by Gigi Anders
“I’m so sorry!” I said. “This is the worst you’ll ever see me.”
“Did something happen?”
“Well…”
“I mean, what happened to make you feel so bad?”
“No!” I said. God, he so didn’t get it. “I’m not wearing any makeup! You can’t tell the difference?”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “I thought you said you’d had a crisis.”
I had. But explaining it would involve an additional five years on the couch. Not that I minded—psychoanalysis was good for me, it was enlightening and permanently useful. But I quickly did the calculations. Let’s see, $200 a session, at three times a week (Gramps would have preferred five because “It only gives you the weekend to hide”), at four weeks per month, at…forget it. No health insurance is that good. And while the ’rents were kindly picking up the slack on that tab, they had mixed feelings at best about my treatment and no mixed feelings whatsoever about Gramps’s fee.
“Coño, el tipo es un ganef,” Papi remarked in Spandish, or Spanish and Yiddish. Dammit, the guy is a thief. Mami Dearest’s aversion to paying for anything had long since rubbed off on Papi, who delayed “expansion” payments as long as humanly possible.
In return, I of course ran to my expander and reported exactly what my father had said. I thought that would be “helpful.” Gramps, a hard-core German Jew, was, shall we say, not amused. The news unfortunately backfired on me:
GRAMPS: Goddammit. He called me that? Look. If there was a flood in your father’s basement and I was a plumber he called to come fix it, we would expect that I would be paid for my work on the spot. Right?
GIGI: Right. Absolutely.
GRAMPS: If I completed the task correctly, I would stand there while he wrote a check. I wouldn’t “bill” him for the future. That’s how the world works.
GIGI: Right!
GRAMPS: Except in your parents’ world, everything comes for free.
GIGI: Right!
GRAMPS: NO. That is WRONG.
GIGI: Oh. Yeah, you’re right.
GRAMPS: Goddammit, I know I’m right. Stop agreeing with me.
GIGI: Okay. Sorry.
GRAMPS: I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to realize that this is YOUR therapy. I don’t give a shit how you pay for it. What I do give a shit about is that I get paid in a timely way, and that is YOUR responsibility.
GIGI: Can’t this one be an exception? I’m sure my dad will cough it up eventually.
GRAMPS: There are no exceptions. You either stand for something or you don’t.
GIGI: Well, I mean, hello. I can’t MAKE him write the fucking checks.
GRAMPS: You’re going to leave here in a few minutes—the sooner, the better…
GIGI: Gee, thanks.
GRAMPS: You’re welcome. And you’re going home and you’re going to sit down with your parents tonight and tell them the following: “Either Gramps gets paid NOW or we have to terminate treatment.” You ask them: “Can we afford this? Because if not, we have to make other arrangements for therapy for me.” And don’t come back here until and unless you’ve had that conversation and bring me that check. You got that?
GIGI: Holy shit.
GRAMPS: That’s right, holy shit.
I was so freaked out about having such a blunt, non-Jubanesque talk with my fantasy-and denial-ridden parents, for whom explicit money discussions were more taboo than sex, that as Papi finally, reluctantly, handed me the check, I felt the top of my skull pop open and fly away.
In our next session, I described this bizarre, unfamiliar sensation to Gramps, who took the check and practically broke out into a one-man “Hava Nagila” hora.
“Mazel tov!” he cried. “Your head’s cracking open! Expansion! It’s about time.”
But before your head can crack open, before anything, for that matter, Jubanas are required by their families to learn how to throw great dinner parties. As her Aunt Alicia told Gigi in the eponymous movie I was partially named after, “Bad table manners, my dear Gigi, have broken up more households than infidelity.”
Entertaining well is a skill that will always come in handy, like being able to tweeze your eyebrows without a mirror or knowing how to bikini wax at home without setting your kitchen and nether regions on fire. Mami and the maid always served a Cuban menu. Typically it was arroz con pollo, the Cuban version of the Spanish paella, preceded by light appetizers, such as mixed drinks and little bowls of cashews or plantain chips. (Cuban food is a little heavy, and Americans experiencing it for the first time always go hawg wild and overeat, so you want to keep the appetizer situation light.) Arroz con pollo is a well-seasoned casserole of saffron-scented and colored rice (usually short-grain Valencia rice, which is fat, creamy, soft, and smooth like risotto) with chicken, pimientos, olives, sweet peas, and whatever else you’ve got lying around. Mami served it buffet-style, with white or red wine, fried ripe plantains, guava-stuffed croissants, and a romaine salad with sliced raw mushrooms and sliced red onions and a creamy dressing. Dessert was always flan, aka crème caramel, embellished with some sort of berry purée on the side, and espresso.
Watching Mami in confident, recipe-free Cuban hostess mode is how I learned to entertain others. She’d show me how to set a table: The little fork always goes to the left of the big fork; the water glass is always to the left of the wineglass; multiple candles and cut flowers project beauty and power. Even though we were still pretty poor, making do with style has always been a quintessentially Cuban trait. It’s a matter of dignity and good taste, of Old World manners and savoir faire. Mami always insisted on fresh flowers at the dinner table. Her favorites were and still are margaritas, daisies.
The first dinner party she had in Washington that I recall was in the late winter of 1963. It was set for 8 P.M. on a Saturday night, which is the traditional Cuban dinner hour and because one of Mami’s favorite movies is 1933’s Dinner at Eight (“Jean Harlow’s hair was totally FAKE een dat plateenohm, but chee was so fohnny an’ cute! I lohv-ed her!”). It was the maid’s day off, but she and Mami had everything prepared well ahead of time, which is easy with Cuban food, since it’s forgiving and tends to improve over time. At 8:05, the doorbell rang. Everything but Mami was ready; she was just getting into the shower. Papi had gone out to buy some wine or ice or something. In Cuba, if you invite people for eight o’clock, nobody with any civility or manners even thinks of arriving until nine-ish. Any sooner would be incredibly tacky, rude, and bizarre. Mami wondered why the doorbell was ringing and asked me to go see. I opened the door and saw a man and a woman.
“Whah, you muss be Gigi!” said the woman. She had a really weird accent and smelled perfumey. He was very tall and looked like Abraham Lincoln. “Aren’t you juss precious!”
“Hi,” I said, unsure of what to do next. They were all dressed up, but surely they weren’t here for the party. It was only 8:05. So we just stood there for a couple of moments. Finally the man said, “Well, you think maybe we could come on in? Ahm Joe. This here’s ma wahf, Josephine. Ahm a suhkahtris. Ah work at the hospital with your mama.”
“Where are you FROM?” I asked.
“Mississippi!” they chimed. See, I knew they were ferners. They couldn’t have been from Mississippi Avenue; that was the road we lived on.
“Are you here to eat our foods?” I asked.
“Isn’t she adorable?” Josephine said to Joe.
“She’s a pistol,” he replied.
I of course had no idea what or whose vocabulary they were using—a “pistol”?—or what exactly to do. So I decided to let them in, but only because they weren’t armed and dressed in guerrilla fatigues.
“Eat our nuts and chips!” I instructed them, and rushed off to Mami’s room.
I found her in the bathroom, applying Maybelline liquid black eyeliner. The TV set was atop a rolling table that had been pulled over from the bedroom to the bathroom doorway so Mami could watch old movies while she was getting ready. A K
ool cigarette burned in an ashtray on the countertop next to a glass of red wine.
“¿Quién fué?” she asked abstractedly, concentrating on the outer edge of her upper eyelid. Who was it? She was barefoot and wearing one of her fifteen bathrobes. I gingerly stepped around the snaking extension cord and TV set—Mami had built a fortress around herself—and sat on the toilet seat. The black-and-white movie playing had a sumptuous smiling lady who was dancing with a man who was singing about queens’ tiaras and dressing in sables. I picked up a tube of lipstick and looked in the mirror while I applied some Cherries in the Snow.
“Two people,” I answered. “What movie is that?”
“Cover Girl. Ees from de forties. I saw eet een Cuba. I like Geelda better, doh. Because dat was de first time dat anybody had ever seen a ray-hayt wehreengh rayt.”
“But it’s in black and white.”
“Only leetehrally. Feegurahteevehly, joo can tell Rita Hayworth ees een a rayt dress. ‘Put All de Blames on de Mames.’ Das what chee sang. Dey joos to say dat rayt hair and rayt clothes don’ match. Dat dey clash. But dat ees totally crap. Because Rita Hayworth, a Latina…See? De guy der, dat one ees Eugene Kelly. Eugenio.”
Mami always Spanishified English words and names.
“Eugenio Kelly is the man dancer and singer?”
“Jes. Was der somebody at de door?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who?”
“Two people. Nothing like Rita or Eugenio, though. These ones are from another country.”
“Where?”
“Mississippi. Josephus and Joseph Steen.”
Mami dropped her powder brush.
“WHAT? Joe and Josephine? Dey are here? Oh, my God! Eet johs can’t be! Ees only eight o’clock…”
“Eight-o-seven, actually,” I said, smacking my rouged lips together in the mirror. “Let me see some of that eyeliner.”
“What? No! Go out der NOW an’ tell dem dat I’ll be out een a second. ¡Coño! Dees country ees reedeeculous! I hate eet!”
I slipped my bare feet into her emerald-green satin stilettos and shuffled off to the living room, still holding the eyeliner wand.
“My mommy isn’t ready yet,” I announced. “But you can put on my eyeliner on my eyes for a while.” I handed it to Joseph Steen, shutting my eyes and extending my chin. “Anyway, don’t worry. We have a lot of many foods.”
I kept my eyes closed to allow the eyeliner to dry, and began singing what I thought were the words I’d heard to “Put Me to the Test” from Cover Girl: “‘I wear no farmer but to my charmer I hereby pledge my wall. In other words, I’m at your ceck and ball.’”
I stopped and opened my Cleopatrified eyes. My audience appeared puzzled.
I beat on, a little boat against the current: “I’m pretty sure my mommy and daddy will talk about you very much after you leave here.”
I brushed my teeth, put on my yellow-and-white cotton gingham baby doll pajamas with the little red strawberries sewn around the neck and sleeves, and sat upon my small white bed. The Steens had given me a present. It was a book, A Child’s Guide to Freud. It had an aggressively drawn series of black pen-and-ink sketches of a fiendish little boy and his family. I thought maybe it was about Freud Flintstone, written from the point of view of Pebbles or possibly even Bamm-Bamm. But instead, I found a story about a troubled child who gets taken to therapy by his parents:
“What Mommy and Daddy take you to is called a PSYCHIATRIC SESSION. The man in the chair…will call you a NEUROTIC…Arguing back is called EXPRESSING ANGER. The reason the psychiatrist does not mind this is called THE FEE…Now you’ve gained INSIGHT. Call yourself AWARE…[Your parents are] SICK. You alone are FREE. You ALONE.”
The last page had a drawing of the little boy with wings, flying above the earth, away from the sun. I wrote my name on the book in black Magic Marker and turned out the light. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and stroked my hair with my hair tete, wondering who writers were and how they wrote their books. I heard my mother’s laughter from the living room. When we’d sat down to eat and cut into our pollo, blood had oozed out. Mami had never cooked before and she thought cooking pollo meant you basically warmed it up. Mrs. Steen kindly took over and made the blood stop by baking the breasts for another hour in a much hotter oven. Now I inhaled commingled perfumes, espresso, and cigarette smoke. There were no intellectuals or creative people in my family. Sure, they were well-trained professionals, but they were not educated, if you can see the difference. There was no one in my immediate circle who would encourage me to pursue writing, a fantasy profession I was envisioning. Writing was not considered a serious or even a heterosexual girl–appropriate endeavor. Even at this tender age, I was already well into my Latina programming: Don’t achieve. You can be successful and intelligent—that way, your parents can bore the shit out of the neighbors at cocktail parties with all your many accomplishments—but you must always remember your place; if you’re too competent and self-sufficient nobody will marry you or, God forbid, impregnate you afterward. This is really, really bad because marriage and motherhood are your raisons d’être. If nothing else, the Hispanic culture is traditional and hierarchical; the implicit rules stipulate that if you’re a girl you can be smart or you can be beautiful. But you can never be both, so you better choose. I loved-loved-loved Cherries in the Snow and eyeliner. I loved-loved-loved my books. In other words, I was emotionally my age but intellectually I was far older. This was a big problem for a four-year-old who already knew a lot about herself and what turned her on. Right now, that was okay. It would not be okay later, but later wasn’t right now. So I kept my little writing fantasy a secret. Like masturbating, it was not something you did in public, and it was something that the more you did, the more you wanted to do.
Anyway, major (or even minor, for that matter) writing was really neither here nor there at age four! Soon I would be spending the summers with Mami on the air-conditioned ward in the mental hospital. At least they kept it cool in there. Jubanos may hate snow and ice, but we’d die without air-conditioning and cylindrical icebergs of compacted crushed cubes in our drinks. It makes us feel more sane and secure, reassured that everything’s going to be all right, that we’re in civilization. That we’re Kool.
At present, surveying our diminished surroundings and the fact that we and the housekeeper were the only Hispanics I knew, I, Anastasia Romanov, I ALONE—with my recurring bad dreams of expropriation and death by water, my pretty pink angora party dress and my strange new Freud book, my treasured gindaleja of holey rubber tetes—preferred exile in Siberia or even Las Casitas Verdes with day-old chocolate birthday cakes, gross-out green lizards, and “simple retailer” Jubanos to this foreign English-dominant wasteland.
Good peanut butter, though. Crunchy.
CHAPTER THREE
Girl Under de Bed
So why the hell was I, barely four years old, going every day from our squalid walk-up tenement in Southeast Washington, D.C., to a mental ward? God knows I asked. Mami explained that unlike Americans (bad), Cuban parents (good) don’t desert their children in summertime by sending them off to camp (death).
“Cahm. Johs de word ees really really bad, joo know? What ees cahm?”
“It has a P at the end, Mami. You say it with a P. Cam-p. You have to say the ‘puh.’”
“Right. What ees cahm?”
“You get on a big yellow guagua [bus] and they take you to a place where it’s got grass and a lake and little bunk bed houses and there’s crafts called papier-mâché…”
“Hold eet right der. Papier-mâché notheengh. WHAT kind of houses?”
“With bunk beds.”
“Right. An’ what kind of place has houses like dat?”
“Is this, like, a riddle?”
“¡Coño, qué bruta!” Dammit, what a dunce!
“Are there any pens in here so I can draw?”
It’s very boring for a young Jubanique child to be locked in a mental institution for eig
ht hours a day, five days a week, even a mental institution that has housed such famous residents as Ezra Pound and, many notorious years later, John Hinckley. I felt as employed there as Mami was, except one of us was, how shall we say, involuntarily volunteering her services and the pleasure of her company to the medicated masses. It seemed as though all three hundred sprawling acres of the federal hospital grounds were just-kill-me-now beige and gray and brown. Mami’s building, the Dorothea Dix Pavilion, smelled of Pine-Sol. It was all dim hallways and black and gray metal desks and cabinets in there, and no carpets so the linoleum floor was bare and cold. The in-patients, the majority of whom were heavily sedated, mostly sat around in loose clothes or bathrobes and defeated slippers on orange and turquoise vinyl furniture and watched TV in the “day room.” Some tried over and over to relight long ago extinguished cigarette butts piled in smelly stale peaks in huge round purple aluminum ashtrays. The patients constantly hit up the staff for fresh cigarettes. At first Mami shared hers to be nice and to bond, but after a while she got hip to their tricks and began announcing, “Sorry, Meestehr/Mees [whatever their last name was], I only have enough for myself.”
There were several other female social workers in Mami’s wing, really nice American women who made a big fuss over me between seeing patients (and thank God they did, because I’d have died of psychiatric cabin fever otherwise). These were Mami’s first real women friends in this country, and many of those friendships have endured. I’d bounce from one to another of their offices, providing comic relief and evaluating each lady’s fitness as a potential surrogate mother to me. “Gigi’s so entertaining!” they’d say. Hello, what choice did I have? I’m four years old and stuck in a locked mental institution, for God’s sake. Throwing a tantrum will only…get me locked in a mental institution! It just doesn’t get much more diminished than this for a Russian-Lithuanian-Polish-Cuban-Jewish princesa. What was I supposed to do? The revolution had put me—Gigi La Yiya Yiyi Yiyita Rebeca Beatriz Anastasia Lula Mae Luli Gorda China Muma Mumita Mamita Bruta Bobita Benes Andursky Anders—here. And my parents, too. Fidel Castro had put us all here, that cabrón comemierda H.P. [shit-eating bastard hijo de puta, son of a whore]. And my Juban culture—which stipulates that children never leave their parents, never never never never EVER, not even after they’re married with kids (especially after they’re married with kids)—had put me here. Shit! Unlike the patients, I seriously had better things to do. I could be bathing with my mother in Varadero beach right now, I could be picking tropical flowers in a beautiful park with my abuelos or eating my daily lunch—bistec a la palomilla (pounded, fried steak), arroz blanco (white rice), frijoles negros (black beans), and platanitos maduros (fried ripe plantains)—which could be followed by a delightful nap chaser in a hand-painted yellow-and-white imported crib and dreams of heiress-hood.