by Gigi Anders
“Gosh,” she said. She had no idea what in the world I was talking about but she was riveted, in a bizarre way. This would become a leitmotif. (I’ve since fine-tuned it; few can handle me full-strength on the first exposure, so I always reassure people that it’s the hardest one. After that it gets much easier.)
“Mm-hm, and los Ciboneyes, Guanahatabeyes, and los Taínos—those were the Cuban Indians,” I continued. “We drink Malta Hatuey—well, I don’t. That’s a cerveza. Beer. It’s named for poor dead Hatuey, the Taíno Indian chief. The Spanish priest burned the chief at the stake just like poor dead Juana de Arco because Hatuey wouldn’t accept Jesus. Agh! It’s like something right out of the summer concentration camps, if you think about it.”
I stared up at the nurse, biting my lip.
“You need to see a special doctor right away,” she said. “I’ll write you a note for your mother.”
“My daddy’s a doctor and my mommy’s a psychiatric social worker,” I told her. “And I see special doctors all the time on the mental ward. That’s why I’m here, so I don’t have to go to see them.”
The nurse looked utterly bemused and slightly alarmed. Her face turned pink and shiny.
These gringas were muy peculiar.
“Nooo!” Mami shrieked, throwing the nurse’s note at Papi’s head. “¡No puede ser!” It can’t be! “La tipa está equivocada.” The gal is mistaken.
“¡Tranquilízate!” Papi told her. Calm down! “Esto no es nada, mi corazón. Esto nomás que’s un ‘eye test.’ Se lo dan a todos los chiquitos.” This is nothing, my heart (another Cuban term of endearment). This is just an eye test. They give it to all the kids.
“Ven acá, mamita,” Mami told me. Come here, little mama. She bundled me up in her arms and, nose tip to nose tip, squinted hard into my eyes, searching for a visible sign of my visual malfunction. From up close, Mami’s sunflower eyes looked watery. I dabbed the outer edge of her left eye with the tip of my right pinky to catch a falling tear. Tears mess up your makeup.
“Eef chees blind, God forbeed,” she told Papi, “ees because JOOR side of de fahmeely has all de bad eyes!”
“Perdón,” Papi said. “Perdóname. ¡Pero Bernardo usa espejuelos! Él mismo se llama Mr. Magoo. Así que házme el favor de ni empezar por allá.” Excuse me. Forgive me. But Bernardo wears glasses! He himself calls himself Mr. Magoo. So do me the favor of not even starting down that road.
Mami dropped me on the rented sofa—all our furniture was ugly, cheap, and rented in that apartment and in its predecessor—and flew out of the living room in a tearful huff, slamming the bathroom door behind her and unsettling glass bottles of perfume and other toiletries. I wondered if my Jean Naté After Bath Splash and Agua de Violetas were among the casualties. I looked up at Papi. He wasn’t saying anything. He just stood there, helpless. So I stretched out my legs and tapped the soles of my tiny archless PVCs on the glass coffee table.
Tappety-tap-tap.
Tap.
“Gigi needs glasses,” the pediatric ophthalmologist announced after a series of failed eye tests in his darkened office. Instead of letters up there on the illuminated screen, there were animals I had to identify. All I saw were little blobs in different colors. Dr. Kostenbader was elderly, soft-spoken, courtly, and balding, with white hair. “She’s quite seriously nearsighted,” he told Mami. “In her right eye, especially. I’m going to write you a prescription. You should get it filled right away.”
Mami took in the news with a façade of reason and acceptance. “Thank joo SO much,” she said, taking the prescription and neatly folding it in half. She stuck it in her caramel faux alligator faux Kelly bag. (As refugees we may have been poorer than dirt, but being Juban refugees, we make do with panache and good taste.) “We’ll go to de optomehtrees’ right away.”
“She’ll be fine,” he said, reassuringly patting her hand.
“Chee EES fine,” Mami said, pulling her hand away. The abrupt gesture made the charms on her bracelet chime. I looked up from above the top edge of my fascinating new fashion magazine (I had to read everything right up against my face, same with watching TV) and rocked on my pony. Instead of regular chairs, Dr. Kostenbader examined his patients while they straddled rocking horses.
“Can I keep this Seventeen magazine?” I asked him. “We don’t get magazines. We’re poor. Castro made us into exiled refugees and his father Hitler killed my great-grandparents.”
“Uh, certainly, gal, take the magazine,” Dr. Kostenbader replied, totally bewildered but polite. “And here, have a lollipop. May she have a lollipop?”
“Chee may,” Mami said tersely, standing up. In her faux alligator caramel stilettos she towered over both the doctor and me.
“Do you prefer cherry or grape or—”
“I like guava,” I told him.
“Guava?” he said.
“But I also like cherry, though. Grape, too.”
“Not grape,” Mami said, shaking her head and making a face, her index finger upright and wagging left and right like a manic metronome.
The doctor handed me a red lollipop and stroked my hair. It had been cropped short when we arrived in Miami Beach, but now Mami and I were letting it grow out. It was down past my shoulders, thick and straight as a curtain. The model on the magazine cover had longer hair, but I knew that if I gave it time I could be just like her, sitting on a gigantic pumpkin and smiling in a black beret, ivory cashmere fisherman cable-knit sweater, Royal Stewart tartan kilt, black Danskin tights, and black leather riding boots. (I had gleaned these infinitely engrossing details by reading the “On Our Seventeen Cover Girl” blurb inside the magazine while the doctor made us wait.) There were red and yellow and copper leaves all around the smiling modelo Americana with the long legs and no eyeglasses and such pretty clothes. We never had leaves like those in Cuba. We had, like, palm fronds.
Mental note to self: Get the Crayola 64 pack and draw American autumn leaves for Mami instead of the hibiscus and jasmine. Check to see if Hecht’s has black berets, ivory cashmere fisherman cable-knit sweaters, Royal Stewart tartan kilts, black Danskin tights, and black leather riding boots. If so, see will Mami please go steal said items so I can be a beautiful and exciting cover girl instead of a short Cuban refugee with bad eyes. Then I’ll be a better person and I promise I won’t hide under the bed and Mami will love me more and read and talk to me longer at night and I won’t die alone.
I took the lollipop.
“Thank you,” I said, kissing the doctor’s soft, sunken cheek. This lollipop and the Seventeen were really making my day, plus I got to be out of school. Mami took me by the hand and yanked me away. I implicitly knew why: Kissing Dr. Kostenbader meant I was kissing the Enemy. The Enemy because it was he who had just correctly diagnosed and officially confirmed my imperfection, thereby banishing any possibility of maternal denial. The doctor was, in Mami’s 20–20 eyes, relegating me to a life of requiring glasses in order to see, which relegated me to eternal damnation not in hell, but in a much worse place: unmarried hag-hood. The place where boys don’t make passes. The place where, because they don’t make passes, boys don’t grow up to become grooms who crush cloth-wrapped wineglasses underneath their black patent leather dress shoes as they stand beside you in a chuppah to be your husband.
My impairment was catastrophic, in other words. And so were my frame ohpshohngs, all three of them: plastic baby-blue cat-eyes (hideous), sissy pink plastic cat-eyes (even worse), or plastic black-brown fake tortoiseshell cat-eyes (don’t even get me started). I settled for hideous.
Mami and I stepped outside.
“Mami!” I cried. “Mami! Look! The trees! They’re so clear! Look, they have a thousand green leaves! EACH! I thought trees were green blobs, like big bowls of lime Jell-O, but they’re EACH, with the leaves!”
Mami was holding back from crying, her shapely white hand covering her red mouth. Ay Dios mio, she was probably thinking, plasteec baby-blue cat-eyes weeth a tafetán color champán weddee
ngh dress?!? I want to dieee.
“‘I feel like running and dancing for joy!’” I sang. The last time I’d felt this high was bathing in the salty sea at Varadero beach. Although I have to say, that Seventeen find was also a life-altering thrill and right up there with Varadero. “And now I won’t run and dance into the car because I can SEE it! I can see! The car’s far away and I can SEE it from way across the street!”
Mami found herself a therapist the very next day.
Years later, I wrote a story for the Washington Post about little kids who wear glasses. People often wonder where writers get their ideas. You just write about whatever bothers you or turns you on or makes you wonder about the most and see if anybody else can relate. Usually, everybody else can relate. In this instance, I wondered if other parents also went plummeting into clinical depressions because their kids needed glasses. Guess what? Not one. The tiny kids I interviewed were all proud of their glasses. They said wearing glasses made them feel special and look brainy. (Then again, the ohpshohngs in children’s frames are huge today. I’ve seen some French imports I’d be thrilled to wear myself, they’re so adorable and hip.) Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, but verify.” That’s a good axiom for journalists. It also showed me that in her reaction to my needing glasses, Mami was, um, jooneek.
Mami insists that her sole concern was about how I would ever dance ballet and play sports while wearing glasses. Well, that is a scream unto itself, n’est-ce pas? First, I had no ballet inclinations whatsoever nor the body for it, and second, SPORTS? Was she insane? Her therapist said it was lucky to live in a time in history when there was a way to correct my myopia. He was right, of course, but for Mami that was neither here nor there, and if she could’ve found a way to blame Hitler or Castro for my—her?—catastropheec eempairmehn’, she would have. Mami’s difficulty dealing with exile status and the whole eyeglasses issue (as well as many other issues, some more “catastrophic” than others, that I subsequently presented her with) reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance,” in which he wonders why people have so much trouble going with the flow of things, and bowing and accepting the end of a love or a season: “The heart is still aching to seek, / But the feet question ‘Whither?’”
Well, Mami’s not exactly a Robert Frost kinda gal. I think she’d side more with poor dead Diana Vreeland, who famously said, “Style is refusal.” Now that’s poetry. At any rate, from the age of four onward, whenever I was photographed for family pix, Mami always said the same thing:
“Quítate los espejuelos.”
Take off your glasses.
Fortunately, Mami emerged from her funk long enough to force me into ballet—and later, drama—on Saturdays as a vicarious way to overcompensate. At first I hid under my bed. Mami had bought me a black Danskin leotard, pale pink tights, and pale pink leather slippers. Well, at least they were all Danskin, like the Seventeen cover girl model’s tights. So that was something. Maybe you had to work your way up to, like, an entire American fashion outfit.
“Jool be johs like dos girls!” Mami said, pointing her chin at the Degas print on her bedroom wall. “Jool lohvee!”
“I like looking at them,” I said, surrendering to the tights she was rolling up my little legs. “I don’t wanna be them. I wanna be the Seventeen—”
“Of course joo do,” Mami interjected, now straightening the slippers’ elastic straps across my feet. She smoothed my hair, which she’d sprinkled with Violetas and spiraled up into a seamless French twist. We walked to the full-length mirror on her bathroom door and assessed.
“Look!” Mami said. “So cute! Anna Pavlova. Johs like me een Cuba. All de best girls danc-ed de ballets. Russian, just like Zeide Boris. An’ French, like dat fohkeengh anti-Semite Coco Chanel. A classeec. Tradeeshon. Das everytheengh!”
“If I don’t like that ballet and something bad happens to me there,” I warned her in the car on the way to class, “you better get me and bring me home or I’ll call the police. I dial the zero and the operator gets me cops. My teacher told me.”
“Honey,” Mami replied, exhaling her Kool smoke, “joo have to get out DER.”
We greeted the friendly American mulata teacher, and Mami handed her a check, which the teacher swiftly folded and tucked inside her shallow caramel-colored cleavage. I was introduced to the class with a crisp clap of the teacher’s hands.
“Attention!” she said in perfect French, a language that to me sounded foreign but not too. “Voilà Gigi. Dites-lui bonjour.”
“Bonjour, Gigi!” they chimed.
I had to admit, my name was perfect for this.
“Buenos días!” I replied.
Silence.
The “studio” was a makeshift affair. It was really a big multipurpose room located off the lobby of a high-rise (not far from our apartment) that had been converted into a dance space. There were long windows along the long parallel sides of the rectangular room, with horizontal mirrors hung on the walls and a wooden rail to hold on to, called a barre. It wasn’t full-length, so there were rows of fold-up chairs compensating on either end. There was a portable record player on the floor, with various LPs: Igor Stravinsky, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Sergei Prokofiev. Off to the side, a skinny bald guy in a black turtleneck and jeans took turns playing a piano with a fat older woman wearing a flowered dress. We commenced our ninety minutes with some warm-up stretches and exercises at the barre.
“Mesdemoiselles,” the teacher explained, “les exercices à la barre sont le fondement du ballet. Ils sont comme les gammes pour le pianiste.”
I knew exactly what she meant, French words being so close to Spanish ones. The exercises at the barre are at the heart of ballet. They’re like scales to the pianist. I knew what scales were for two reasons: Mami always pretended she was practicing piano scales, and Mami said the things that make a Cubana Cubana were playing the piano; pierced ears with gold, diamond, or pearl earrings in ’em; Agua de Violetas in the hair; taking ballet; having long manicured fingernails; and having a zaftig, curvaceous derrière. Except for the piano playing—which Mami said was out of the question for me because we couldn’t afford a piano—and the fingernails, which never seemed to grow without bending and then breaking, I fit the description impeccably.
In ballet class I first learned the five basic positions of the feet and how to do pliés (demi- and grand-), where you bend your knees with your legs turned out. This wasn’t too hard or bad so far. I wasn’t sui-or homi-(cidal)—yet. Maybe Mami was right after all. Ballet class definitely beat watching crazy patients relight extinguished cigarette butts or having them press opened scissors against your thigh. Then I learned to make the sign of the cross (en croix) by moving my leg fluidement to the front, to the side, to the back, and then to the same side again. I asked, but the teacher said there’s no sign of the Star of David. I said why not. She just smiled and shrugged. There were ripples of derisive chortles. I looked around. The girl in front of me at the barre, an olive-skinned blond with kinky hair and no ass whatsoever, had her head bowed and was kind of shaking with giggles. Same thing with the other two gringas in front of her.
“Those glasses,” snickered No Ass.
Did she mean me? Was she talking about my, albeit hideous, glasses? Then I realized: I was the only person in there wearing glasses, hideous or otherwise.
“Lisa!” the teacher admonished. “Silence, s’il vous plaît!”
“Old lady Coke bottles,” No Ass added, as giggles rippled across the room.
“Lisa!” the teacher repeated. “Silence!”
Lisa. What a stupid name for a No Ass. Lisa. Lisa la Bicha. Lisa the Insect. I tried to contain myself, but Jubanas can’t. Let’s not forget my little José Martí airport tarmac episode over my ultimately STOLEN little red trike, not that I’m bitter or anything; these puny Americanas weren’t even armed like that gross-out Cuban guerrilla thug. Sohkehrz. I could take ’em easy, just like when sheer boredom back in Miami Beach Land forced me to pinch my dork
y cousin Joelito, even if it meant getting bitten in return. Until La Bicha started up, I thought that only boys were the dumb and vicious people little Jubanas had to stand up to.
“Hey!” I told La Bicha, lightly touching her shoulder. It was surprisingly fragile and bony, just like my public elementary school principal’s. Were all these gringas so bony like that? “Castro took my Papi’s hospital! And my Zeide Leon’s Cuban American Textiles! All the Andurskys got the bad eyes. We cry because we’re refugees in exile, you ignorant bruta. That’s why I’m blind! Because we cry so much! Because the revolution was BEYOND OUR CONTROL!”
“Mademoiselle Gigi!” the teacher cried, walking over to me and La Bicha. “Silence, s’il vous plaît!”
“Comme vous voulez, señora.”
My spontaneous polyglot made the teacher laugh. Mami had prepped her ahead of time about Our Trageec Émigré Seetuation, so my outburst didn’t totally throw her. The rest of the class, however, was culturally blindsided, dumbfounded. I stared them down, silently daring them to make a single other remark, about, say, my “primitive barbaric African cannibal” pierced ears, which is what a few of the neighborhood girls called them. I may’ve been out of breath but I was on a roll. The teacher told the class to take five and came over to me. She embraced me as I gradually paced my breathing to match hers, slow. She plié’d real deep and whispered that I’d do fine and I’d be a real good ballerina in time. I could see down the front of her plunging V-neck leotard. There was the tip of Mami’s folded yellow check. The teacher told me my hair smelled good and was it a special Cuban shampoo? I rolled my eyes and explained it was the Agua de Violetas Mami’d put in there. She had no idea what I was talking about and asked me to tell her what “Aga di Volettis” was.