Jubana!

by Gigi Anders

  “Oh!” Teepee said, smiling and nodding. He was Looking at me. Capital L. His eyes were blue but not true-blue. Behind him Carroll Sockwell’s suicidal self-portraits in shades of blue gloomed in multiple heavy layers of dark oil.

  “Spanish conquistadores and African slaves made Cuban food Cuban,” I said, feeling muy authoritative and shaking stray sesame seeds off my lap. I was wearing my favorite sleeveless capri jumpsuit. Bright yellow with tiny blue birds and matching tiny blue bird buttons down the front. It was a bitch going to the bathroom, but I was still at the stage where suffering for style was a given, not to mention proof of my superior aesthetic sense.

  “Wow,” Teepee said. “Are you a chef? A historian?”

  “I’m a Cuban,” I said. “Cubans know their Cubanity. I just turned fourteen in December, what are you talking about? I just had my Bat Mitzvah last spring. I’m an official Jewess in high school, honey.”

  “Really? I would have never guessed.”

  “That I’m a Jewess? Why? You’re a Jew, right? I’m a Jew, you’re a Jew, everyone’s a Jujube.”

  “No, no,” he said. “I just meant you seem very…mature.”

  “Oh, I’m mature,” I said, flattered by the observation—which I’d heard all my life—and by the fact that this man was actually paying attention to me. Growing up with parents with exceedingly low boredom thresholds, I’ve always expressed myself volubly—a lot more so than even a regular Cuban—and fast, because I’ve always felt the meter running out on parental attention spans. Really, my heart races and everything. (Or maybe it’s just my metabolism; I usually think, move, and feel a lot faster than other people.) I realize not everybody is my parents. But I can’t usually tell the difference when I’m on a roll or nervous because I have so much energy and so much I want to say. Excitement versus panic; sometimes I can’t distinguish the two. Who can tell the dancer from the dance, right?

  “Very mature, indeedy,” I continued. “Don’t let the zits fool ya. I have camouflaged them pretty well, though, I think. Which is really saying something since these are golf ballers.”

  “Golf ballers?” Teepee said.

  “Pimples big as,” I said. “I’ve got a friend at school who shoplifts makeup for me for cheap. She invited me to her birthday party at Kenwood Country Club? So my mother takes me and we drive around for three hours and never find it. We finally had to give up and go home. It’s right there on River Road in Bethesda! Big sign and everything. Anyway, about the zits? My dermatologist Dr. Kanoff, she’s terrifying. She’s real strict and severe and she chain-smokes. I love her. The first time I went to see her and she examined me? We sit down in her office afterward and there’s all this cigarette smoke everywhere. She gets out a prescription pad and on the top writes the word NO and underlines it, like, three times with a thick black fountain pen. Then under NO she writes this list: ‘Iodine (shellfish, etc.). Chocolate. Nuts. Cola. Cheese. Whole milk. Fried anything.’ I was, like, ahhh, just kill me now. I go, ‘This is strict!’ She goes, ‘There are doctors who believe what you eat has nothing to do with how your skin acts. I’m not one of them.’ So I decide to humor her to her face? But I go home and totally ignore this Nazi food list on the refrigerator. Mami always said to cut every corner. Like in The Sound of Music, ‘Climb Ev’ry Mountain’? This would be her version: ‘Cuuu-t eeev’ry corrr-nerrr, searrr-ch high an’ lowww…’ So. I go back for my next appointment and Dr. Kanoff looks at my face and she goes, ‘Are you eating any of the foods on that damn list?’ I go, ‘Well but we just got a brand-new Skippy. Crunchy. A whole JAR.’ And she goes—she scared me half to death—‘You’ll either do what I recommend or you won’t. If you won’t, please don’t bother coming back. It’s a waste of our time. Good-bye!’ I liked her ever since ’cause she sets rules and limits and she’s not afraid to kick your ass when you’re bad or lazy. I’m not used to that. My parents are out to lunch. They’re in Europe and Israel and Latin America half the time. My father hates going anywhere, but my mother, well, you know how in the government they give you a lot of vacation? Plus she never gets sick so she’s got shitloads of sick leave. Joos eet or loos eet.”

  Teepee chuckled at my rendition of his coworker’s argot. He said, “What I meant before was you come across as very precocious, very worldly.”

  “Well I do,” I said. “The only thing I can’t handle is algebra. It’s my nemesis. Oh now there’s a word I can expect to encounter somewhere in the verbal part of my SATs. I’m fourteen and I was supposed to be obsessed by my SATs ten years ago like my Sidwellemy classmates were, except I was busy fending off delusionals and paranoid schizophrenics at the time. So I’m way behind the curve. My mother’s my nemesis, too, actually, but in a completely different way. Or maybe not in such a completely different way—”

  “Are you wearing a citrus scent?” Teepee said in a strangely overfascinated tone.

  “‘A citrus scent’?” I said, gently mocking what sounded to me like an arch, queer phrase right out of Mademoiselle. “No dear, I’m wearing Agua de Violetas. It’s a traditional Cuban hair cologne. Violets and orange. ‘Citrus.’ Please.”

  “It’s very alluring,” Teepee said, leaning his face in my hair. “Mmm, I love it. It’s wonderful. So fresh and feminine…”

  “Just like using a turquoise bidet! That’s what my mom does. Anyhow, I heard they give you, like, two hundred points just for getting your name right on the SATs. I know I’ll fail the entire math section. I’m already failing Algebra I. I hate my school. I hate the people except my few friends. I don’t have any friends who live around here ’cause I get shipped off every day in a yellow taxi with a morbidly obese trailer park woman named Tiny. The kids here go to public school in a normal yellow school bus. And the ones at Sidwell—that’s my school, another nemesis—they don’t live around here. Silver Spring is, like, beneath them. It may be beneath me, too, actually. I probably belong in New York City ultimately. What do you think?”

  “Sidwell?” he said, reaching for his espresso. “That’s a tough school to get into. You must be really smart. It’s Quaker, right?”

  “Yeah, right. Peace, love, tie-dye, and granola—and a big fuck you to you. They’re all totally cutthroat phonies. Ivy League! Gotta go to the Ivy League or why keep on living! Gotta beat Muffy and Puffy and Huffy into the Ivy League! Muffy, Puffy, and Huffy—Snow White’s little preppie dwarfs!”

  Teepee laughed.

  “Gotta live in Fat City and hit the club for cocktails and tennis and adultery after a hard week at the dwarf Ivy League law firm!” I continued. “Anyway. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna fail algebra. So tah-tah, Hahvahd Yahd.”

  “I was always pretty decent in math myself,” Teepee said. “Mm, good espresso.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re not gonna tell me you like it, are you? That it’s…fun? Because I may throw up.”

  “Espresso?”

  “Math.”

  “Okay, I won’t say it’s fun or I like it,” Teepee said, touching my freckled arm. “Can I just say why it intrigues me?”

  “No. I avoid discussing power raising, root extraction, and radicals whenever possible. Call me crazy.”

  “Because it’s concrete problem solving. That’s what life is, you know? It’s why I’m a social worker.”

  Was it my imagination or had the fucker just moved in closer to me AGAIN?

  I pulled away my arm and placed one of the 782 stray sofa cushions on my lap.

  “Problems aren’t always concrete,” I said. “Maybe in algebra but not in life. Frenzy likes to say—this is such bullshit, how they describe algebra in their course curriculum, I love this—‘Problems are related to those encountered in daily life.’ Yeah, right. Anyway, that’s why I love writing. Love love love it. People are the real puzzles, not equations. I think life is a mystery. My mother sucked at math and science because she was expected to, being a Latina and everything. Now we’re in a whole different country, a continent instead of an island, but I’m still supposed
to be just like her. I don’t know which one to be loyal to, my mother and our little culture or my school and that whole world outside of gringos. ’Cause those Sidwell girls can all do algebra and ice skate. But I can write them under the table. So. I’m either algebraically incompetent or else really confused and frustrated. Which would make me resistant.”

  “‘Resistant’? What do you know about resistance?”

  “I said I was on the psycho kiddie ward—at your current institutional employer—when you were about the age I am now.”

  “I thought you were joking.”

  “Mental illness is no joke, dear. I almost got slashed and stabbed to death by a boy with a huge scissor on my thigh because I wouldn’t kiss him.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Teepee said.

  “Oh that’s nice,” I said dryly.

  “No, I meant he had good taste,” he said, tapping the second and third blue bird buttons on my jumpsuit for emphasis on the good and the taste. The blue birds were right between the ’zoomies. I should’ve put a cushion there, too. “Except I’d personally leave out the scissors. Staff or patient wanted you?”

  “Patient,” I said. “An older psychotic man of twelve. Only crazy boys like me.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “Well, another one broke my finger and practically killed my beautiful blue swan when I wouldn’t kiss him. So sad, my swan. Papier-mâché. It got lost when we moved to this house. Typical. Long story.”

  “You inspire great passion in men.”

  “The blue swan killer was a black fourth grader named Maurice,” I said, standing up. “Now he goes to Sidwell, too. So does my old Southwest D.C. friend Mara. It’s weird. But most Sidwell boys don’t like me. I repel the white preppie male element. They don’t get me. Few straight XY chromosomes do. Starting with my father. My mother says he’s not ‘attun-ed’ to me or my needs, not that she does anything about it or picks up the slack. The only female my dad can relate to is the wife unit. I have no relationship with my brothers. I don’t understand their existence or its point. My little baby sister, Cecilia, is dead, in Cuba. I’m like Marilyn on The Munsters. Voilà: Moi’s life in a coconut shell.”

  “Where are you off to?” Teepee asked.

  I bent down and conspiratorially whispered, “To my room. To smoke a True. To be bad behind my parents’ back. I’m a kid, I’m in that adolescent angst phase. Hormones, you know. I rebel. I’m secretive. I’m pissed. It’s what I do. It’s my job.”

  “But your mother smokes. I thought you didn’t want to be like her.”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not concrete. I am ambivalent and conflicted. Kiddie ward words. Adios, dear.”

  “Can I come?” he whispered back, his face perilously close to mine.

  “Shoe shine?” Eric said. “Just a dollar. Bargain.”

  My little capitalist seven-year-old brother had been making the rounds and now it was Teepee’s shoes’ turn. Eric had just saved my life. A grown man in my bedroom! In my boudoir! What would I have done? Was having seen Klute enough of a qualification to deal with a man nearly twice my age? And why was Teepee concentrating so much on me to the exclusion of the other guests his own age, anyway? It felt very odd, and I couldn’t decide if it was odd cool or odd creepy. Excitement versus panic. I knew siccing Mami on Teepee would be fruitless. She’d looohv for him to go upstairs with me. After all, wasn’t it Mami who’d rejoiced over the onset of my menses two years before because I could finally start dayteengh? As for Papi, he would always defer to Mami and, like her, would consider denying any guest in his home anything a social breach. If only Rebeca were here. That pygmy maid would slice off Teepee’s moyeled pecker with one fell swoop of her cucumber knife and go right back to making la ensalada without missing a beat.

  I heard Teepee ask Eric, “You know how to shine sneakers, buddy?”

  I was already halfway up the stairs. I suspected our intime little tête-à-tête would make killer diary entry material, especially that shit with the buttons. Good and taste. My green Valerie typewriter awaited me. Me and my tiny but mighty right index fingertip.

  I failed Algebra I.

  Sidwell Frenzy said to get a tutor and I could retake the ninth grade final exam pass-fail at the end of the summer. Why the ’rents never asked Frenzy for qualified tutor recommendations is anyone’s guess. Maybe Frenzy told them it was their responsibility, not the school’s. Maybe Mami didn’t feel like making the effort. Or maybe she didn’t feel like coughing it up for one—it might have put a crimp in her personal retail budget. Hadn’t she learned anything from the Tío Jaime Bat Mitzvah camera disaster, that you get what you pay for? Nooo, not as it applied to me. Enter Teepee, who offered to do it for free. (Well, almost. He wanted Cuban coffee in return for weeknightly tutorials.) F-r-e-e, Mami’s favorite four-letter word after f-o-h-k. Did I have any say in this? Of course not, I was the bruta who’d yet again fohk-ed up. Did Mami perceive a possible conflict of interest, as she worked with Teepee, or the impropriety of having a decade-older man tutoring me alone? Of course not, he was a goo’ frien’ and he was f-r-e-e.

  And so Teepee began pulling up on our cul-de-sac in his VW beetle just as Rebeca was serving the after-dinner espresso. We’d all sit around the round white mod table from Scan in the family room until the café was quaffed. The ’rents would go up to their bedroom to watch TV for the rest of the evening, and Eric and Big Red Al went downstairs to the basement to play or to their rooms to do whatever it was they did in there. Only Rebeca lingered, clearing the table, wiping it off, eating her dinner (as usual, after we did) at the breakfast counter outside the family room. She took a real long time eating whenever Teepee was around, and spent at least another hour dish-washing and leftover-storing and broad-spectrum kitchen anti-bacterializing.

  “Why is she still here?” Teepee whispered.

  Gee, maybe because she’s the only one around with a clue?

  “Who knows?” I said, batting my hand dismissively. “Who cares? She’s a paranoid Ecuadorian. Ignore.”

  “She seems…hostile.”

  “She’s never been the same since This Is Tom Jones went off the air. She goes around singing ‘No es inusu-AL’” all the time. She can’t speak a word of English but she loves that Welshman. It’s about, you know, the feeling. The universal language of luuuv.”

  “She goes around singing WHAT?”

  “‘It’s Not Unusual.’ Tom Jones’s theme song?”

  “Whose?”

  “You’re kidding, right? ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’ ‘Delilah’? ‘She’s a Lady’?”

  “Sorry,” Teepee said, shaking his head. “At least you’ll never fail popular culture.”

  “Pop,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Not popular. Nobody says popular culture. Unless they’re unpopular.”

  “Hey, give me a kiss,” Teepee whispered, leaning into me.

  I grabbed my TaB—bet you didn’t know it’s officially kosher—and sipped through my straw. Too bad I couldn’t smoke out in the open. I so needed a True. Who WAS this guy? Why was he saying this? Hey, give me a kiss. He was new in town but still, why wasn’t he asking girls his own age to Hey, give me a kiss? What the fuck, should I go for it?

  “On the cheek?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh. All righty.”

  I heard Rebeca loudly clear her throat and slam down a pot.

  “I’ve wanted to kiss you since the first time over the huevos,” Teepee said.

  “Well,” I said, glancing at Rebeca, who stared back with fierce black crucifix eyes, “dream on—at the moment.” It wasn’t as if I’d never been kissed, but this was a Big Boy.

  “Afterward,” Teepee said. “We’ll wait till she goes downstairs. And then you’ll walk me to the car. It’ll be our secret.”

  It was hard to concentrate exclusively on algebra after that. Teepee and I got into this flirtatious routine: He’d show up, drink the
coffee, wait for everyone to disperse, and then punctuate the mind-numbing monotony of linear equations, inequalities in one and two unknowns, and quadratic equations with gradually deeper French kissing and touching. Then we’d walk to his car and kiss some more. It made me giddy. It was exciting and sexy and fun, and hell if it didn’t liven up monomials and polynomials, not to mention what would have been an otherwise stupefyingly torpid, malaise-ridden summer in the Siberia of Silver Spring. Mami didn’t look like a pimp, but hadn’t she in fact brought us together? The Cuban in me said, “Caramba! Young brides are the best! Remember not the Maine, but the tafetán color champán!” The Jew said, “Oy! Remember Hitler at Munich! Then again, Teepee is Jewish and single!”

  Teepee eventually complained to the ’rents that the family room was “too open and noisy and distracting for Gigi to absorb her lessons.” Since both my parents lack that Cuban “Not with My Daughter!” gene, they immediately complied. Teepee and I began meeting downstairs in Papi’s basement office. It was a tiny room but far from the madding crowd, and it had a door that locked. The office, however, was just across from Rebeca’s bedroom. We could hear the humorless Andean warden pacing aggressively outside our closed door, clearing her throat and snorting and listening for prolonged silences. Rebeca could hover and eavesdrop in her overt, heavy-handed way, but she could not control everything. My parents may have told themselves and Rebeca that Rebeca was a member of the family, but in the end she was an employee, as I impertinently reminded her whenever in her pre-Columbian way she overstepped her bounds and tried disciplining me physically.

  By summer’s end, Teepee had me remedialized. On what I expected would be our last session, I walked him to the car to kiss him good-bye forever. Such sweet sorrow.