Jubana!

by Gigi Anders

  My whole fucking fucked-up family would have had a hysterectomy over that one. They think I’m a pobrecita, a poor little thing. I’m the least financially successful one of us. I’m the most observant and emotionally expressive. I’m the most creative and literary. I’m the most never-married and stuck with an alarmingly dwindling number of viable huevos. None of this holds any value. Au contraire, it creates beaucoup de hassle. What counts, what really matters in the Juban end? Dinero. Being attractive. Dinero. Never wearing the same outfit twice. Dinero. Marrying well. Dinero. Procreation. Dinero.

  Otherwise you’re a sohkehr. You’re going to starve to death with your little poems.

  As my very, very, very flush-from-nonkosher-pork-products brother Eric once remarked, most Virgo-ly, “In our, like, childhood, you were why we ever had problems and fights, okaaay?”

  Okaaay! Was Eric saying this because I used to sadistically pull out his long eyelashes? Because I mimicked his strangely Valley Girlish diction and the way he made virtually every declarative statement sound, like, a question? Because whenever my parents went out on Saturday evenings and I was forced to babysit I’d throw him, baby Big Red Al, and our bulimic poodle, Martini, in the backseat of the car and take off barefoot in Mami’s turquoise Corvair (garlanded with neon flower-power daisy stickers) on joyrides, smoking Mami’s Kools and getting too mentholatedly dizzy and phlegmy to figure out how to release the emergency brake?

  “I may have been only twelve or thirteen but I was an excellent driver,” I reminded Eric. “We never once got stopped all up and down Sixteenth Street and Military Road. And it was at night, too, when it’s so much harder for a Helen Keller like me to see.”

  “You made Martini upchuck!” Eric said. “And then we had to clean it all up before Mom and Dad got home and spray it with Lysol?”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t have sprayed it with Lysol?”

  “That’s not, like, the point or whatever?”

  “It’s totally the point. Name one Hispanic, regardless of class, who does not consider hygiene first and foremost. Even in Cuba, the poorest poorest Cubans, all they ever ask all the tourists for—if sex for American cash is a no-go—is SOAP, SOAP, and SOAP. Jabón! Jabón forever! Lysol would be, like, the Balenciaga of hygiene products for them. Hello!”

  The conversation kind of devolved from there. No one in my family, least of all my brothers, ever has any idea what I’m talking about. Anyway, I’m sure Eric was right about everything because he is a pork products prodigy in a Roberto Cavalli leather jacket. And I am, after all, not.

  I was twelve and Rebeca was giving me what would presently become my final nightly bath with Rebeca. As I got out of the tub I said. “I’m thinking of letting my hair grow out again.”

  She stared down between my legs and, smiling a weird smile, said, “You’ve got hair growing out all over now, don’t you?”

  What. A. Freak. That was the last time I allowed her or anyone else in my family to bathe me or see me naked. My new need for modesty and privacy made Mami mad, especially when I refused to get undressed in front of fifty strange women in Loehmann’s cattle call dressing room in Rockville, Maryland.

  “What ees de problem?” she asked. “Deyr not lookeengh at joo!”

  “I don’t like being stared at,” I said. “And I don’t like when you stare at me, either.”

  “Stare? I’m joor mother! I can see whatever I wan’!”

  “Actually, no. You can’t. News flash: This is my body.”

  “Dat came out of ME—an’ den I had to say bye-bye to de beekeenees an’ hello maillots. Stretch marks. Really really beeg ones dat don’ go ’way! Ever. Ees de same theengh eef joor room ees so messy. Eet can’t be because dat room ees een my house! ¡El que paga, manda!” Whoever has de money has de power!

  “If you and Dad want to walk around in your underwear at home,” I said, “that’s your business. But I’m not. And I’m not gonna strip in this fucking dressing room. It reminds me of Auschwitz newsreels.”

  “No! Eet does NOT! Eet’s not at ALL like dat! Dees ees Loehmann’s, not de cahms! ¿Tu ’tás loca? From where do joo get dees krehsee heestohree-ohneeks? Because ees not from ME, das for choor.”

  “Sunday school. That YOU send me to.”

  “Cahm Auschweetz ees a totally separate eeshoo dat has notheengh to do weeth de heres an’ de nows of Rockveel, Mareelan’ an’ Loehmann’s. Joo can suffer a leetl beet in here because de prices are de rock’s bottom. Coño. ¿Qué te pasa a ti? [Dammit. What is wrong with you?] Dees ees about de choppeengh an’ de bargains, okay?—wheech ees probably de only goo’ theengh about dees whole fohkeengh country—an’ not about de gasses an’ de chambers! Por FAVOR. ¡Tranquilízate!” P-LEASE. Calm down!

  “I’ll wait for you outside by the ‘Deep, Deeper, Deepest discount’ pile. Happy strip search.”

  Maybe those black-and-white Auschwitz newsreels really were too graphic for Sunday school sixth graders to see, the bulldozers sweeping up piles of naked, limp corpses. But at Temple Shalom, the Chevy Chase, Maryland, Reform shul we had joined in order to have no more “Chri-ist the Lord” episodes, students were exposed in small but unforgettable doses to Jewish realities, sometimes inadvertently, such as the fact that Passover candy sucks compared to Easter candy. (You can’t beat the Reese’s peanut butter egg with a jelly fruit slice. Sorry. You can’t. I wrote a whole story about this in the spring of 1996 for the Washington Post’s food section. I offended Rabbi Bruce at the time, but I earned my Gentile candy cred.)

  Temple Shalom was a cozy, modest, smallish congregation, with several hundred families. It had nowhere near the power, money, and clout of the better-known Washington Hebrew Congregation in Northwest D.C., where all the big-bucks Reform Jews belonged (including the few other Jewish kids at Sidwell). But Temple Shalom was a six-minute drive away from our new Neil Greene–designed house, located two doors down from his on a leafy, peaceful cul-de-sac of Neil Greene–designed houses, some of them with swimming pools in the basement, in Silver Spring. No swimming pool for us, but there was a turquoise bidet for Mami and lots and lots of wall space for Mami to hang all her suicidal Carroll Sockwell paintings and an atrium that Mami called “de hole een my house” from the roof skylight all the way down three floors to a boxed-in garden in the basement. From its top hung a cascading series of huge round glass light fixtures on white cords like an Alexander Calder mobile vertically turned on its side. Before dinner parties Papi would get a broom and pull in the cords to Windex mis bolas, my balls, as he called them. I used to tell my Sidwell friends that many, many men gave their lives to build the new manse, falling straight down the atrium shaft to their untimely deaths. A few gullible ones believed me. Sohkehrz.

  I think Papi wanted to build Mami a castle, to re-create or recapture or in any event approximate what we’d lost in Cuba after the fall and the expulsion from paradise, something grand, something amazing, something that could never be taken away. But the money ran out before the construction ended. This is because of my family’s tenacious Cuban belief in dreams, magic, the fantasy of infinite resources. In reality, we were comfortable, not rich. That discrepancy, however, was at odds with Papi’s need to always say yes, to Mami especially. It seemed as though nothing was beyond our reach and that we’d never ever have to really worry about money. That wasn’t true, of course. But it is impossible to live within your means if your past life, a wistful, forlorn Cuban siren song, keeps beckoning and beguiling you like Circe. Americans say, “I think I’ll re-create myself.” Cubano exiles say, “I think I’ll re-create my pre-Castro Cuban life.”

  It’s like in The Great Gatsby, when, late at night, after another crazy party at his mansion, Gatsby tells Nick all that he expects from Daisy: to tell her husband, Tom, that she never loved him and to marry Gatsby:

  “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” [Nick] ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

  “Can’t repeat the past?” [Gatsby] cried incredulously. “Why of c
ourse you can!”

  Baba Dora offered to make up the rest of the funds needed to finish the new house. She and Zeide Boris had been living with us in the guest room of the Southwest town house while Zeide was in the last stages of liver cancer. After our family’s six-month Miami Beach layover in Las Casitas Verdes, Baba Dora and Zeide Boris and several of our cousins, uncles, and aunts settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, where there were plenty of textile jobs in the mills. It was hardly Camisetas Perro. The Schindler’s List grayness of my grandfather’s pre-Cuban life in Belarus had turned to blinding Technicolor in Cuba. Now after Castro, the grayness returned like The Wizard of Oz in reverse, Dorothy Galeowitz falling asleep in color and awakening to a black-and-white world. Sometimes we’d drive down I-95 South to my abuelos’ modest Charlotte home and stay for a week, Mami’s front seat Kool smoke blowing into my backseat face for seven straight hours, gagging me and intensifying my car sickness. My brothers and I would scramble out of the smoke-congested car and run around our grandparents’ little house, Baba serving us orange-flavored Hi-C punch and ham sandwiches with French’s mustard, melancholy Zeide smoking his cigars and having shots of wiski with Mami as the wet laundry flapped on the line in the backyard breeze.

  In 1965 Zeide had developed cancer in his left eye. The eye was removed, and he wore a prosthetic one. The cancer eventually returned, though, this time to Zeide’s liver. So he and Baba moved in with us for the last three months of his life. Mami came home from work every day at lunchtime to be with Zeide. She’d lie down next to him in his special rented hospital bed, and they’d talk. On the night of August 22, 1968, Zeide fell into a semicoma. My parents took him to Prince George’s Hospital Center in über-gauche Cheverly, Maryland, where Papi had hospital privileges. I somehow felt Zeide would not make it because it was a Thursday. Thursdays in 1968 were horrendous: April 4, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and June 6, when Bobby Kennedy was killed. I remember going to see the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and the tag line on the poster in the theater read, “The forces of good! The forces of evil!” I always thought of that whenever Gramps reminded me of my internal civil war.

  “It’s the conflict between light and darkness,” he’d say, “between right and wrong. Imagine me sitting on your shoulder. If you ever give in to the bad, I’ll slap you on the head and say. ‘What the shit’s going on?’”

  “Oh,” I’d say. “That sounds healthy.”

  And Gramps would say, “Thank you. It is. Sound mental health isn’t about achieving some abstract human perfection. It’s about being on to yourself, knowing yourself. So that when you’re in a situation and you start to fuck things up the way you always do, you stop and go, ‘Shit. I’m doing it again.’ And then you can either stop it and self-correct or you can give in to it and knowingly, consciously, deliberately suffer the consequences. Now get the hell out of here. It’s enough for me for one day already.”

  Zeide died during that Thursday night in the summer of 1968. He was seventy-four, younger than Papi is now.

  “When we lef’ de hospeetal very early in de morneengh,” Mami recalls, “I felt like an orphan. I always felt notheengh really bad could ever happen to me as long as my father was alive. Den I look-ed at de sky an’ saw a peenk cloud een de chape of an angel. I felt at peace.”

  As is customary in Latin families, Baba moved in with us, staying on for the next few years. She helped Papi pay for the rest of the house and spent her days in her southern wing, watching Days of Our Lives, sewing, occasionally baking her famous butter-marmalade cookies, and criticizing Rebeca’s cooking and cleaning. Though Baba could be difficult sometimes, I felt protective of her because she was widowed and an innocent. When Mami took us out in the car—Baba always sat up front—I’d distract Baba from the backseat by leaning in between her and Mami and telling jokes and stories whenever we passed cemeteries. We were on Georgia Avenue in Northwest once, passing the Civil War–era Battleground National Cemetery. I saw granite soldiers and angels and I literally turned Baba’s face away from them with my hands.

  As we awaited completion of the new house, Ann “Nancy” Biester also came to live with us. There was nothing strange about or wrong with my Sidwell classmate, but we were friends anyway. Not soul friends, not a poor dead Cecilia-like sisterhood, but friends. Her Republican Congregationalist father, Edward G. Biester Jr., of Furlong, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was up for reelection. In the fall of 1968 he went off to campaign for his seat as the U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania’s Eighth District. So the blue-eyed dirty-blond Nancy moved in with us while her parents were away campaigning. I had twin beds in my room, and we’d stay up half the night talking, giggling, and fooling around. Rebeca was constantly barging in on us, checking to ensure we weren’t turning into pubescent lesbians. After her father won the election, Nancy went back to her family, and our friendship ebbed. Edward Biester painted a watercolor of the Pennsylvania woods in winter and gave it to my parents as a thank-you for having sheltered, fed, and clothed his daughter for a semester. Mami hung the painting in the powder room of the new house, where it remains. We’ve never heard from the Biesters again.

  The kids in my new neighborhood all went to Silver Spring public schools. The kids at Sidwell never set foot in Silver Spring, and really, rightly so. God knows I’d rather have been in the relative civilization of Friendship Heights or Chevy Chase or Bethesda myself. So that when Tiny pulled up at 3960 Thirty-seventh Street, the Northwest middle school campus and, four years later for another four grueling years, at the upper school on 3825 Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest, she was taking me away from any after-school socializing and bonding possibilities, and delivering me back to an isolated cul-de-sac and a big house and Baba Dora sewing in the family room and Rebeca in the kitchen with her knives and cucumbers and Latina self-loathing.

  “¡Usted siga con su tarea,” Rebeca would tell me as I lowered a salted cucumber seed strip down into my mouth, “y tal vez un día usted podra ser una secretaria importante!” You keep up with your homework and perhaps one day you might become an important secretary!

  Well, I was getting to be pretty good at typing on my Valerie Hermès typewriter with my lone right index finger.

  The next morning was a Saturday. Rebeca always had the weekends off. Her daughter Beatriz would come pick her up and take her away to her crucifix-heavy Adams-Morgan apartment. I awoke in my bed in a pool of blood. My adorable lime-green-and-white-striped babydoll pj’s were dripping, ruined. Thinking I must be dying, I screamed my head off like that Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with the horse’s head in The Godfather. Mami and Papi rushed in. Papi took one look and rushed out. Mami said, “¡Ay, gracias a Dios! Por tu madre, joo can finally start dayteenth! Ees so great!”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, looking down at my blood-soaked thighs. “Start dating? Dating who? I’m DYING over here, hello!”

  Mami said I had just gotten my período.

  “Das what de weemehns have to have een order to get to de nex’ level, wheech ees de tafetán color champán.”

  I asked her why.

  “Dey johs do,” she replied.

  “And you get periods like this, too?” I said.

  “I get dem,” she replied, shaking her head, “but not like dat. Das, like, an extrehmeety. Must be from Papi’s side of de fahmeely.”

  Mami put me in the shower, handed me a Kotex and an elastic belt with hooks, threw away my pretty pj’s (this was all before they made Clorox Stain Out, my absolute favorite thing for such situations), changed my sheets, and called it a day.

  Because I always had heavy and painful periods, periods of extrehmeety, especially Dreaded Day Two, I concluded that I was abnormal, since Mami’s periods weren’t at all like mine. Thus I was exceptionally moved one night in Baltimore years later, as another of my older men—in this case a Protestant—and I were getting ready for bed.

  “I’m really sorry,” I told the Geezer, “but I have my period. Today’s
Dreaded Day Two and…”

  “Why are you apologizing for something that’s natural?” the Geezer asked.

  I had no answer. Or rather, I did, but it would take too long to explain.

  “I have plenty of towels,” the Geezer added. “And if you’d rather not make love, that’s fine, too. I just want you to feel comfortable.”

  Voilà: The Geezer at his geeziest best. Gestures like those buy an otherwise impossible WASP man a whole lotta Jewish credit, a whole lotta Cubana time.

  As worldly and precocious as I was in some ways, sexuality was still a mystery to me in the sixth grade, putting me at a huge disadvantage in the sex-crazed anomie of the sixties and to some extent the seventies. As for the eighties, well, I believe I was the only person having sex—with others, I mean—because Reagan was in office for most of that decade. Plus, if you recall, it was just a really, really depressing time: AIDS, poor dead Princess Diana marrying that awful Charles, shoulder pads, C. Everett Koop denouncing cigarette smoking, aerobics, Natalie Wood drowning, nouvelle cuisine, gravity-defying hair, yuppies, Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, Madonna, George Bush. How horrifying is all that? What got me through—besides outrageous coitus (with an older married cowboy poet from Wyoming whom I called the Poet Lariat) in various hotel rooms with great room service across the nation—was, what always gets me through: TaB, Parliaments, and American pop culture. Americans are so good at diet drinks, cigarettes, and grooviness! Do you all appreciate what you have? Does it take a foreign-born Jubana to show and tell you how lucky you are and how good you have it? Seriously. When people start criticizing this country I go krehsee for two key reasons: One, I just don’t hear about people dying to get into, say, oh, I don’t know, how about…CUBA! Really, when was the last time you heard about any illegal immigrant risking his or her life to go live in CUBA! And two, how can you criticize America, a country that (a) lets you criticize it (something no Cuban living in Cuba can do), (b) has TaB (something no Cuban living in Cuba can have), and (c) has had, even in the politically tacky eighties, the following (which no Cuban living in Cuba has probably ever even heard of, considering that Cuba’s stuck in such a pathetic time warp that acid-washed jeans are cutting-edge): the TV shows Hill Street Blues and Cheers; the movies The Accused; Amadeus; Atlantic City; Babette’s Feast; Baby Boom; Blow Out; Blue Velvet; Body Heat; Casualties of War; Cat People; Children of a Lesser God; Dangerous Liaisons; Desperately Seeking Susan, Diner; Down and Out in Beverly Hills; The Elephant Man; E.T.; Fatal Attraction; Full Metal Jacket; Hannah and Her Sisters; Kiss of the Spider Woman; The Last Emperor; Married to the Mob; Mommie Dearest; My Beautiful Laundrette; My Left Foot; New York Stories; 9 1/2 Weeks; Out of Africa; Prick Up Your Ears; Prizzi’s Honor; Raging Bull; Raising Arizona; Reds; Risky Business; Roxanne; Scarface; sex, lies, and videotape; She’s Gotta Have It; The Shining; Sophie’s Choice; Steel Magnolias; Tequila Sunrise; Terms of Endearment; Tootsie; Trading Places; The Untouchables; Wall Street; The Witches of Eastwick, and Working Girl; and the music of Anita Baker, Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson (prefreakdom, obviously), Rickie Lee Jones, the oft-overlooked Katrina & the Waves, John Cougar Mellencamp, the Police, the Pretenders, Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, U2, Suzanne Vega, and Stevie Wonder.