by Gigi Anders
“I like Georgetown Day and Maret the best,” I told Mami, checking myself out in the car’s passenger vanity mirror. We’d just been to Robert England’s hair salon on M Street in Georgetown, where, in a Twiggy-inspired impulse tinged with a soupçon of Vidal Sassoon sprinkled with a dash of Faye Dunaway’s sleek Bonnie and Clyde bob, I’d had my waist-length hair lopped off into an adorable, boyish pixie cut like Twiggy’s: short in the back and around the ears, parted on the side, with almost too long layers in the front that occasionally obscured my vision as well as my hideous glasses. I loved it.
“Eef Seedwells Frien’ takes joo,” Mami said, chewing her Juicy Fruit and exhaling Kool smoke through her nostrils like a dragonet, “joo go der. Ees de best. So. End of story.”
To think that that cahm would be my scholastic pokey for the next eight soul-killing years…Isn’t that the essence of tragedy, really, when you anticipate a disaster—and then it happens?
For all Cubans of my parents’ generation, the collective Juban mind-set is Havana, circa 1955. And like children, certain exotic tribes, and mental patients, Jubans traffic in magical thinking. It’s how they get through life. It’s Blanche DuBois: “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” Magical thinking, not to be confused with magical realism, permeates every aspect of living. In our case it has to do with nostalgia, fantasy, the belief that thinking equals doing and, above all, denial. As the Temptations sang, “I can make the season change / Just by waving my hand / I can change anything from old to new / Yet the thing I want to do the most / I’m unable to do.”
Like make Fidel never have happened. That’s impossible even for a mighty Temp’ to pull off. Or even for the super-strong, super-fragile, and altogether extraordinary Annie Lennox, who covered that Temps song so gloriously on her Medusa CD, and who sings everything else so gloriously. How do black American soul singers and Scottish chanteuses and the other artists I love so much, those intimate strangers both dead and living in whose beautiful recorded, written, painted, cinematic, psychiatric, culinary, and even sartorial voices I can privately and profoundly lose myself and find and feel my own joy, grief, solace, beauty, despair, desire—all the otherwise inexpressible human emotions—be so different from me and move me so much that I feel us connect? How is it that Shakespeare understands me? Or Manet? Or Manny? I could go on and on about people who make my life worth living. (As my writer friend Mr. Lewis Lawson says, “Some of us writers are taker-outers and others of us are putter-inners.” I’m obviously in the latter camp.) But here’s the question: Are Jubanas really so different from everybody else?
And here’s the answer: a little bit, yeah. The parentals’ childlike clinging to the magic of denial so infused the atmosphere as I grew up that I didn’t realize I was inhaling it like secondhand Kool smoke. My exiled Cuban family’s own little Motown-inspired mantra goes like this: It’s not real if I say it’s not. If I don’t look at it or think about it, if I don’t accept it, I can will it and wish it away. Any bad thing will be as though it never existed and only everything lovely and pleasurable will go on forever without end. If I believe in it, every day and every moment can be the Fourth of July, only better and grander, with much bigger and more dazzling fireworks. Nothing comes at any real cost because I’m entitled to it because of who I am.
Conveniently, denial is a portable philosophy. Pack it and go. Since Castro allowed us gusano traitors only a few suitcases apiece, the good news is that denial hardly takes up any room. If you want to really protect it, you can do what Barry Fletcher did with his prized blow-dryer when the D.C. hairdressing champ—whom I wrote a story about for the Style section of the Washington Post in 1994—headed off to international hairstyling competitions: He wrapped it in a towel and then packed it in his shoulder bag.
Mami also wrapped towels around her prized possession—denial, never self-denial—but hers were Towels, not towels. My parents had received, among many other beautiful things that Castro’s gangster guerrillas eventually stole, a huge set of monogrammed bath towels. They were solid and striped, in every color, hand-loomed of the finest pima cotton. Today they’re in tatters, thin as onion paper. Still usable, but rarely in use. Mami’s bought many other towels, bigger ones and maybe even better ones, in different American stores throughout the years. Mostly those are used because, over time, my parents’ wedding towels have aged into fragility. They lie in wait, folded neatly in thirds in perfect vertical stacks in the linen closet.
A fragrant mausoleum of emaciated Cuban wedding towels. A Juban towel museum. Tomb of the unknown towel.
One time, I suggested to Mami that she let them go.
“Let dem GO?” she shrieked. “Let dem go where?”
“Out ‘DER,’” I said. “Isn’t that what you always tell me I should do? ‘Get out DER’?”
She flashed me The Look, blew Kool smoke in my face, and slammed a rather attractive stolen London restaurant ashtray down on the kitchen counter, cracking the impacted topaz-colored imported tile. (Cubans are tile-obsessed. It’s a Spanish—as in, from Spain—décor motif.)
“Dos towels, dos towels are EET. Okay? Deyr great! Deyr de best ones! Deyr my whole damn life before dat fohkeengh Castro. I’ll never get reed of dem, never, so fohk heem. Motherfohker. An’ joo can forget eet.”
So glad we straightened that out. Thank God we’re not bitter or anything. God forbid anything petty should interfere with our assimilation.
In fifth grade the only control I had was over my body. So I asserted myself with my groovy haircut, just like a good Hemingway heroine. (In Hemingway you can always tell there’s a sea change in a female character when she cuts her hair.) Mami had initially refused to pay, insisting I was “maykeengh de meestayk of a lifetime.” In other words, straight men prefer long hair. In other words, an up-do is more elegant than a boyish pixie cut for a tafetán color champán bride. In other words, just like taking ballet and drama, me having long hair was vicarious for Mami, who has almost always worn her hair short. She’s never had any patience for anything, and with her hair’s nice color but wispy texture, she’d have had to really work it to make it look halfway decent if it were long.
“¿Si a ella le encanta tanto el pelo largo,” Rebeca said, “pues entonces por que ella misma no se lo crece?” If she loves long hair so much, then why doesn’t she grow it herself?
Good point. Did I detect an edge in her tone? Was this pygmy watering the seed of my budding ambivalence toward Mami? And if so, to what end?
“Ella no lo crece porque no le quedaría bien,” I told her. She doesn’t grow it because it wouldn’t look good on her.
Rebeca shot me a significant look, the silver blade of her knife shining. If she could have raised one eyebrow, she would have. We were in the kitchen, Rebeca slicing peeled, seeded cucumbers and me sitting on the high stool and eating the discarded wet strips of seeds sprinkled with a little salt, one of my favorite treats.
“¿Qué tu estás diciendo?” I asked. “¿Que ella QUIERE que yo luzca mal?” What are you saying? That she WANTS me to look bad?
Rebeca smiled knowingly and whacked a naked cucumber with appalling gusto. See, this was the thing about her: I still couldn’t stand her—she was a misogynistic control-freak Jesus-freak radical traditional Hispanic female with all of the retro bullshit and none of the assimilation or wit. But! She did have some good insights from time to time, plus she kept me, Señorita Lonely, company. My parents had each other, and my brother Eric would soon have a new redheaded baby brother named Big Red Al to bond with. Whom did I have just for me? Since Cecilia was gone, no one. So Rebeca kind of won by default. This latest insight of hers about my mother and me and our hair was…what, exactly? I wasn’t sure, and Rebeca was always shrewd enough to pique your interest and then go forth and say no more, a savvy provocateuse who withdraws just at the moment of climax. She must’ve been the life of the village back in Quito. Well. Rebeca may indeed have come from penury and she was uneducated but she was no bruta; she was a hard
-core survivor who knew which side her Wahndehr Brayt was buttered on. So she’d tease me with an intriguing morsel about Mami Dearest, who paid her her salary—and then go whack a cucumber. It was perfect in its Freudian simplicity.
And my new hair was perfect in its precise geometric simplicity. Up until Twiggy my style icon had been Nancy Sinatra, especially the way Frank’s firstborn looked on the cover of her 1966 Boots LP. The black-and-white striped bodysuit, red leather miniskirt, and coordinating red leather go-go boots with the roll-down tops—so great. I also loved her How Does That Grab You? LP cover look—oversize camel fisherman sweater to just barely below the butt, possibly tights (it’s hard to tell for sure), and brown leather knee-high boots. My other fave was her Nancy in London look, which even now looks au courant: brown newsboy cap, straight highlighted blond hair, chunky red turtleneck, skinny dark blue jeans, suede camel boots. Yep, Nancy definitely had it going on as far as I and my fashion and hair choices were concerned, until Twiggy, with her velvet painting Third World starving orphan hyperbolic eyes and fake eyelashes, caught my eye. But then I wanted to be Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker and I grew my hair back out into a pageboy so I could wear a white or black wool beret (tilted at a rakish angle, of course) and lie on my bed (the wrong way, with your cutlets on the pillows and your head where your cutlets go) and bang on the footboard with my tiny fists in frustration over the confines of my real life. But then Mia Farrow looked so elegant and chic in Rosemary’s Baby, even when she sweated in un-air-conditioned Manhattan phone booths, that I cut it all off again. Then I let it grow out after seeing the lit-from-within Olivia Hussey in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet and I kept it growing for two years, through Ali MacGraw’s foulmouthed yet perfectly dressed Radcliffe Catholic beauty in Love Story in 1970. And no matter what my hair situation was, there was always Agua de Violetas in it.
One day while I was Mia-fixated, I bought a magazine with her angelic face on the front. The feature story was about how Frank Sinatra had abruptly divorced the refined waif for having shorn her locks, allegedly yelling, “I married a girl and woke up with a boy!” It was raining lightly out and I was standing in front of the supermarket with our bagged groceries, waiting for Mami to pull up the car. I was completely engrossed in Mia’s marital and beauty travails, thinking how Frank could be a Latino with that Neanderthal short-hair-makes-you-a-dyke attitude. I heard a loud quintuple honk, forgot there was an elevated curb, approached the car—I was still reading the article—and promptly fell on the slippery pavement. Poor Mia’s face was a dirty mess. I immediately wiped it off with my arm, over and over.
“What are joo DOOEENGH down der?” Mami screamed. “Joor knee ees bleedeengh to de deaths an’ joor cleaneengh Mia? ¿Tu ’tas loca? ¿Qué RAYO ’tas haciendo?” Are you crazy? What the HELL are you doing?
“I’m prioritizing!” I cried. “That’s what Americans DO!”
Mami would never have screamed like that had I been holding an Hola! instead of a Rona Barrett’s Hollywood. Hola! is Mami’s and our family priest Máximo’s favorite Spanish-language glossy. The oversize magazine obsesses less over Tinsel Town and more over Actual Royalty of the European kind. Had, for example, La Princesa Carolina de Monaco’s extraordinarily beautiful face been soiled in front of Giant Foods instead of Frank Sinatra’s soon-to-be ex, Mami would have been the first to wipe off now-poor-dead Grace Kelly’s daughter tout de suite. Unlike me, Mami was never influenced much by American pop culture or the evolution of American fashion and style. She’s had the same three-feet-long square-tipped fingernails painted bloodred or opaque white since she was a girl in Cuba (must have been the height—or depth—of chic in 1955 Havana), and nothing will ever make her change that. If you tell her that that look is beyond disco passé, her stock replies are, “What ees joor poin’?” or “I don’ geev a fohk. I lohvee.”
I, however, deed geev a fohk. At four I’d been seduced forever by Seventeen. And now at nine years old I’d long outgrown my Archie comic books and had moved on to fashion and celebrity ’zines. So much so that I’d actually begun purchasing annual subscriptions with my allowance because it was cheaper than buying them all full-price at the store. These days I’m down to a mere twenty-four subscriptions; it used to be twenty-seven. Mademoiselle—sob!—folded. I didn’t renew Condé Nast Traveler—I only leave my apartment by force—and Rolling Stone hasn’t been my thing since I began shaving my armpits and legs. When I see all my new magazines in their plastic covers, heavy and rolled up and layered and smushed inside my mailbox, I feel euphoric. Little did I know back then that this fascination would be the perfect preparation for becoming a features reporter at the Washington Post and later, a freelance magazine writer. The fiancé and I had this joke: I’d be telling him something about Sex and the City or Narciso Rodriguez or Sephora or glittery lip gloss or the latest hair removal or defrizzing techniques or chandelier earrings or anything else of crucial import that I’d ’zine-gleaned, and he’d go, “Whuuut?” And then we’d both say, “Hard news, Dinosaurio,” because Paul’d spent his entire professional life as a hard news reporter and editor—the newsroom chasm between hard news and features people is cosmic—and because my nickname for him is Dino(saur) or El Dinosaurio or E.D. for short. Paul’s Mesozoically big and basic and, as Mami puts it, “sohleed.” There was an obscure girls’ song in the late seventies whose refrain was, “I like ’em big and stu-pid, I like ’em big and REAL dumb.” Works for me. As Chanukah stocking stuffers, I once got Paul two refrigerator magnets. One says “I ? My Penis” and another one has a picture of a huge sliced bologna that says “You’re not too smart. I like that in a Man.” Paul cherishes them. He’s so smart. He’s so stu-pid.
To my complete confusion, my impudence during the Sidwell Frenzy interview backfired and I was accepted. Maybe WASPs have an ironic sense of humor? Maybe they view impertinence as gumption? What did I miss? I quickly discovered I was profoundly ill-equipped and tragically unprepared to navigate this bizarre late sixties sea of a Quaker private school, in the midst of Vietnam and with Watergate soon to come. Nothing computed: Turtlenecks had to be from Talbots and have embroidered whales on them; espadrilles came from Pappagallo in Georgetown; Ivy-grad teachers who looked like robust, predissolute Ernest Hemingways and Martha Gellhorns taught Ivy-bound kids who looked like Ralph Lauren models of Ivy-grad parents who looked like Donald Rumsfeld, H. R. Haldeman, and Jeane Kirkpatrick (all of whom actually did have kids there), and everybody would look like John Cheever and Lilly Pulitzer when they were old; if you lived in D.C. you lived in Georgetown, Woodley Park, Spring Valley, Foxhall, Friendship Heights, Wesley Heights, Palisades, Glover Park, Tenleytown, or Cleveland Park; in Maryland, you lived in Kenwood, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, or Potomac; if your parents were alcoholic anti-Semitic Republicans, you lived in McLean, Virginia; you were into lacrosse, archery, tennis, soccer, basketball, cross country, crew, squash, football, softball, track and field, swimming and diving, field hockey, and wrestling; you had beautiful hair, perfect skin, a trust fund, and serious drug and alcohol issues.
By contrast, I felt like Edvard Munch’s screamer.
Then I thought of Chet Baker. Beautiful, brilliant, doomed, drug-addicted Chet Baker. Except for the drugs, I could relate. I specifically thought of the way the jazz trumpeter played and sang “Let’s Get Lost”: “Let’s get lost, let them send out alarms…/Let’s get crossed off everybody’s list…/And though they’ll think us rather rude, /We’ll tell the world we’re in that crazy mood.”
I’d heard it for the first time at Rhoda Simpson’s house. She was one of my Amidon classmates whose parents I’d tried in vain to seduce into adopting me during a birthday party. The Simpsons said Chet Baker was so good he could be a Negro like them. Except for Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, Chet Baker was the only cracker in their entire vast music collection. (“Let’s Get Lost” was a top contender for the fiancé’s and my First Dance as husband and wife. The other was Etta James’s “At Last.” Both are wonderful
; the latter is a slower song and therefore easier for E.D. to dance to, what with his big paws or toes or whatever it is that dinosaurs plod on.)
“Gigi’s goheengh to Seedwells Frien’!” Mami announced.
It was a Sunday in late summer. Dozens of neighbors and other friends had come over to celebrate her and Papi’s August birthdays. Mami prepared her signature Sunday afternoon meal: huevos a la Malagueña, baked Eggs Málaga. It’s a traditional Spanish casserole of whole eggs baked in a bed of sofrito—chopped onion, bell pepper, and garlic sautéed till tender in olive oil, the holy foundation of all savory Cuban cooking—mixed with sherry, tomatoes, and pimientos. You sprinkle early sweet peas on top (Cubans only use LeSueur) and lay on canned asparagus tips (Cubans prefer canned, according to Mami, because when canned produce was first introduced in Cuba, it was considered technologically advanced and more sophisticated than the raw stuff). Now the classic way to make this dish, which I’ve heard is actually quite tasty if you bother making it correctly (which, God forbid, requires more dan three eh-stehps), is to drizzle each egg with melted butter, fortify the rest of the casserole with chopped ham and boiled shrimp, and then bake it lightly, just until the egg whites are set but the yolks are still soft.
But no.
It’s not that Mami excluded the pork and shellfish because they’re trayf. (Rebeca fried us bacon every day of our lives, Baba Dora’s specialty was ham sandwiches, and Mami took me to go sit on Santa Claus’s lap every Christmas. Until I got my period at age twelve, that is, after which I had to stop going because continuing to sit on Santa’s lap would be, as Mami said, “eefee.” Not because I was physically blossoming and turning voluptuous. Not because Cuban parents, like all Latin parents, are so conservative and overprotective of their children, especially their vulnerable, virginal daughters. Not because—here’s a rad’ concept—we’re a Jewish family who respects the goyish tradition of but does not actively engage with Santa. Not because the shmuck at the mall wearing a rented Santa costume might actually be an alcoholic kiddie pre-vert with a rap sheet longer than his gift list. No. It’s because, “Joo might eh-stain Santy Clohs—joo bleed like krehsee, wheech I can never understan’ because I never had dat, but joo are so exaggerated een everytheengh—an’ den dat would be horeebl! Because eef Santy ees not wearing rayt pants, less say hees wearing, like, white pants or sometheengh like dat, den eet would be, like, a total contrast! Das a no-no.”)