Jubana! (11 page)

Whether it was the Kools, the rapport, or the meds, Carroll began giving Mami his paintings as gifts, so many and so many big ones that they almost overlapped on the living room and dining room walls. It was the first “real art” we'd owned since Castro and his guerrillas took away everything we'd owned and loved and cared about. Carroll's pictures meant a lot to Mami. I think they made her feel less bereft. Less hurt. Owning good objects can make you feel loved and secure because they're tangible. Carroll was a paranoid schizophrenic and an alcoholic who painted like an expressive angel on jazz. It was strange to identify with him, but I did, in a way. Carroll Sockwell was able to give us something back in his art therapy that we had lost in Cuba: self-expression. And with that comes hope. We'd almost lost that, too.

After Carroll was released from St. E's, his painting career took off. He showed locally at the Phillips Collection, Washington
Project for the Arts, and in a one-person exhibition at the Corcoran; and at the Whitney Museum in New York, among other places. He and Mami stayed in touch sporadically throughout the years, and he came over to the house a few times with whoever his boyfriend was at the moment for drinks and now to sell her his pictures for just a few bucks apiece, pictures that became worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Carroll would consume an entire bottle of cognac while he visited Mami. This was okay-fine by her. There is a veritable liquor warehouse in my parents' house. Some of the bottles are so old that they're dusty. This is because my parents have been given spirits, wines, and liqueurs as gifts for the past thirty years of parties. Being Jewish hosts, they rarely touch the stuff. One of the good things about being Jewish is the low rate of alcoholism; it's a supposedly genetic trait. However, none of our many Gentile guests could care less about that. They just love coming over and imbibing from our infinite alcohol archives.

“Carroll doesn't like espresso?” I asked Mami. We were in the kitchen fixing a tray of snifters, napkins, and bowls of plantain chips and salted cashews, while in the living room Carroll and his friend elegantly tapped their cigarette ashes in elegant white-and-gold-leaf ashtrays Mami had filched from a five-star hotel located near the Zürich Opera House.

“Espresso?” Mami said. “Are joo keedeengh? Ees, like, fohk de espresso. Breengh on de boozes!”

“Isn't he an alcoholic, though? Aren't you, like, helping to poison him?”

It was hard to look down at the beautiful tray—hand-painted and acquired during one of my parents' long and numerous holidays in Spain or Portugal or Israel or Russia or France or Italy or Argentina or Switzerland or Belgium or Puerto Rico or Brazil or Chile or England or Kenya or Mexico—and think, “I'm serving poison.”

“Carroll ees an alcoholeec,” Mami said. “But eef he doesn't
dreenk eet in here he'll dreenk eet
out der,
so what's de deeeference?”

When Mami didn't hear from Carroll for long stretches she said, “Prohahbly hees back to dreenkeengh. A lot. He's very disturb-ed.
Pobrecito.”
Poor little thing.

Carroll jumped off the Rock Creek Park Bridge to his death in the summer of 1992. He was only forty-nine. Like Carroll, Richard Cory also committed suicide on a calm summer night. At least Mami got to keep Carroll's paintings, and that made her happy. I found many of them gloomy and depressing as hell. But that was beside the point. For bereft Jubanos, more is more. Amassing and stockpiling
objets
is
toujours
where it's at. As T. S. Eliot said so beautifully in “The Waste Land,” “These fragments I have shored against my ruins…”

 

After I'd spent a month or so on the kids' ward, a twelve-year-old patient named Kevin had developed a crush on me. I think the technical term would be
fixation.
He seemed harmless enough, following me around like a smitten puppy, sitting next to me at lunch and generally regarding me with lovesick awe. It was five o'clock, the usual time for the orderly to unlock the heavy door and let me out, as Mami would be waiting for me out front in the car. I walked over to the glass-walled staff office and didn't see anyone in there but the secretary, who said everybody was in a meeting and to go wait by the door and someone would be by soon. Kevin and I walked over there and waited.

“Wish you weren't leavin',” he said.

“I know.”

“You're so cute,” he said, taking my hand in his.

“I know.”

“Can I have a hug?” It was more of an advance warning than
an actual request. He embraced me tightly, squeezing me against him. He felt bony and hard. I gently pulled away.

“Your hair smells like fruit,” Kevin said. “Or candy.”

“It's not fruit
or
candy,” I corrected him. “It's Agua de Violetas.”

“I don't want you to leave.”

“I don't blame you.”

“I said,
I don't want you to leave.”

“Yeah, I got you the first time,” I replied, rolling my eyes and wondering where my orderly was. I checked my pink sundress to see if it needed smoothing, then my sandals to see if they needed rebuckling or anything. Nope.

“Let's sing a song until the orderly comes,” I ventured. “‘Big girls don't cry, big girls don't cry…' You know that one? ‘Bi-ig girls do-o-n't cry-y-y…'”

Kevin looked at me strangely. It was an expression I'd never seen on anybody before. He suddenly extracted an office-size scissor from his pants pocket and lifted the hem of my dress with its slanted tip, laying the closed silver blades flat on my inner left thigh. The steel was shiny against my skin in the dim hallway light.

“I told you,” Kevin said, slowly opening the scissors, “to stay with me.”

“Okay.”

“You gonna do it?”

“Yeah. Let's go back into the day room, okay?”

“Okay, baby.”

He closed the scissor and slid it back into his pocket. I let him hold my hand. As we passed the staff office—only the stupid secretary was still in there, filing her nails, cracking her gum, and reading a magazine—I bolted away and ran inside.

The rest happened very quickly: me crying and hiding under a
desk, the secretary screaming, a bunch of staffers running out of a meeting room, two orderlies subduing Kevin, who was kicking and screaming on the floor, another orderly carrying me out in his arms and delivering me to my mother, who was sitting in her car, oblivious, blowing the horn and pissed that I was late because we would hit rush hour.

At least I got to stop having to go there anymore, TYJ (thank you, Jesus). On the day of my liberation, I tell you I was happier than a Fidel-fleeing Cuban rafter making it intact to the U.S. of A.

Really, my deliverance was poetry.

 

The scissor incident is why I began school before I was really ready. It was the only ohpshohng. So Mami devised a plan, and by the time we met with the Amidon elementary school principal about getting me into kindergarten a year ahead of my peers—nursery school or pre-K weren't on anybody's radar at that point—it was basically a done deal.
La gringa
never knew what hit her; she was a total sohkehr.

“See, dees keed ees totally precocious,” Mami explained. “I feel eet ees not an overstatemen' to say chees jooneek.”

“I'm sure you think she is,” said
la gringa.
“But children this age, developmentally, need a bit more time before they can successfully be integrated into—”

Mami squeezed my hand, pressing the pointy tips of her lacquered bloodred fingernails into my tiny palm. That was my stage cue—not to mention it hurt like shit.

“¡Ay!”
I cried, yanking away my hand and wiggling out of my chair to climb into
la gringa
's bony lap. (So far, so good. Anticipation, execution, all flawless. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was pathologically cute.) I wrapped my arms around her skinny neck like an adoring kitten, kissing both her cheeks.

“I'm so so sorry,” I told her, curling on her lap and remembering to repeat the word
so
twice whenever I used it. That was from the script Mami had concocted and had made me memorize before this meeting. The stage direction at that point said to look “soulfully” into
la gringa
's eyes. I tried, but she was so tall and long that all I could get was two huge nostrils.

“I am so so sorry,” I continued. “But you are beautiful! And I would say your pearls are very so so. I could not repiss!”

Mami was horrified.
So so pearls? Repiss?
Fuck. It was
reSisT.
Fuck. I'd screwed this up. And I was doing so well! Oh God, it was back to the mental ward. Mami mouthed the words
“¡Me cago 'n su madre!”
I shit on your/her/his/its mother!

The unaware
gringa,
however, found me fabulous.

“Mrs. Anders, you've got
quite
a girl here. I'd say your assessment of her acumen and readiness for kindergarten is astute.”

“Joo are too kin',” Mami said, utterly relieved, feigning humility and refusing to pronounce the last letter of
kind.

She always did like to have things her way.

 

Mami had to drag me into kindergarten. Soon after the scissor incident, I'd taken to hiding under my bed whenever it was time to take me somewhere new, afraid I'd be stabbed to death with an office instrument. Mami called me “de girl under de bed.” It wasn't an accolade. She'd locate a stray arm or foot and maddeningly yank it and the rest of me out. I'd be like one of those little show poodles having a bad hair day, who doesn't want to perform, no matter what, and do a tug of war with my mistress. Being bigger and stronger, she of course would always win. I'd curse my head off at her in the car, accusing her of
reckless childhood abuse and endangerment,
another term I'd learned on the kids' ward.

“Joo know what?” Mami would say, “Das johs too damn bad.”

I'd effortlessly conquered the principal
gringa
—charming and flirting with these authority figure types was one thing. Cultural flitting came easily; Jubana butterflies flit because that is their nature, not be pinned down is what they
do.
But actually lingering in structured, academic environs, staying on for entire “semesters” at a time—that was a whole different story.

My kindergarten teacher looked like Aunt Bee on
The Andy Griffith Show,
and while she was on the somber side, she was nice enough. She took me under her flabby wing, seeing as I was the only Hispanic child and the only student in the entire school for whom English was a second language. Eventually I began getting the hang of it. Finger paints—loved. Oatmeal cookies and milk—so-so. Skipping to square dance tunes with little blond boys—all right. Reading—fabulous, as long as I could hold the book right up against my face.

That last item got me sent to the school nurse for an eye exam. There was a chart with a series of capital E's across it in rows. The E's were rotated in different directions. There was a backward E, an upside-down E, and so on. My job was to sit at a distance from the chart and tell the nurse which way each E was pointing with my hand. I cocked my head right. I cocked my head left. All I saw were what appeared to be fuzzy black chopsticks tossed around like pick-up sticks on a white tablecloth.

“What do you see, Gigi?” the nurse asked me, jotting something down on a chart.

“I see…” I said, rolling my metal chair past her up to the chart, “I…Ohhh! They're E's! But they're all messed up. Look, this one's, like, dead. On its back like a poor dead baby bird. Aw. And this one looks like an M. And this one looks like the Hebrew letter…oh, what's that letter? My Zeide Boris's yarmulke has a letter like it on top in silver thread. That's
hand stitched,
by the way.
Embroidered in Cuba.”

The nurse stared at me and blinked.

“Really,” she said, humoring me. “Okay, go on.”

“SHIN!” I said, smacking my forehead.
“¡Qué bruta soy!
[What a dunce I am!] SHIN. SHIN SHIN SHIN. I love SHIN, don't you? It's the next to the last letter in the Hebrew alphabet, right before TAV. TAV is definitely the last letter in there, like in the Land of Milk and Honey. Baba Dora told me. I remember now. They put Zeide's yarmulke inside-out in the pocket where his linen handkerchief went on his jacket. He put his handkerchief in his pants pocket. That's how they got it past the guerrillas who stole our houses. Otherwise, who knows? Fidel might have used my Zeide's yarmulke as a Handi Wipe or something to clean his filthy mouth and ugly, smelly, greasy black beard or that gross dirt under his—eiw!—Satan claw toenails, like in the Hieronymous monsters. My mami showed me a Bosch print from El Museo del Prado, that's where that painting is, in Spain, in three pieces. Trip-tych. Spaniards killed poor Jews in the Inquiry and then all the poor Indians in Cuba to conquer Cuba.”

“Gosh,” she said. She had no idea what in the world I was talking about but she was riveted, in a bizarre way. This would become a leitmotif. (I've since fine-tuned it; few can handle me full-strength on the first exposure, so I always reassure people that it's the hardest one. After that it gets much easier.)

“Mm-hm, and
los
Ciboneyes, Guanahatabeyes, and
los
Taínos—those were the Cuban Indians,” I continued. “We drink Malta Hatuey—well, I don't. That's a
cerveza.
Beer. It's named for poor dead Hatuey, the Taíno Indian chief. The Spanish priest burned the chief at the stake just like poor dead Juana de Arco because Hatuey wouldn't accept Jesus. Agh! It's like something right out of the summer concentration camps, if you think about it.”