklace la gindaleja (gheen-dah-LEH-hah), a phrase that has no real meaning and therefore can’t be translated.
“I want that hot chocolate,” I told Mami, twirling my pinky into the hole of the pinky tete. “And no more elephant ears. And I want peanut butter. Crunchy. Why don’t you ever buy that?”
“¡Coño!” she cried. Dammit! “I told joo. Peanut butter ees made for de peegs! Joo know?”
“Well, I like it.”
“No. Joo don’. Peanut butter ees what?”
“Peanuts.”
“Right, peanuts. An’ dey come from de farms! Like peekeengh de cottons. Ees from de Amereecahn Southern farms, joo know? Een de South! Like from de slaveries! An’ den dey feed dat to de peegs! Das not for de leetl kiddies. We never had dat een Cuba. Never. Das johs for de peegs. De same ones dat eat de Wahndehr Brayt.”
It took me decades to stop associating Skippy with slavery.
Whatever Mami loved and hated, it was to extremity, and I tried real hard to also love and hate the same. She was my golden girl on the moon, my redheaded Cuban Grace Kelly with pearls on her earlobes, around her throat, encircling her wrists and fingers, the milk-white fingers with the perfect long red fingernails, the glazzy gal who was sleek and smart and thrilling. Mami knew the answers to everything and was sophisticated, worldly, and effortlessly beautiful, easily the most beautiful mother in the world, the very best woman. Oh, I was so in love with her. It never occurred to either one of us that it was possible to love her and still be separate people. One pre-Gramps psychiatrist, an American named Raymond Band, whom I saw briefly in Washington, D.C., said I was conflicted about my own individuation. Meaning that he thought that I thought that if I broke away and became my own person—which is apparently what all the well-adjusted albinos in America did—something awful would happen. I’d feel as though I were abandoning my mother. And my father. Hadn’t they been through enough bad things? I figured if I clung to them and never left them alone, they would be less sad about losing Cuba and less sad about life in general. We would be this tight little constellation of love, understanding, comfort, closeness, safety, familiarity, fluency, and support in an otherwise vast, indifferent, confusing, lonely, threatening, strange, and empty cosmos. To me we were like three wounded mártires who had endured something intense and unspeakable together in an unwinnable war in a far-off land that only we understood and could never explain to anybody who wasn’t also a Cuban refugee. The American psychiatrist regarded me as though I were an alien.
I guess I was.
The D.C. summers were hot and wet, unabated by sea breezes. Mami didn’t mind. She loved to bake—in the sun, not cakes. Being fair-skinned redheads, neither of us could tan. But we could freckle. The aspiration was to get so many freckles that eventually they’d merge into one gigantic tan. But from June to September my legs were covered in hives and assorted rashes from the chafe. Unlike Mami, I was “delicate.” A sensitive Jubana hothouse orchid who reacted violently to all sorts of outer and inner weather.
“¡Mira pa’ esto!” Mami said, examining my blistered inner thighs. Look at this! And then to my father, “¡Has algo!” Do something!
“¿Qué coño tu quieres que yo haga? ¡Hay calor! ¡No hay dinero!” What the hell do you want me to do? It’s hot! There’s no money!
“¡La niña no puede vivir así! Mira pa’ esto. A mi no m’importa un carajo. Compra un aire acondicionado, coño. O róbate uno, a mi que m’importa. Pero hazlo!” The child can’t live like this! Look at this. I don’t give a fuck (what it takes). Buy an air conditioner, dammit. Or steal one, I don’t care. Just do it!
“Okay.”
My father went to Sears and bought an electric fan for $12. They put it in my bedroom. My hives and rashes cleared right up. Mami needed a target for her fury. Papi was the most convenient one to blame, as if he had caused our new impoverished circumstances with all its attendant problems and deprivations. Mami railed against Fidel Castro, she howled at the moon for the random unfairness of life, for the constan’ eensohlt of snow, for the red rash on my thighs.
Later on we got a.c. and she kind of calmed down. It made her feel slightly less bereft, since in Cuba we always had a.c. in our houses. Just like we always had maids and silver stove-top espresso pots. Those are the culturally specific symbols of lifestyle continuity from one country to another. We didn’t have much else here, though. We had one another, sort of. I hardly ever saw my parents, and when I did, we were rarely alone. They were either at work or resting in their bed after work or going out or throwing dinner parties for psychiatrists or resting in their bed from the dinner parties. I grew up surrounded less by children than by adult psychiatrists and other assorted health care professionals who were all Mami’s new work friends. (Papi didn’t really have friends except Mami. He was always too shy, withdrawn, awkward, and socially indifferent. I found those qualities alternately sad, infuriating, and touching.) I had always felt more comfortable and normal around much older people than I ever did or would around my peers—with a couple of caveats. The people I have always gotten along with best are straight women either my age or younger, married men of any age, straight men close to my parents’ age, gay men around my same age, and blacks and immigrants of either gender and any age. After all, until I was sent in the fall of 1967 to a prep school in the fifth grade, my friends were almost exclusively black: nannies, children, and their families.
What I didn’t grasp until Sidwell Frenzy, as I refer to that hellish eight-year period from fifth to twelfth grade, was just how racially segregated Washington, D.C., was. It was an unpleasant realization, one that I’ve really never gotten used to. Maybe that’s the reason I identify so much with people of color, although I am technically white. I have a Caucasian Mexican-American friend, Mayra, who likes to point out that white is a color, one that “contains all of the visible rays of the spectrum.” Well, Mayra went to Harvard. That’s how those people talk. Acing the SAT verbals is just in their blood. But Mami says saying we’re whitey crackers is wrong. Here’s why: There used to be a discount chain of stores in the northeastern part of the country called the Cosmetic Center. One time Mami was shopping there and saw a fetching display of particularly colorful makeup. It was really hard to shoplift in there—visible cameras and mirrors everywhere—so she grudgingly walked up to the counter to “pay” for an olive eyeshadow and a rust-colored lipstick, two of her favorite “earth” colors.
“Oh no,” said the cashier. “These aren’t for you.”
“Of course dey are, honey,” Mami said.
“No, ma’am. See? This says it’s for ‘Women of Color.’”
“Right. So?”
“Well, it’s for women of color.”
“Das right. I am a woman of colors. Peenk.”
Unlike Mami, whose heavy-duty accent instantly gives h
er away as a ferner, as they say down South, I have no accent either in English or in Spanish, and besides, I look mainstream and unethnic. Therefore, I can “pass” as a whitey. Or someone peenk. Whatever. But in some ways, that only compounds how different I feel underneath the skin. I’ve had blacks, Latinos, and Asians treat me one way before they found out my background, and then act completely another way when I open my mouth and start rattling off in rapid-fire, perfect Español.
But integration is how Latinas and Jubanas have always survived. Paradoxes “R” Us. We’re always integrating the European with the Indian with the black with the Russian with the Mongolian with the Spanish with the English with the Jewish with the Gentile with the Old World with the New World with the real diamonds with the fake diamonds. Making sense of what doesn’t make sense is how we’ve survived historically. That and a lot of red lipstick and toenail polish. We, or at least I, feel invisible without it.
One time when I was monastically shuttered at home for a few days while on deadline for the Washington Post, I was under so much pressure to produce and scoop the New York Times that I forwent makeup! That tells you how bad it was. Anyway, once I’d filed my story, I had to come into the office to get edited. I took a long hot shower, washed and blow-dried my hair to frizz-free perfection (it takes six styling products to get it that way), and lovingly applied my makeup with an I’ve-missed-you! gusto. I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror in my apartment as I was leaving and I literally said out loud, “Oh, there you are!” In other words, Jubanas are more “themselves” with makeup than without it. Something is terribly, terribly wrong if we skip it.
Which is why the first time I went to see Gramps without a trace of makeup (okay, I think I did have some Kiehl’s clear lip balm on, but that doesn’t really count), we got our multicultural wires crossed. We’d been together for a year or so and the trust was there, so I decided to do something really bold, really daring, really wacky: a naked face in public! But it was simply because I’d overslept. And you know how these Freudian fuckers will never pass up an opportunity to psychoanalyze your every last move. If you’ve overslept—and by age four or five, having been ringed by so many psychiatrists, I hardly needed yet another one to point this out—there’s a reason for it and that reason usually has something to do with resistance or avoidance. I just didn’t have the energy to go there. So I arrived right on time and, knowing I looked like a raging hag, immediately apologized to Gramps for my appearance.