by Gigi Anders
“A-GUA DE VI-O-LE-TAS,” I said, correcting her. Jesus, she spoke French, what was her problema en Español? “It’s violet water. It’s not a shampoo. It’s a hair perfume by Agustín Reyes of Havana, Cuba. It’s a classic, like Anna Pavlov and Russian Mongolian eyes like Zeide’s and Atticus Finch and Jackie Kennedy and Caca Chanel.”
“Well!” she replied, just clueless.
She noticed my feet, which were stuck, more or less, in second position. She studied them, then took in the rest of my placement and ligne, the alignment or line of my body. Her gaze returned to my feet. As usual, my ankles were practically grazing the floor. Apparently, real good ballerinas’ ankles weren’t supposed to do that. She repositioned my feet as though they had actual arches and pulled my shoulders back, erect.
The native albinos were growing restless, presumably because the teacher was paying too much attention to me.
“Gi-gi’s a squee-gee!” a girl trilled.
I didn’t know what it was but it had to be bad, based on her tone alone. Did she just call me a refu-Gigi?
“Alb-i-no Esk-i-mo!” I cried. That shut her up. Hahaha.
I may have been the shortest, blindest, curviest, most flat-footed ballerina in the history of ballet, but I’d shown up, dammit. I’d emerged from under the bed and gotten out DER. These bailarinas americanas were NOT gonna make me quit. I shall overcome, I thought. I’d seen groups of black American people on TV sing that song, but they said “we.” Mami had talked to me about the “ceeveel rights movemen’” and equality for blacks, but I felt I needed some civil rights of my own, even if I was a white Hispanic Jewish child. Didn’t I have the right to be in the world without being picked on, ridiculed, singled out, put down, and laughed at just because I was different, from a different country and culture? Blanche DuBois said that deliberate cruelty is unforgivable, the one thing she had never been guilty of.
Deep in my heart I do believe I shall overcome. I am not afraid. I am not alone. I shall overcome the whole wide world around—some day.
Audrey Hepburn’s Lulamae/Holly could have her Tiffany’s. I had my beloved gindaleja waiting for me at home. I would suck the mouth tete tonight and suck it hard. I’d suck myself right into a dominós, Dominus, dominós, Dominus vobiscum, dominós, domino theory stupor. That was my plan. Good.
You have to give yourself things to look forward to when you are facing evil.
“Dios mio,” Mami wailed. “Here we go again. De Andursky curse. First de eyes and now de feet. Coño.” Dammit.
The ballet teacher had told Mami that my feet were flat as matzos—I guess the Star of David inquiry kind of tipped her off as to my Jewosity—and that that would likely present a problem for the physical demands of ballet, especially if I planned to advance to dancing sur les pointes, on my tiptoes. Though that was years off—children don’t go sur les pointes until they’re eleven or twelve, when the bones of the feet are fully developed—Mami was going to see to it that I became a Russian Degas Cubana ballerina, Polish Andursky arches be damned. We went to see a pediatric podiatrist who recommended I be fitted with special shoes containing “cookies,” physical arches to teach my unleavened feet to rise to (presumably Gentile) arch-hood. At the special shoe store, it was like reliving the eyeglasses nightmare; one pair of shoes was uglier than the next. Not a single black leather riding boot in sight. Rats. There were brown lace-up ankle boots that reminded me of the ones Red Skelton wore when he was playing Freddie the Freeloader and Clem Kadiddlehopper on his weekly TV show. There were also some black-and-white saddle shoes, only slightly less heinous. Since Mami and I couldn’t decide which we despised more, we bought both pairs.
“Don’ worry, Luli,” Mami said, holding back her tears. “We can take off de ugly plasteec glasses an’ de ugly ortopehdeec choos BEFORE de ceremony begeens an’ den eet won’ clash weeth de tafetán color champán gown.”
“No glasses?” I said. “What if I trip on my way to the chuppah?”
“Joo won’,” Mami said. “Ees not as eef joo have to see to get marri-ed.”
I alternated wearing the two different choos to school, depending on my outfit, praying to God no one would notice.
“Combat boots!” screamed a boy named Shawn the first day I wore the ankle boots. “Haaa. Hey y’all, Gigi’s got combat boots! Com-BAT, com-BAT. You a soldier in ’Nam, you tropical termite!”
It was during recess, and I was swinging on the playground swings. When I heard the taunt I dropped my head and turned my feet inward, trying my best to hide them from view as I swung backward into what I hoped would be oblivion. I felt hot and sweaty, and the lenses of my hideous plastic baby-blue cat-eyes got steamy. I could feel blood rising up through my neck to my cheeks, flushing them. Oh, I was on fire, all right. It was bad enough to have been victimized by a fatigue-wearing bearded bully who called me and my family gusanos, worms. But now I was stranded in el exílio, in exile, and I was a TERMITE? This was way too much entomology for me. I mean, okay, insects are the most successful survivors and the dominant life form on Earth. And I may be a tropical little refugee girl with problems. But I’m not vermin, coño.
When the bell rang to go back inside, I watched for Shawn and followed him. As we were going down the hall to our classroom, I stopped and let him get a couple of yards ahead of me. Then I made a run for it, tackling the fucker. “I don’t know about ‘tropical,’” I yelled, “but how about a nice Hawaiian punch?” I smacked him hard upside the head and kicked him with the indestructibly ugly square pointes of my com-BAT termite-gusano boots. Maybe this would help my nonexistent arches rise; you know, by flexing them. Everybody gathered around, staring. Shawn knew better than to strike a girl, even in self-defense, so he mostly shielded his face and groin from my ’Nam—whatever that was—boots, screaming, “Stop, termite! Termite, stop! Go back to the tropical war where you came from!” He even tried to snatch off my glasses. I told him to go ahead and take them, I knew they were hideous, just like his face, and if I couldn’t see his face I’d feel a lot better anyways.
The teacher, whom Mami had earlier briefed about my “podeeahtreec catastrophee,” emerged and dragged Shawn away by the ear. He had to sit in the corner for thirty minutes. The teacher took me aside and explained that Shawn’s older brother had been sent to fight in a war far away in a place called Viet-NAM. She said maybe that’s why Shawn was so sensitive about it. I asked her what tropical was and she said it was where Cuba is. I asked her why he called me a termite and she said that there are a lot of termites in the tropics and also probably Shawn’s house had bugs. I told her I was sorry about all that but if Shawn insulted me again he’d get a swift kick in the huevos and the culo with my ugly revolutionary combat boot. I bounced my index finger on my butt to demonstrate culo and I let her fathom the definition of huevos on her own.
The teacher made Shawn apologize to me in front of the entire class by repeating after her: “I’m sorry for what I said to you. It was wrong. I am ashamed of myself. You are not a soldier in the war. You are a nice, bright girl. There are no termites in this school. There are no termites in this school. There are no termites in this school.”
Nanette, my friend who sat behind me, tugged my braided ponytail in feminine solidarity. She loved playing with my hair, now halfway down my back. Nanette liked to unbraid my ponytail and marvel at it coming undone and loose, then she’d rebraid it. “Black hair won’t do that,” she always said, meaning that if you undid her assorted braids, her hair would just sort of stand there, sticking out and defying gravity. Nanette wasn’t the only black girl who loved playing with my hair; all my black and biracial girlfriends did. Actually, I had only four white friends, Annie, Holly, Rena, and Mara, and they never played with my hair.
There were these two or three older black girls who for three days in a row yanked my pink mother-of-pearl hair band off my head after school just to torment me while I was playing double Dutch. “Playing” may be stretching it; everybody knows that white girls, even h
ip-swinging Jubanitas like moi, do not have what it takes to be a double Dutch diva: an amazingly precise combination of fast feet, strong arms, steady rhythm, and sheer stamina. I wasn’t coordinated or quick enough to be a rope turner, much less a jumper. These girls—Rhoda, Fairon, Zena—were SERIOUSLY gifted, no less so than the synchronized Busby Berkeley chorus girls in Gold Diggers of 1933 or Esther Williams & Co. in Million Dollar Mermaid, two old movies Mami and I had watched on The Late, Late Show. So I got to recite the jumping rhymes—in iambs and in trochees, Shakespeare would have been proud—while the double Dutchers dazzled me with their progressively tricky flair and dexterity:
So, so, suck your toe, all the way to Mexico, once you get there let it go, so, so, suck your toe, spell it out so you can go now M, E, X, I…
Don’t say ain’t or your mother might faint and your father might fall in a bucket of paint, now I’ll betcha a hundred dollars that you can’t do this, now close your eyes and count to ten, one, two, three…
I got ants in my pants and they’re making me dance now one, two, three…
I loved being included, if only as a sideline barker. Mis negritas and their families were as close as I would ever get to living in a Latino neighborhood, a place where you’d feel at one with the rest because you belong, where you are part of each other and your shared culture. As for those bratty older girls who messed with my hair band, on the third consecutive day I stopped right in the middle of chanting “now close your eyes” and marched straight to the principal’s office to report the perps. They never messed with me or my lovely hair accoutrements again.
Otherwise, I’ve always loved having people’s hands in my hair. Sometimes a good shampoo, like the wonderful aromatherapy ones I get at my Foxhall Square hairdresser’s in D.C., or a head rub, like the amazing ones my Raleigh, North Carolina, masseur Darryl gave, can be better than sex, and last longer. Must everything really always be about genitalia, end of story? How limiting is that? Cubans are long, luxuriating lovers, the delight is in the lingering. We’re not “efficient” in the North American microwave sense of in-timer-out-eat-over. Many’s the time I’ve begged the un-Cuban fiancé to massage my abnormally large head, but he turns my request into a double entendre, touches my head for maybe thirty seconds, and we’re right back to my hand on his penis. Sigh. If I were a lesbian I bet I’d get my head rubbed because my girlfriend would understand that pleasure and the sensual power of all the skin, and she’d do it for the sake of doing it, and not be in a hurry to get it over with to appease me and rush me along so we can move on to the Main Event of her penis, her penis, her penis. (Well, she obviously wouldn’t have a penis, but you know what I mean.) I checked this out with a bona fide lesbian friend and she shook her head.
“Forget it,” she said. “It’s no better or easier over here.”
Mami says that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which she claims she knew would never come to a head, we discussed it at the dinner table every night while it lasted. I really don’t remember. What I do recall is having a very busy TV viewing schedule in 1962. Between Hazel, The Lucy Show, Red Skelton, The Flint-stones, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Lassie, My Three Sons, and Dennis the Menace, I was alternately annoyed and transfixed watching news stories that kept interrupting my regular viewing. When John Glenn orbited the Earth in February, an event I found only mildly interesting, the Jewish joke around the house was, “Beeg deal. If joo have money joo can travel.” I thought it must’ve taken brillions and gazillions of dollars to get that astronaut up there, ’cause my teacher told me we were in a space race with the Soviet Union, and Mami told me we hated the Soviets because “dey are een cahoots weeth de dehveel [Castro] heemself.”
I wrote Jackie Kennedy’s husband a letter, with Mami’s proofreading help and Papi’s four-cent stamp, asking why were we spending so many dollars on space when my Cuban family and all the other poor Cubans in exile were in greater need “because you, Mr. President John F. Kennedy, let us all down last year during the Bay of the Pigs. Really, that wasn’t a good idea or nice. You should say you’re sorry and will fix it. My Mami and Papi say now Fidel Castro, Adolfo Hitler’s boy, thinks he’s so big! And all the Cubanos here will not vote for you anymore. They’ll go Republicano. Love, Gigi. P.S.: Mami says to tell you, ‘You blew it, Juanito.’”
Mr. Jackie Kennedy wrote me back a few weeks later on the most beautiful heavy ivory linen stationery I’d ever seen. (“Das notheeng compar-ed to Papi’s an’ my weddeengh eenveetations,” Mami said with a dismissive sniff.) The president said that he understood my position and the plight of the Cuban people and that he’d try to do better by us. But he said the space program would go forward regardless of the price because it was integral to the United States’ interests in this and other hemispheres.
I didn’t quite get that last part—“integral”? “hemispheres”?—but I got the gist.
“We’re not gonna get any money,” I told Mami.
“Dat feegurs,” she replied, exhaling her Kool smoke and critically examining her long painted fingernails. It was time for a fresh manicure. “But ders always enough money for Jackie’s hats an’ choos an’ for Feedehl to steal from us. Das de way eet goes.”
One day before Mami’s August 6 birthday, Marilyn Monroe died. I didn’t know who she was but Mami explained that she was a sad actress with fake bleach-ed hair, who didn’t wear calzoncillos, underwear, and didn’t bathe often enough and was Juanito F. Kennedy’s and everybody else’s lover. We watched the report on TV from Mami’s bed while she preceded her “tehrahpy,” or ministering to her nails, by trimming mine. She cut straight across the edge of a tiny nail almost to the opposite end and let me pull off the rest.
“Joor nails,” she grumbled, shaking her head. “Andursky nails. Soft an’ chort an’ bendy. Coño. Benes nails are hard and long an’ strong. Mujeres Cubanas have to have nice nails. Ees our trademark. I’m goheengh to buy joo gelateen. Knox.”
“Fort Knox, I heard of that. It’s where the gold is.”
“Right but dees Knox ees like Jell-O,” Mami said, blowing the emery board dust off my nails. “Joo eat eet. Ees goo’ for de nails.”
The collective bouquet of acetone, nail polish, espresso, burning Kools, and dead movie stars without underwear had me dazed, entranced. I felt like a little bug on a drug. But not a gross bicho like a gusano or a, God forbid, termite or a cucaracha like poor dead Franz Kafka. Maybe like a mariquita, a ladybug. They don’t hurt anybody and you should never kill one because they’re good luck. I could definitely use some of that.
CHAPTER FOUR
Huevos
A Jubana never forgets her first WASP. And Valerie Ogus, Vancouver-born second wife of D.C. insurance magnate Walter Ogus, was mine. This exotic creature was related to us by marriage; Walter was Baba Dora’s first cousin. Like Baba’s, Walter’s origins were Lithuanian. His family migrated during the turn of the century and settled in Boston and then in Washington, D.C. By the time I met the Oguses, in the early or mid-sixties, they seemed über-American, almost Brahmin. Walter came from a generation of Jewish men whose habit was to marry Jewish women first, make a ton of money, get divorced, and marry trophy shiksas. In those latter unions the men take on more WASPy attributes than the women do Jewish ones. Maybe WASPy attributes are more fun to take on. At least there’s no chronic hand-wringing, depressive, brooding, fun-killing, over-introspective Woody Allen neurosis to deal with, and certainly Manischewitz is never involved. (Although you will have to learn how to drink unsweetened beverages and handle power tools/ gardening supplies/the heartbreaking fact of no dessert.)
But I suppose that if you grow up being embarrassed by or anti-Semitically harassed over your Old World Fiddler on the Roof shtetl Jewosity in this young Christian country, if you feel third-rate, then one way to diffuse it is by marrying out. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Hey, Gentile lust has worked huge for Ralph Lauren. And you don’t even have to be a bazillionaire Polo pony designer Jew to have it wor
k for you. Take my brother Eric. Born just three months prior to Juanito Kennedy’s assassination, Eric and his generation are Doing It, too, and making it work for them, sort of. Though she officially converted to Judaism and the wedding was Jewish, my now ex-rated sister-in-law Roberta, a Minnesota farming gal, is a WASP, born and bred, through and through. And Eric is a true blue Jew, although he makes his living through a chain of fancy Southern California restaurants selling pork. Trayf. (At least I think that’s the spelling. As my rabbi Bruce says, when it comes to transliteration of Hebrew to English, it’s tough getting scholars to reach a consensus. It’s a really great word, though. I love forbidden—unkosher—food. It’s as key to the Reform Jubanique vocabulary as puerco asado, roasted pork loin. We see no conflict there.)
At any rate, the Oguses were warm and generous, two adjectives that frequently and tragically elude garden-variety WASPs who like gardening. The Oguses just seemed—and were—wonderful, fascinating, attractive, vivid, and really, really, really rich.
The main attraction of them for me was Valerie. I’d never seen anyone like her. Tall and slim and perpetually tanned from playing golf and swimming, she had cropped blond hair highlighted at the Lord & Taylor salon in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She had small Windex-blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, fabulous cheekbones, and wore bright pastel pink or coral lipstick. She drank like a pargo, a red snapper, smoked like a chimenea, and laughed like a man, deep and hoarse. I think you’d call her “handsome.” A former buyer in New York for Bergdorf Goodman, Henri Bendel, and Bonwit Teller, Valerie had impeccable taste, especially in clothes. No uptight, portly Talbots matron, she, nor remote, anorexic Truman Capote swan—the only two WASP subspecies I’d seen up till then on TV and in magazines and catalogues. Valerie had inborn, unteachable, eternally untrendy chic, the kind mere mortals can aspire to but never quite grasp. To me she was Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn in one, relaxed and upbeat and no-nonsense in her effortless glamourosity and decisive femininity, but with an eclectic, interesting, witty, eccentric edge that precluded her from ever being an Ordinary Gentile. I lived surrounded by Gentiles in my Southwest D.C. neighborhood, of course, but not like Valerie. I seriously doubt Valerie could relate to my double Dutch Baptist divas, and vice versa.