by Gigi Anders
But nooo.
So. I could either have hourly heart attacks, like my Miami Cuban exile brethren have had for more than 406,888 hours of the last four-plus Castro decades, or I could make the best of things. That made me be resourceful, adaptable, imaginative, and self-reliant, whether I felt like it or not. What do they say? Children are resilient. Yeah. Right. If you’re the tiniest one with the least power, you have to obey the bigger, stronger ones feeding, clothing, and housing you, even if they’re completely flipped out. My parents were way too engrossed in daily survival and the effects of compounded transatlantic losses to be a Juban version of Norman Rockwell parents. (Actually, Rockwell, with his idealized, un-Hispanic, syrupy visions of Americana, is Papi’s favorite painter. When he got into a shared private practice in 1963, Papi hung schmaltzy Rockwell prints of doctors and patients along the office hallways.)
Whenever my parents did pay attention and those magical, ephemeral, singular moments presented themselves, I grabbed on tight and savored those rations. Give me love. At night Mami sat on the side of my bed and in the lamplight read or talked to me—briefly. She’d start to rise and I’d grab her freckled arm and pull her back down to me. I need more from you. Are we together? Are you my loving mother? Are we a family? Or not? I wonder why you won’t be closer and more giving. I thought I had articulated those things by my actions, but it didn’t seem to register in Mami, or in Papi, for that matter, and it never would. Nor would it with the four Epic-Epochal lovers of my future romantic life.
Even now, my mother sounds a thousand times brighter, happier, and more excited to hear from me on the telephone or in E-mails than in person. Why is this? I was learning the ropes, the ropes of people’s love limitations, and settling for what little I could scramble to get. My deduction: I may have to steal the love I crave. Where can I go to shoplift love? Maybe I’m just not interesting enough to linger over, so I’d better work on that. I must be burdensome and not worth putting time and effort into. My needs must be too big and unwieldy, for meeting them takes too long and takes too much out of others, who have more important things to do with their time. My feelings about the state of my needs don’t count or matter. I will always be alone in the world. Castro said if you need a friend, get a dog. Maybe I’ll ask Mami and Papi for a dog for my birthday. A puppy could help me.
A weird fatalism was taking hold within me. It wasn’t logical. Could it be a chemical or genetic hand-me-down from my great-grandparents, who died anonymously in the death camps, piled high in pits like the extinguished cigarette butts in the day room on the ward? Zeide Boris, my father (though he’s always denied it), and Tío Bernardo—each has had a predisposition to depression. How well you tolerate frustration—some of us break sooner than others—is an element of that predisposition. The messages I was picking up day-to-day seemed to trigger that fatalism, and converge into a submissive, sometimes self-destructive, melancholy: inevitability and those recurring dreams of death by water and of being ripped off. My Juban family had secrets, hidden agendas, unfinished business. What were those things? It was all very subtle and therefore hard to identify and to resolve. We certainly never talked about it at home, but I knew I had it, whatever “it” was. A masochistic malaise, perhaps? I was much too young to articulate it to anyone at the time, but I knew I had a certain…syndrome. It was Jewish and it was Cuban. Though it appeared to be at odds with the cheerful, lively, sparkly Cuban spirit called el echar pa’ ’lante—which literally means the throwing forward, or the ability to push ahead—all Cuban exiles are sad underneath the skin. I was like Papi in the Jewish syndrome sense, Papi who metaphorically hid under the bed his whole life: ill-at-ease with anyone but family and intimate friends, resigned, sweet, mistrustful of strangers and yet too trusting of others’ real motives, a little sad, always picking up the tab and not letting others do for him, perceiving the world as a dangerous, inhospitable place.
I once asked Mami why most of the Jews seemed so passively to submit to the Nazis. She said, “Because dey couldn’t believe dat what was happeneengh to dem was really happeneengh to dem.”
Dr. Raymond Band, my pre-Gramps psychiatrist, the one who said I was conflicted about my own individuation and who regarded me as though I were an alien, once called me “a driven leaf”; I had no moorings. “I lived on air that crossed me from sweet things,” wrote Robert Frost in his poem “To Earthward.” Imagine, a New England Yankee farmer-poet-philosopher-anti-Semite who read at Jackie Kennedy’s husband’s inauguration, speaking to me. “I craved strong sweets, but those/seemed strong when I was young: The petal of the rose/It was that stung.”
Dr. Band couldn’t see that generations of displacement—first my great-grandparents, from their shtetls to the camps; then my grandparents, from Europe and Russia to Cuba; then my whole family, from Cuba to the United States—take their toll, and how. What little morsels my parents could offer me, and I don’t mean materially, weren’t sufficient. I remained hungry. So I looked for my mother and my father in other people. “A driven leaf.” I wish. “I crave the stain / Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love / The sweet of bitter bark / And burning clove.”
Oh, if only I could live on air, like a leaf…
There were bright spots. There was a trip to the National Zoo on a wonderfully moody autumn day, my favorite time of year: Mami’s deep gray cropped angora sweater (worn with a sleek pair of black ski-type slacks, black leather gloves, black ballet flats, diamond stud earrings, and a silver charm bracelet) matched the color of the sky. Her hair and painted lips were remarkably red. Papi bought me a paper bag of unshelled peanuts, much to Mami’s gastronomic dismay, and we ate some and fed the rest to the elephants, whose skin matched Mami’s sweater and the Washington, D.C., sky. We took pictures. Mami looked like a model.
Another time Mami rented a stroller and rolled me through the ample, quiet corridors of the National Gallery of Art. It was cool and dim, and Mami showed me the paintings she favored; most were of ballerinas. “Míra,” she told me. Look. There was Auguste Renoir’s Dancer and Edgar Degas’s beautiful ballerinas. I loved to see those graceful figures, especially from the back, where green, yellow, blue, or pink satin sashes were tied in bows around the waists of their white tutus. We passed some Monet landscapes. Mami liked them, too. Her tastes, such as they were, were definitely eclectic. At the gift shop, she bought two small Monet prints and a Degas called Dance Class. Mami had the three framed and hung the Monets in the bathroom and the Degas in her bedroom. She said that one reminded her of her ballet school in Havana.
More than a decade later, when I was in college in Paris studying literature, poetry, and art history, I saw similar paintings at the Louvre. The Degas dancers resonated more than even Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, probably because M.L. is encased in a bulletproof box and is always surrounded by hundreds of tourist gawkers. At five-two, I could barely get a glimpse of anything but her mysterious, long, eyebrow-less almond eyes. Besides, Degas’s ballerinas had always been Mami’s picks; how could anything else dare to compete?
Even when life was no longer about fighting off the threat of starvation or eviction, my parents usually left me to my own devices. Maybe I’d gotten too good at playing the independent, happy-go-lucky, assimilated child. Maybe my interests (books, magazines) and strengths (writing) were too isolating and foreign to them. Maybe I was just really good at entertaining myself. Maybe the ’rents, as I refer to them with my friends, didn’t get me because I was so different from them. Maybe my presence made them miss Cecilia and Cuba too much. Maybe I had the wrong anatomy. Maybe Papi only had enough tunnel vision energy to love one girl. Maybe Mami was competing with me and would never let me win. At any rate, I thought I could overcome and rise above any and all of those possibilities, and outwardly mask my blue inner feelings, by embracing the Gypsy attitude: “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile, let me do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks, I’m very versatile.”
In Mami’s office I fou
nd a yellow legal pad and government-issue pens. Since I could never go to cahm, where they have cool crafts like papier-mâché, I settled for sketching flowers resembling the ones I used to pick for Mami in El Jardín Botánico and El Parque Central. Living where we did in D.C., there wasn’t much nature. Behind our crummy apartment building, though, there was a shallow running creek. My Tía Elisa, Tío Julio’s wife, used to take me back there to wade when she and Tío Julio came to visit us from Miami. Tía Elisa was a Big Mama who loved to eat EVERYTHING, and I could easily coax her into taking me to the Safeway supermarket where she’d buy me all the exotic delicacies that Mami wouldn’t: Wahndehr Brayt, Welch’s grape juice, Swee-Tarts, and Skippy crunchy peanut butter.
Later, we’d sit by the creek (after Tía Elisa cleared away the empty beer cans and broken glass pint bottles, the cigarette butts and used condoms), and I’d extend one leg and then the other so she could roll up the bottoms of my pants. I loved the slippery smoothness of the hard rocks on the soles of my feet under the dirty water. Mami regarded my soiled feet after these immersions and shook her head, grumbling, “Este país es una mierda.” This country is a piece of shit.
Bernardo—the Puerto Rican immigrant gang leader of the Sharks in West Side Story, not my uncle—would concur with that assessment. Mami had taken me to see the musical, my first movie in this country, and in the song “America,” Bernardo is disparaging of the United States: “Everywhere grime in America, organized crime in America, terrible time in America.” But Nardo’s spitfiery girlfriend and fellow Puerto Rican, Anita, considers her native land ugly, diseased, and backward: “Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion, let it sink back in the ocean.”
“Dat Rita Moreno ees so not Cuban, by de way,” Mami said as we left the theater. “Not even close. So I cannot blame her. Puerto Rico ees a peet compar-ed to Cuba. Actually, eets a peet compar-ed to anytheengh.”
“Maria is so beautiful!” I said, reaching for Mami’s hand. “She looked pretty in the white dress with the red sash, like a Degas ballerina. ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty…’”
“Natalie Wood, jes,” Mami replied, digging in her purse with her free hand for the car keys. “But lemme tell joo, honey, chees about as Latina as Jackie Kennedy, okay? Dat accent, what was dat? Mexican?”
“‘I feel stunning and entrancing, feel like running and dancing for joy…’”
“Watch eet. Joor about to run an’ dance for joy eento de car.”
I was. My visual world was out of focus unless I got right up close to it. I assumed everybody saw this way.
“‘For I’m loved,’” I continued, “‘by a pretty wonderful goy!’”
“Speakeengh of goys,” Mami said, “who ees Jackie Kennedy?”
“What? Oh. President Juan’s chic wife.”
“Right,” Mami said, handing me two sticks of Juicy Fruit. “Abre ’l chicle.” Open the gum. Just as Cubans generically call any chocolate bar a “peter” (pronounced PEH-tehr, probably from Peter Paul Mounds, introduced in 1921), they refer to any brand of chewing gum as “chicle,” from Chiclets. Mami never smoked a cigarette without having something else in her mouth, be it a drink or a mint or chewing gum. People who smoke any other way are “hard-core ahdeects an’ deesgohsteengh.” I unwrapped the powdery beige rectangles and neatly rolled each one up tight, the way Mami preferred. It’s the only way a lady chews gum. I handed Mami one roll and put the other in my mouth.
“Dat Jackie has class,” Mami continued, reaching for the lighter for her Kool. “Not as much as us, but eet’s right up der. Joo can’t be fina [refined] eef joor fat. Jackie knows dat. Chee can’t take a bad peecture. Chee always looks perfect. Plus, I hear chee smokes behind clos-ed doors. We could be like seestehrs, practeecally.”
The gum’s sugary sweetness slid down my throat. It was so intense that I started tearing and nearly choked. We were southeast-bound from Pennsylvania Avenue, heading toward the Potomac waterfront. When we passed the Arena Stage on Sixth Street, Mami said, “Das where I want to leev.”
“You want to live in a theater? Like, on the stage?”
“No, bobita,” Mami said. No, silly girl. “I want to leev near eet. Because ees theater an’ because ees near de water. Das a great combo. Drama an’ a reevehr. I lohvee.”
At the Varadero beach in Cuba, where Mami took me swimming from the time I was a baby, there was only powdery-soft white sand underfoot, like talc, and the salty sea water was translucent and pristine. A thousand incandescent caracoles, seashells, and iridescent concha de perla, mother-of-pearl shells, studded the strand. Inside them I could hear the waves’ voices; they murmured, moaned, and rushed.
“Mi sirena,” Mami said, dipping me into the supple waves and back up. My mermaid. “¡Cómo te gusta el mar y la playa, mamita!” How you love the sea and the beach, little mama!
“Méteme, Mami,” I always replied. Put me in, Mommy. I wanted never to get out of the water. Inside my tiny body something vibrated with gorgeous animation. It was the life force. Since life began in the sea, I was in my element in el mar. Four decades later, the fiancé called me la canaria, canary bird; that’s what Stanley Kowalski called Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley said, “Hey, canary bird! Toots! Get OUT of the BATHROOM!” Blanche stayed in the bath for hours, singing and soaking. She said that after a long bath she felt so good and cool, so rested and refreshed.
“A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand-new outlook on life!”
Moi aussi, Blanche. I’ve never made an important life decision before I’ve taken a long bath or shower. Of course, all my baths and showers are long. (I mean, they’re normal for me but they’re long for non-Jubanas.) Maybe it’s that religious cleansing motif, or maybe it’s the return to the womb. Maybe it’s because I, a sea girl at heart, was born on an island. Whatever it is, I need it to come alive.
“Méteme, Mami.”
“So?” I suddenly heard Mami’s voice say. “What kind of place has dos bohnk bayt houses?”
“What? Oh. Camp.”
“Das right. An’ what kind of cahm ees dat?”
“¡Ay!” I cried, impatient with her game. I got up from the hospital’s antiseptic cold floor to stretch. “I don’t know what camp is that.”
“A concentration cahm!”
“Mami, I need to interact with children my own age,” I said, repeating a new word I’d overheard one of the staff psychiatrists use to a colleague. “I do. I see them on TV and these American children are friends with other children. Do you like the flowers I drew?”
“Look,” she replied, barely glancing at my artistry. “We are poor refugees because Castro made us dat an’ he stole everytheengh johs like Heetlehr. I never knew my gran’ parents because Heetlehr took dem an’ he keel-ed dem. Who ees Heetlehr?”
“Castro’s late father,” I said, batting her exhaled plumes of Kool cigarette smoke away from my face. As the smoke was clearing I noticed a tape dispenser on Mami’s desk. I rolled off some strips of tape and pressed my remembered Cuban flowers on her wall.
“Das right, das right,” Mami said. “An’ how deed Heetlehr get de poor Jews like joor poor dead great-gran’parents over to de concentration cahms?”
“In trains.”
“Exactly! Wheech ees so seemeelahr to a BUS. Wheech ees how dey sen’ de leetl keedees to go to de cahm! Now please. Go back een de day room an’ play weeth de patients, okay? Ees fun for dem to have a leetl keedee hangeengh aroun’. Eet breaks up de monotony of being so krehsee. An’ let me tell joo, honey, dees people are krehsee as hell.”
Skippy, slavery. Papier-mâché, six million dead.
Mami forced me into school a year early. A refugee child, scarcely four, I was nowhere near ready. I could read pretty well, but my English was Spanglish at best, still a bit wobbly, and I had acute separation anxiety. Mami felt school was the only option. To her, I was becoming a total pill, whining about having to accompany her day after day to the mental ward.
But I h
ad my reasons. It wasn’t just the boredom and the fact that I was at least thirty-five years younger than everyone else and the grindingly gray, crushed cigarettey ennui of it all. The breaking point came when I spent a period of time on the children’s ward. It was in a separate building—St. Elizabeths being a vast complex, almost like a little city unto itself on a hill, surrounded by high wraparound stone walls and guards at all exits. Mami figured sending me there would be a good idea since (1) it would give her a break and (2) hadn’t I been the one whining about needing to interact more with people my own age? After all, she reminded me, I’d never specified that I had to interact with unhospitalized children.