Jubana! (14 page)

Otherwise, I've always loved having people's hands in my hair. Sometimes a good shampoo, like the wonderful aromatherapy ones I get at my Foxhall Square hairdresser's in D.C., or a head rub, like the amazing ones my Raleigh, North Carolina, masseur Darryl gave, can be better than sex, and last longer. Must everything really always be about genitalia, end of story? How limiting is that? Cubans are long, luxuriating lovers, the delight is in the lingering. We're not “efficient” in the North American microwave sense of in-timer-out-eat-over. Many's the time I've begged the un-Cuban fiancé to massage my abnormally large head, but he turns my request into a double entendre, touches my head for maybe thirty seconds, and we're right back to my hand on his penis. Sigh. If I were a lesbian I bet I'd get my head rubbed because my girlfriend would understand that pleasure and the sensual power of all the skin, and she'd do it for the sake of doing it, and not be in a hurry to get it over with to appease me and rush me along so we can move on to the Main Event of her penis, her penis, her penis. (Well, she obviously wouldn't
have
a penis, but you know what I mean.) I checked this out with a bona fide lesbian friend and she shook her head.

“Forget it,” she said. “It's no better or easier over here.”

 

Mami says that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which she claims she knew would never come to a head, we discussed it at
the dinner table every night while it lasted. I really don't remember. What I do recall is having a
very
busy TV viewing schedule in 1962. Between
Hazel, The Lucy Show, Red Skelton, The Flint-stones, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Lassie, My Three Sons,
and
Dennis the Menace,
I was alternately annoyed and transfixed watching news stories that kept interrupting my regular viewing. When John Glenn orbited the Earth in February, an event I found only mildly interesting, the Jewish joke around the house was, “Beeg deal. If joo have money joo can travel.” I thought it must've taken brillions and gazillions of dollars to get that astronaut up there, 'cause my teacher told me we were in a space race with the Soviet Union, and Mami told me we hated the Soviets because “dey are een cahoots weeth de dehveel [Castro] heemself.”

I wrote Jackie Kennedy's husband a letter, with Mami's proofreading help and Papi's four-cent stamp, asking why were we spending so many dollars on space when my Cuban family and all the other poor Cubans in exile were in greater need “because you, Mr. President John F. Kennedy, let us all down last year during the Bay of the Pigs. Really, that wasn't a good idea or nice. You should say you're sorry and will fix it. My Mami and Papi say now Fidel Castro, Adolfo Hitler's boy, thinks he's so big! And all the Cubanos here will not vote for you anymore. They'll go Republicano. Love, Gigi. P.S.: Mami says to tell you, ‘You blew it, Juanito.'”

Mr. Jackie Kennedy wrote me back a few weeks later on the most beautiful heavy ivory linen stationery I'd ever seen. (“Das notheeng compar-ed to Papi's an' my weddeengh eenveetations,” Mami said with a dismissive sniff.) The president said that he understood my position and the plight of the Cuban people and that he'd try to do better by us. But he said the space program would go forward regardless of the price because it was integral to the United States' interests in this and other hemispheres.

I didn't quite get that last part—“integral”? “hemispheres”?—but I got the gist.

“We're not gonna get any money,” I told Mami.

“Dat feegurs,” she replied, exhaling her Kool smoke and critically examining her long painted fingernails. It was time for a fresh manicure. “But ders always enough money for Jackie's hats an' choos an' for Feedehl to steal from us. Das de way eet goes.”

One day before Mami's August 6 birthday, Marilyn Monroe died. I didn't know who she was but Mami explained that she was a sad actress with fake bleach-ed hair, who didn't wear
calzoncillos,
underwear, and didn't bathe often enough and was Juanito F. Kennedy's and everybody else's lover. We watched the report on TV from Mami's bed while she preceded her “tehrahpy,” or ministering to her nails, by trimming mine. She cut straight across the edge of a tiny nail almost to the opposite end and let me pull off the rest.

“Joor nails,” she grumbled, shaking her head. “Andursky nails. Soft an' chort an' bendy.
Coño.
Benes nails are hard and long an' strong.
Mujeres Cubanas
have to have nice nails. Ees our trademark. I'm goheengh to buy joo gelateen. Knox.”

“Fort Knox, I heard of that. It's where the gold is.”

“Right but dees Knox ees like Jell-O,” Mami said, blowing the emery board dust off my nails. “Joo eat eet. Ees goo' for de nails.”

The collective bouquet of acetone, nail polish, espresso, burning Kools, and dead movie stars without underwear had me dazed, entranced. I felt like a little bug on a drug. But not a gross
bicho
like a
gusano
or a, God forbid, termite or a
cucaracha
like poor dead Franz Kafka. Maybe like a
mariquita,
a ladybug. They don't hurt anybody and you should never kill one because they're good luck. I could definitely use some of that.

A
Jubana never forgets her first WASP. And Valerie Ogus, Vancouver-born second wife of D.C. insurance magnate Walter Ogus, was mine. This exotic creature was related to us by marriage; Walter was Baba Dora's first cousin. Like Baba's, Walter's origins were Lithuanian. His family migrated during the turn of the century and settled in Boston and then in Washington, D.C. By the time I met the Oguses, in the early or mid-sixties, they seemed über-American, almost Brahmin. Walter came from a generation of Jewish men whose habit was to marry Jewish women first, make a ton of money, get divorced, and marry trophy shiksas. In those latter unions the men take on more WASPy attributes than the women do Jewish ones. Maybe WASPy attributes are more fun to take on. At least there's no chronic hand-wringing, depressive, brooding, fun-killing, over-introspective Woody Allen neurosis to deal with, and certainly Manischewitz is never involved. (Although you will have to learn how to drink unsweetened beverages and handle power tools/ gardening supplies/the heartbreaking fact of no dessert.)

But I suppose that if you grow up being embarrassed by or anti-Semitically harassed over your Old World
Fiddler on the Roof
shtetl Jewosity in this young Christian country, if you feel third-rate, then one way to diffuse it is by marrying out. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Hey, Gentile lust has worked huge for Ralph Lauren. And you don't even have to be a bazillionaire Polo pony designer Jew to have it work for you. Take my brother Eric. Born just three months prior to Juanito Kennedy's assassination, Eric and his generation are Doing It, too, and making it work for them, sort of. Though she officially converted to Judaism and the wedding was Jewish, my now ex-rated sister-in-law Roberta, a Minnesota farming gal, is a WASP, born and bred, through and through. And Eric is a true blue Jew, although he makes his living through a chain of fancy Southern California restaurants selling pork.
Trayf.
(At least I think that's the spelling. As my rabbi Bruce says, when it comes to transliteration of Hebrew to English, it's tough getting scholars to reach a consensus. It's a really great word, though. I love
forbidden
—unkosher—food. It's as key to the Reform Jubanique vocabulary as
puerco asado,
roasted pork loin. We see no conflict there.)

At any rate, the Oguses were warm and generous, two adjectives that frequently and tragically elude garden-variety WASPs who like gardening. The Oguses just seemed—and were—wonderful, fascinating, attractive, vivid, and really, really, really rich.

The main attraction of them for me was Valerie. I'd never seen anyone like her. Tall and slim and perpetually tanned from playing golf and swimming, she had cropped blond hair highlighted at the Lord & Taylor salon in Chevy Chase, Maryland. She had small Windex-blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, fabulous cheekbones, and wore bright pastel pink or coral lipstick. She drank like a
pargo,
a red snapper, smoked like a
chimenea,
and laughed like a
man, deep and hoarse. I think you'd call her “handsome.” A former buyer in New York for Bergdorf Goodman, Henri Bendel, and Bonwit Teller, Valerie had impeccable taste, especially in clothes. No uptight, portly Talbots matron, she, nor remote, anorexic Truman Capote swan—the only two WASP subspecies I'd seen up till then on TV and in magazines and catalogues. Valerie had inborn, unteachable, eternally untrendy chic, the kind mere mortals can aspire to but never quite grasp. To me she was Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn in one, relaxed and upbeat and no-nonsense in her effortless glamourosity and decisive femininity, but with an eclectic, interesting, witty, eccentric edge that precluded her from ever being an Ordinary Gentile. I lived surrounded by Gentiles in my Southwest D.C. neighborhood, of course, but not like Valerie. I seriously doubt Valerie could relate to my double Dutch Baptist divas, and vice versa.

Valerie always reminded me of the kind of gal you'd have seen dancing and drinking it up and laughing the night away (with her head thrown back) at Truman Capote's Black and White Ball. Only if Valerie had been invited, she probably would have skipped it. Society types, poseurs, and society-type poseurs weren't her bag. She preferred giving sumptuous yet casual and very intimate dinner parties at her palatial apartment by the Shoreham Hotel, where the drinks were strong and the entrées never varied. Valerie's signature dish (she did all the cooking) was a big fat juicy hamburger. Sirloin only, chopped special by her Chevy Chase butcher, served bunless, like steak. French fries. Caesar salad, tossed by a designated guest. All served on individual trays and consumed in the living, never dining, room. Frank Sinatra crooned in the background about city girls who lived up the stair, with all that perfumed hair that came undone…And about blue-blooded girls of independent means who'd ride in limousines, their chauffeurs would drive…

“I was always plaster-ed—an' how—whenever I was der,” Mami recalls. “Eet was a meestehry to me as to why.”

Eventually Papi figured it out. He explained it was from mixing highballs with
vino.
Mami wanted to do what Zeide Boris did, which was to have
un wiski,
or Scotch in Cubanese. So Mami would start with cocktails, usually Scotch on the rocks. Then she'd drink red wine with dinner. By the time coffee was being served, Mami was smash-ed. In keeping with certain WASP predilections, Valerie served dessert—usually high-quality vanilla bean ice cream lightly topped with an insouciant toss of ground espresso beans or grated bittersweet chocolate—only when my parents, with their Cuban sweet teeth, were present. Heavily sugared joo-name-eet is to Cubans as hard liquor is to WASPs. As for coffee, Valerie liked hers black and unsweetened, whereas we Jubans enjoy a splash of foamy black espresso in our demitasses overflowing with sugar—Cuba's best export after Jubanas.

“Valerie brought out de choogahr johs for us,” Mami says. “Because I told her from day one dat dat wasn't ohpshonal. Eet was, like, ‘Here come de Cubans!'—an' reach for de choogahr, honey.”

The sugar and the closet. Mami was the best-dressed refugee around, courtesy of the exquisite castoffs from Valerie's perfectly and ongoingly edited yet significant haute couture wardrobe. One dress was more kill-me-now beautiful and luxurious than the next. The flawlessly tailored and lined little black day dress in silk and wool crepe that Mami wore with pearls and killer heels to her mental hospital job interviews? Valerie's old Jackie Kennedy–worthy Nina Ricci. It was like the rhyme I sang with my Baptist divas when we played patty-cake, only taken to a finer level: “Miss Mary Mack-Mack-Mack, all dressed in black-black-black, with silver buttons-buttons-buttons, all down her back-back-back…” The orgasmic sleeveless hand-beaded satin and silk
brocade ball gown in a pattern of swirling big tomato-red and black and gold bejeweled paisley on an ivory background with the triangle peekaboo cutout between the bosom and the waist, the dreamy confection that trailed along the floor in a rustle like a happy woman's sigh? The festeev dress Mami hardly ever wore because she was a ceeveel servant? Valerie's old Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute–worthy Ben Reig.

Bliss for me to be there inside Valerie's dressing room, luxuriating and lingering in the lushness of superb fabrics—shantung, organza, chiffon, satin, Italian cotton pique, scalloped lace, cashmere, crepe de chine—that embraced me in their fullness from their hangers as I sank into them like a vertical hammock, breathing in my ladies' smoke. T. S. Eliot, it
was
perfume from a dress that made me so digress, digress right into a little girl's projected dreamland of what being a real lady would be like someday. Colorful rows of strappy sandals, mules, slides, and sling-back and pump stilettos (lots of spectator styles in there), each pair light as meringues; impossibly thin ivory and black silken slips and half slips that smelled of Joy; sell your firstborn to the Gypsies for the sapphire, pearl, diamond, gold, and platinum pieces of estate jewelry. It was all like being inside a more compact El Encanto. You'd have to be etherized or expired not to
lohvee.

To imagine having all this taken away, wrested from your clutches by some illiterate asshole hick guerrilla reeking of B.O.—
Gahd!
Valerie lived the way we did before Castro. To never have to think about money or comfort or well-being or peace of mind or miss what used to belong to you…Feeling so close to everything we lost…

I burst into tears.

“¿Qué pasó?”
Mami shrieked, abruptly turning to me, bare-
foot and only half zipped into a fitted sleeveless poufy-skirted black silk Dior cocktail dress with a plunging neckline and a rhinestone buckle on the matching belt encircling the tiny waist.

“Gigi?” Valerie said, her nicotine and alcohol-marinated voice a beacon of eternal reassurance.

“I'm too happy!” I said, standing up. Something hard was digging into my naked archless cutlet. It was the heel of a pointy black silk velvet stiletto with an ornamental rhinestone accent on the vamp, meant to be worn with the dress Mami was trying on. I picked up the shoe and held it in my hand tenderly, as you would do for a delicate baby bird fallen out of its nest or a holy relic from a lost realm.

“I'm too happy,” I repeated, sniffling and steaming up my horrendous baby-blue cat-eyes. “God must have sent you to rescue us.”

Valerie hoisted me in her long, tanned arms and squeezed me tight to her, kissing my nape. She smelled like expensive flowers. Roses, maybe, with a touch of…was it freesia? Lily? Hyacinth? Peony? Lilac? All of those, none of those?

“This child,” Valerie said. “I'm wild about this goddamn child!”

 

My brother Eric's diaper might've needed changing, but that didn't deter him from his crawling rounds at the forty feet of our twenty dinner guests. We could now accommodate more visitors in our home at one time because we'd moved from our “drama an' a reevehr” apartment into a little town house nearby in a development called River Park. Our new place had central air and heat and a sliding glass door leading to a small enclosed backyard with grass in it. Eric and I each had our own room. Mine was upstairs, overlooking the street and directly above the front door. My bedroom ceiling was sloped, which I liked because it lent the
room an attic-y feel, and the walls were painted deep, bright aqua, which I loved, green being my favorite color. And the furniture may have been inexpensive—most of the pieces were wicker that had been painted white—but at least it was comfortable and pretty and we'd bought it ourselves. No more of that horrible rented junk.

“He's adooorable,” said Josephine from Mississippi, her eyes on Eric. Fiercely entrepreneurial from birth, my little brother had a shoe shine kit and he was going around the room with his wooden box containing brushes, buffing cloths, and cans of black and brown shoe polish. His asking price for a shine was a quarter but people usually tipped him a dollar.

“Tha-yutts just precious!” Josephine added, extending her leg to Eric's ministrations and exhaling her Salem cigarette smoke. “This boy is somethin' else. Go ahead, sugar, have at mah shoes.”

Had his forte been, say, sketching quick caricatures, Eric would've done it. The disciplined, driven way he worked rooms was just amazing. His knack for money-making would “take him far,” Josephine's husband, Joe Abraham Lincoln, noted. My nice third grade teacher, Mrs. Scott, and her husband thought so, too. (Mami always invited my teachers and their husbands over for dinner.) I'm so sorry, did I miss something? Did somebody have a secret how-to-get-ahead-in-the-world meeting while I was busy poring over my
Seventeen
s and writing my little poems and stories on scraps of paper and playing with my redheaded Barbie in her hot-pink patent leather wardrobe case?

“I want to talk to you,” Valerie told me, putting down her cocktail and extinguishing her cigarette in an ashtray Mami had stolen from La Omega, a Cuban restaurant in Adams-Morgan. I climbed into her lap, facing her and careful not to show the other guests my floral
calzoncillos,
panties, under my sleeveless turquoise, violet, and lime faux Pucci cotton micro-mini-dress.
(Unlike Mami, I always gravitated toward happy colors. Life was tough enough living with former mental patients' suicidal black-and-blue self-portraits hanging on every wall, thank you.) On that summer night I also had on a stretchy turquoise hair band that matched my shift. I liked being coordinated. All Jubanas must be. I had accumulated a vast collection of assorted hair bands, barrettes, ponytail holders, and clips; by then my hair was down to my waist. I wrapped my legs around Valerie's hips, tucking the naked cutlets underneath. I lived for nights and weekends, when I could liberate the cutlets from their cookie confinement and be barefoot. Valerie took a good look at me, smoothing the little soft short wisps hovering above my forehead.

“What do you want most in the world?” she asked.
To memorize everything you wear so I can look like you do.
I did have a seemingly useless knack for acute fashion memory. Regarding beautiful women dressed beautifully was instructive and inspirational, not to say natural. I'd done that since I was a baby. Valerie was wearing a navy boat-neck pullover with white stripes and three-quarter sleeves, yellow gold and iridescent white pearl Chanel button earrings, a gold watch with a red alligator strap, white capri slacks, and quilted red satin ballet flats. Very Lulamae–Holly Golightly. Thanks to Valerie, I was learning the lexicon of fashion. She said, “God is in the details.”

“What do I want the most?” I said. “No brother.”

I rolled my eyes as Eric industriously shined his fifth pair of shoes. It was as if he had on invisible blinders and could see only what was right in front of him. Mami and Papi regarded their son with awe and infinite admiration. You know, Judaic-Latino parentals, firstborn male, etc. I'd been dethroned by a towheaded toddler in wet diapers who shined shoes for money. But! If your parents insist on having sex (whatever that was) without using protection (whatever
that
was) and refuse to consult you so you
can, like, weigh in, there's really nothing you can do about it. I knew one thing for sure, though, and nobody had to articulate it to me in words: This was about
princesa
dethronement, Hispanic style, by the arrival of brothers. This isn't a simple sibling rivalry thing—that's kid stuff. This is having to confront the profound Hispanic reality and dirty not-so-little secret that no matter how much your parents love you, they will always prefer their sons. You have eggs. Your brothers have penises. It's as simple as that. It's a general worldview, boys and girls are not equally valued. Hence, not equally treated. No matter how enlightened you may believe you are as a Mundo Latino member, penises beat eggs. Every time. There's no contest in a Latin home. Egg girl, joo lose. Really. We Latinas can't even keep our own eggs as
eggs;
the noun's been co-opted by LatinOs as slang for their testicles. THEIR testicles. Yep. Machismo's not fair, it's not right, but it is what it is. Consider the breast.
Seno.
It's masculine, for God's sake:
El seno.
The butt? Both forms, polite (
fondillo,
or seat) or vulgar (
culo,
or ass)—are also masculine. Okay, so now we've forfeited our eggs, breasts, and butts to
hombres.
What do we have left, anatomically speaking?
La cabeza,
the head (and, accordingly,
la mente,
the mind). As Mami Dearest would say, joos eet or loos eet.