Jubana!

by Gigi Anders

  “I love you,” I said into his spine, laying my cheek on the Cuban capital. Paul turned toward me, half asleep.

  “Love you, too,” he mumbled. “Still pissed?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  We kissed.

  “It’s an old wound,” I said, climbing on top of him and laying my body down across his. “It’s the whole Cuban thing.”

  “You’re quite a Cuban thing,” he said, smiling. “My terminally cute little Jubana princess.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder blade, matching his breathing, smelling the soft cotton of his cigar T-shirt. Unlike my lost island home, my vanished life, and one little shipwreck survivor heading back to that mythic home, Paul was here, warm and alive and real. He was what I could truly embrace.

  So I did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Marzipan in the Second Act

  Could there be a more unfortunate, anti-Jubana color combo than maroon and gray? Maroon and gray were the official Sidwell Friends School colors. I was a turquoise-violet (faux) Pucci gal who would soon discover the thrill, sensation, and rightness of coral and tomato-red lipsticks. I was also a nine-year-old public school fourth grader being interviewed for possible admission into the toniest, most competitive, most elite, most overwhelmingly Anglo-albino private prep school in the most powerful city in the world.

  At 9 A.M. sharp I was seated on a maroon sofa in the admissions office in a stone cottage called Zartman House on the grassy fourteen-acre campus. It smelled smart and rich and old, and musty, like faded, dusty Persian carpets and ancient, mildewed books. My interviewer was the middle school principal, Mr. JohnF. Arnold (B.S., Washington and Lee University; Yale University; University of Houston). He was a Southerner, I believe, an un-Valerie kind of WASP with big pink ears that stuck out like Dumbo’s. Mami had taken me to see the animated movie, and she said that elephants are supposed to have excellent memory. So I knew this blond pachyderm was mentally recording every word I uttered and would never forget anything I said.

  Not that I was worried about it. I’ve always aced interviews. Remember the skinny gringa principal with the pearls back in kindergarten? Please. Cubans are congenitally charming. We’re social mariposas, butterflies. Besides, Sidwell was the fourth private school I’d been to visit in that spring of 1967, and so, to answer Jimi Hendrix, yes, I was experienced. The school board in my Southwest neighborhood had elected to enact the Tri-School Plan, basically a forced reverse integration program involving my school, Amidon, and two other inferior local public schools, Syphax and Bowen. My parents rightly did not like the idea and were by then in a position to afford full tuition for virtually any private school for me. Their D.C. friends suggested four top area schools: Sidwell, Georgetown Day School, Maret (all in D.C.), and Burgundy Farm Country Day School (near Alexandria, Virginia). The friends said Sidwell was far and away the best and most prestigious, which is technically true. However, my parents knew nada about the subject, so they automatically wanted Sidwell whether or not it was the right school and best fit for me.

  As I sat there in my patriotic thick cotton piqué mini-dress (white bodice, red empire waist, navy blue skirt), white knee socks, and orthopedic saddle shoes, engulfed in that big old dark maroon velvet sofa with a gray pillow on my lap, I couldn’t have cared less about the school’s putative cachet. Actually, I was hoping I wouldn’t get in. For one thing, I’d heard the place was academically demanding, and I was really, really busy with other things; 1967 was an amazing year for pop music, and I wasn’t sure how I’d squeeze that much “studying” into my already crammed music listening schedule, not to mention my magazine and book reading, not to mention all my TV show viewing. Family Affair, Saturday Night at the Movies, and Green Acres were among my faves, though they often got interrupted with special reports about the six-day Arab-Israeli War (which my parents and I cheered when “we” won), Dr. King encouraging draft evasion from Vietnam, civil rights riots, and the world’s first heart transplant. I was also trying to keep up with my weekly typed diary entries. I liked recording what was in my mind while listening to music sometimes; I had a little plug-in record player and a growing tower of 45s and LPs. That year I especially loved “To Sir with Love,” “Ode to Billie Joe,” “Somethin’ Stupid,” and “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Beyond my pop culture-dom, I was happy and doing well at Amidon with my negritas, with whom I’d walk to and from school. If I left Amidon, all that would cease. No more birthday parties with lemonade and coconut cake and potential black parents to adopt me, no more double Dutch.

  Knowing I would be leaving, my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. McEachnie, inadvertently made it harder for me to say good-bye by being extra nice. As a farewell gesture, she asked if there was anything I’d like to do that we hadn’t done. I didn’t have to think. Papier-mâché. So the class spent a week making our fanciful objets, and it was as fun as I’d imagined, and not once did it ever remind me of six million dead Jews, thereby proving that doing crafts didn’t necessarily lead to gas chambers and that Mami was nuts.

  Why was my family like this? Was I adopted? That would explain a lot. But I knew I wasn’t; my fingers and toes are exactly like Papi’s, short and wide, not to mention our matching flan-size pores and acne-prone oily skin. (“Joo got dat from hees side, honey,” Mami always told me.) Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling” and William Butler Yeats’s gorgeous and haunting poem “The Wild Swans at Coole”—one of the few grown-up Anglo poems I could sort of understand at that age—I settled on creating a papier-mâché life-size swan. In my illustrated fairy-tale book the swan was white, and Yeats never describes his “nine-and-fifty” swans by any color. So, being a Jubana, which means you must have color at all times, I painted my swan periwinkle blue—the only universally flattering color—with a glossy black beak and big green eyes with a double row of long black eyelashes (top and bottom) like mine. A gay friend of mine in college who was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor once told me that Liz also has double rows—“upper and lower lashes,” he noted.

  “Big deal,” I said. “I have them, too.”

  He came in close and stared at my eyelashes, inspecting them more carefully than he ever had before.

  “You do,” he said. “Wow. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing?”

  “Cubans press fallen eyelashes together,” I said. “You guys break wishbones for luck. We put an eyelash on our fingertip and press it against somebody else’s. And whoever’s got the eyelash afterward has the luck.”

  Anyhow, my swan was a tour de force, if I do say so myself. In fact, the boy who sat beside me, Maurice, was so impressed, he gave me my first kiss on the lips, or at least that was his excuse. But then Maurice tried to pick up my mysterious, beautiful swan before it had finished drying, and I had to smack his arm, thereby breaking the romantic spell, such as it was. Maurice got mad or maybe it was just an accident, but as we were leaving class he closed the door so hard on my hand that my right middle finger broke. I got a splint and a cast with a shoulder strap and everything. Maurice couldn’t even look at me, he felt so guilty.

  My poor middle finger never did heal properly. To this day there’s a protruding bump on its left side. The finger incident hurt, and it prevented me from writing for a long while, which was the worst thing I could think of. God had given me God’s vision for my literary future and then some boy with no vision at all goes and breaks my Michelangelo Sistine Chapel ceiling finger. In the panel called “The Creation of Adam,” Adam’s inert finger awaits the spark from God’s fingertip. How can you be a writer if you can’t physically write? I thought of that years later when my beloved cousin Melanie became a hand model in Los Angeles. Whenever I’d fly out there, no matter what the occasion or weather, her stellar little $450-a-day hands would be encased in a pair of $500 quilted black leather Chanel gloves. I’d like to see Emily Dickinson in a pair of those. Anyway, I took the finger-breaking episode as a sign that Amidon should be a thing of the past. You can’t
stay in a place where boys break your bones.

  I was hoping to go to Georgetown Day School. I’d had a good interview there, and the atmosphere was easygoing and nurturing. Maret was sort of in the middle. And Burgundy Farm, well, it was fine, but they had live chickens pecking and scratching around the grounds of the picnic tables where we’d eaten lunch. Mami instantly nixed payeengh top dollar for dat country cheet weeth dos pollos.

  No pollos at Sidwell.

  “It’s fascinating you come from Cuber,” Mr. Arnold said.

  “From where?” I said.

  “Cuber. Havaner, Cuber.”

  “You mean Havana, Cuba?” It was a rhetorical question. I’d heard poor dead President Juanito F. Kennedy pronounce the name of my birthplace the same way on TV during the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  “Right, that’s whut Ah said. Havaner, Cuber. Real neat! Spanish comes easily to you, does it?”

  “Like English does to you,” I said, my eyes on the clock on his desk. Like everything else in this office, the clock was wooden and plain. Spartan. Spartan is anti-Juban. It’s Quaker. I stared at the slo-mo second hand. This was taking forever.

  “So you’re completely bilingual?” Mr. Arnold asked. “Perfectly fluent in both languages?”

  “Perfectly perfect.”

  He went to the dark brown bookcase, pulled out a heavy hardback book, and laid it on my lap, opened to a map of the Caribbean. It was an eighth-grade-level geography textbook in Spanish.

  “Recognize any of that?” he asked.

  The guy may have been an Ivy Leaguer—a term I’d picked up back at the three other private schools I’d already visited—but I thought he was a complete idiot, or worse, disingenuous because he was a complete idiot.

  “I recognize that like you would recognize a map of the United States,” I said, hoping my smart-aleck tone would turn him off and jeopardize my chances of admittance. “You would recognize a map of the United States, wouldn’t you?”

  “Whyn’t you go ’head and read some of that text to me.”

  Since Mami had taught me to read in Spanish from the age of two, this was a ludicrously simple test. I rat-tat-tattled away in rapid-fire Español. Just as I was getting to the tongue-rolling section on La Sierra Maestra, Dumbo said to stop.

  “If you said la maestra cierra,” I noted, “it would mean something totally different.”

  “Really?” Mr. Arnold said, scratching his head. “Whut?”

  “La maestra cierra means the teacher closes. You know, like, a door. A book. A MIND.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking the book. “We’re in good shape. Thank you.” His ears were so pink they were almost red.

  “What did I just read?” I asked.

  “How’s that?”

  “I can obviously read in Spanish but can you understand what I just read? How do you know I didn’t make any of it up? I could’ve been reciting José Martí poems, for all you know. ‘Los Zapatitos de Rosa,’ for example.”

  “Huh. Well. Ahm listening for your verbal ease and acumen as well as your intellectual comprehension,” he said, “not just literal word definition or foreign translation and interpretation.”

  Domestic translation and interpretation: GET ME OUT OF HERE. NOW. Please, Yahweh, I’m begging you. In the name of Abraham, Moses, David, and all the major Old Testament Israelites, in the name of my Holocaust victim great-grandparents and all the women prisoners who stopped getting their periods from the sheer stresses, in the name of every Bay of Pigs mártire and all of Cuba’s political prisoners, in the name of every descendant of every slave on every Southern peanut butter plantation, please Lord God, liberate me from this cahm!

  I stretched, yawned, looked out the window. On a big green field raced muscular, red-cheeked girls with messy ponytails, wearing gray sweatshirts, maroon kilts, maroon knee socks, and lunky-chunky athletic shoes. The girls were catching and chasing a ball with wooden sticks that had nets on top, like brawny butterfly catchers.

  “Girls’ lacrosse team,” Mr. Arnold said, jutting his chin in the direction of the players. “What sports do you enjoy?”

  “Where are black girls and boys?” I asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “Where are your black children students?”

  “Oh, we’ve got a few.”

  “Not out there. I can see in my glasses. How about Latinos? Besides the janitors, I mean.”

  “Well, we pride ourselves on…So you play lacrosse at all?”

  “What?”

  “You like lacrosse?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I told him. “Never been there. Wisconsin, right?”

  “Say whut?”

  “OshKosh B’Gosh? Cheddar cheeses? Sharp, extra-sharp? Cows? Mami says the Midwest is a pit, like Puerto Rico. Actually, she thinks this whole country’s una mierda.”

  “Well, hahaha. No. You see, here at Sidwell, we consider rigorous physical education as vital to our overall core academic curriculum as we do the Quaker ethos.”

  This was as indecipherable as that Mississippi psychiatrist Joe calling me a pistol. Did Mr. Arnold just say that you have to eat oatmeal to attend this school? Speaking of which, I was starving. Thirsty, too.

  “Are we eating lunch soon? I can’t think or talk anymore when I’m this hungry.”

  “Sure, we’ll go grab a bite soon,” Mr. Arnold said. “Ah think today’s either mac ’n’ cheese or Charlie’s Special.”

  “Charlie’s what?”

  “Oh, it’s special, all right. You’ll like it if you like chicken. It’s like a stew, named after one of our greatest coaches. You like chicken?”

  “The dead or alive kind?”

  “Dead or—?”

  “I like arroz con pollo if psycho-maid makes it and not Mami,” I said, meaning our maid, Rebeca. The first time I saw her was after they wrenched out my tonsils at Children’s Hospital and on the way home Mami said we had this new maid who was making me something special. Something special. This could be good! I’d always had nice nannies. Maybe Rebeca, my namesake, will have made me cherry Jell-O and lemonade and bought some mint chocolate chip ice cream. That’s all you can handle after a tonsillectomy. The pong of frying eggs and ripe plantains and rice hit me in the face as we walked through the door. Normally I’d have loved it; that’s a typical Cuban lunch or light dinner. But not right after throat surgery. Mami introduced us and Rebeca stared me down with fierce black Andean Indian eyes. Ecuadorian eyes. She wore what appeared to be a nurse’s white uniform minus the cap. She was a pygmy, barely taller than I. Her jet-black hair was wavy, shiny, and thick, sprouting out of her head like Greek myth coils. She had tucked a series of bobby pins in it on both sides to keep it back off her face. Her earlobes drooped from heavy dangling gold earrings. There was a golden crucifix on a chain around her neck. I got the picture immediately. Rebeca was one fearless wench.

  The clock on Dumbo’s desk struck noon. “Rebeca’s an Andean Eva Braun but she can cook,” I told him. “Look, I really have to eat now. Please. Get me food. Or I might say ain’t and my mother might faint and my father might fall in a bucket of paint.”

  He regarded me, stupefied.

  “Double Dutch,” I explained. “Not lacrosse.”

  I once asked my rabbi, Bruce Kahn, where God went during the Holocaust. Bruce said, “If we knew the answer to that, we’d be God. But there’s more to it than that. I believe that God’s power is all over, everywhere for us to take in and utilize. We blame God for our failures. God has given us the clearest possible understanding of what the sacredness of life is about and what we must do to safeguard it. And if we’re told to stop brutality and hatred and murder, let alone genocide, and we ignore all the warnings we’re receiving and all God’s guidance to take action against it—and it happens, why is it that God is to blame? That is to say that human beings are less than puppets.”

  “Bruce,” I said, “you are a god. Small G, don’t get nervous.”

  “Nah. I’m a serva
nt of God. But seriously, think about it: If you’re given all the power, insight, and direction you need and you wind up with a tragedy on your hands, whose failure was it?”

  “I don’t know. Is this like that ‘when bad things happen to good people’ attitude?”

  “Was the Holocaust God’s failure or that of the human race? When you do everything you can to instruct a child to not do something that would hurt the child and the child does it anyway…And we’re talking about children here, not adults.”

  “So we poor little Jew people are to blame?”

  “No, I’m not talking about the victims of the camps but of the leadership of the world that had an awareness of the rise of Hitler and his genocidal message and who chose appeasement as opposed to prevention. So I think that God was rarely as disappointed in the human race as He or She was when the world wouldn’t deal with the rise of Hitler and Nazis. I’m sure some Jews who died refused to face and deal with what was really happening—some led very narrow lives and were not that sophisticated. But the majority had no adequate awareness or options to do much different from what they did.”

  In my current Sidwellian context, that meant Mami and Papi chose to listen not to me but to their friends. And I had nothing to do but go there to that preppie cahm.

  “The approach of the world is to not deal with the ethic that it espouses,” Bruce added. “People will in lots of personal ways but when it comes to real decision-making, it’s very difficult. There are usually other considerations than the morality of right and wrong: financial gain, political or some other kind of prestige. The expediency overrules those other ethics—justice, the saving of life, and imitating the goodness of God.”

  As usual, Bruce, a reservist naval chaplain, said a mouthful. I say that God and the parentals must have had something extremely mysterious in mind on the day Sidwell accepted me, one of the singularly worst days of my single-digit-aged life, and God knows I’d already had my share: Cuba and Cecilia and guerrillas and my stolen little red tricycle and Rebeca and my broken finger and tight shoes and black parents rejecting me as their own were all bad enough—and now this? Why didn’t God go and smack Mami and Papi upside the head and make them send me to Maret or Georgetown Day School instead of to Sidwell? Manny Roman says I obsess over imponderables. I’m sure it’s all the café con leche.