Jubana! (18 page)

The clock on Dumbo's desk struck noon. “Rebeca's an Andean Eva Braun but she can cook,” I told him. “Look, I really have to eat now. Please. Get me food. Or I might say ain't and my mother might faint and my father might fall in a bucket of paint.”

He regarded me, stupefied.

“Double Dutch,” I explained. “Not lacrosse.”

 

I once asked my rabbi, Bruce Kahn, where God went during the Holocaust. Bruce said, “If we knew the answer to that, we'd be God. But there's more to it than that. I believe that God's power is all over, everywhere for us to take in and utilize. We blame God for our failures. God has given us the clearest possible understanding of what the sacredness of life is about and what we must do to safeguard it. And if we're told to stop brutality and hatred and murder, let alone genocide, and we ignore all the warnings we're receiving and all God's guidance to take action against it—and it happens, why is it that God is to blame? That is to say that human beings are less than puppets.”

“Bruce,” I said, “you are a god. Small G, don't get nervous.”

“Nah. I'm a servant of God. But seriously, think about it: If you're given all the power, insight, and direction you need and you wind up with a tragedy on your hands, whose failure was it?”

“I don't know. Is this like that ‘when bad things happen to good people' attitude?”

“Was the Holocaust God's failure or that of the human race? When you do everything you can to instruct a child to not do something that would hurt the child and the child does it anyway…And we're talking about children here, not adults.”

“So we poor little Jew people are to blame?”

“No, I'm not talking about the victims of the camps but of the leadership of the world that had an awareness of the rise of Hitler and his genocidal message and who chose appeasement as opposed to prevention. So I think that God was rarely as disappointed in the human race as He or She was when the world wouldn't deal with the rise of Hitler and Nazis. I'm sure some Jews who died refused to face and deal with what was really happening—some led very narrow lives and were not that sophisticated. But the majority had no adequate awareness or options to do much different from what they did.”

In my current Sidwellian context, that meant Mami and Papi chose to listen not to me but to their friends. And I had nothing to do but go there to that preppie cahm.

“The approach of the world is to not deal with the ethic that it espouses,” Bruce added. “People will in lots of personal ways but when it comes to real decision-making, it's very difficult. There are usually other considerations than the morality of right and wrong: financial gain, political or some other kind of prestige. The expediency overrules those other ethics—justice, the saving of life, and imitating the goodness of God.”

As usual, Bruce, a reservist naval chaplain, said a mouthful. I
say that God and the parentals must have had something
extremely
mysterious in mind on the day Sidwell accepted me, one of the singularly worst days of my single-digit-aged life, and God knows I'd already had my share: Cuba and Cecilia and guerrillas and my stolen little red tricycle and Rebeca and my broken finger and tight shoes and black parents rejecting me as their own were all bad enough—and now
this?
Why didn't God go and smack Mami and Papi upside the head and make them send me to Maret or Georgetown Day School instead of to Sidwell? Manny Roman says I obsess over imponderables. I'm sure it's all the
café con leche.

 

“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.