Jubana! (2 page)

Cubans and Jubans are funny about names. Everyone gets nicknamed. On my birth certificate, it says “Beatriz Anders Benes.” That is, of course, wrong. My given name is Rebeca Beatriz Anders y Benes. Rebeca is for my maternal grandfather Boris's mother. Mami Dearest wasn't crazy about it, but (1) Jews name kids after dead relatives and (2) she said it was the only thing her father had ever asked her to do for him.

Beatriz is for my father's maternal grandmother. Benes is Mami's maiden name. Though I personally like Rebeca and Beatriz, I've never been called either, not even derivatives of them. I think Gigi and its derivatives—Geeg, La Gig'—become my carbonated personality better anyway. Mami fell in love with Colette's
Gigi,
then Alan Jay Lerner and Vincente Minnelli's
Gigi,
and it stuck. Being nicknamed after a Gallic courtesan-in-training?
Pas de problème!
But in Cuba they called me Yiyi or La Yiya. One of Mami's 750 best friends was named Yiyi, and so that made it stick even more.

When I became a published writer twenty-five years later, I used Gigi Anders as my
Washington Post
byline. I once asked one of my Style section editors to let me use Rebeca B. Anders, just to see what it looked and felt like. She allowed me to do that one time, and never again, explaining that Gigi Anders was now my trademark, and perfect for a Style writer, a fun name evoking French poodles, rhinestone collars, bubble baths, and pink accessories, such as TaB. She was right.

The problem with Gigi versus Rebeca was school records, doctors' patient files, taxes, credit cards, health insurance, bank statements, social security and immigration documents, passports, and freelance check payments. Everything was constantly screwed up because nobody could ever figure out who I really was, legally speaking. As for me, it was all very confusing. In terms of identity, this was one massive matzo ball to tackle. If you're not even sure what your
name
is, where do you start to figure yourself out? Typically, Mami did not anticipate what difficulties her caprice would cause.

By 2001 I just couldn't take it anymore. So I went downtown to the cute little court building in Raleigh, North Carolina—I worked at the
Raleigh News & Observer
and, having moved to Raleigh from Washington, D.C., I thought everything appeared cute and little in comparison—and legally changed my name to Gigi Anders, thereby consolidating my personal, professional, and legal identities, and completely upsetting Mami. Legally changing your name is like getting a tattoo: You don't want to tell your parents beforehand. You have to present it to them as a fait accompli.

The following Thanksgiving up in suburban Germantown, Maryland, I was seated with my family (minus Papi, who was not up to it, and the fiancé, who had temporarily broken up with me in order to, among other things, avoid this very Juban social obli
gation) at my brother Big Al and sister-in-law Andrea's tarmac-size tiger maple French Country dining room table.

“I legally changed my name,” I announced to no one in particular. Nobody was listening. You couldn't hear much above the din of Juban chewing and slurping. I cleared my throat.

“Hello!” I hollered. “Hello?” A herd of well-coiffed heads full of turkey,
gahntze tzimmes
(a big, sweet Jewish stew of brisket, carrots, prunes, dried apricots, and sweet potatoes), and
frijoles negros
(black beans) turned in my direction. “I wanted to let you all know that I legally changed my name.”

“¿Qué?”
Mami said, puzzled.

“Yep. I am now legally Gigi Anders. I went down to the Raleigh courthouse and—”

“Wow,” said Big Al, aka Big Red, high-fiving me with the tip of his black bean–encrusted drumstick. “Pretty cool, Geeg!” The boy is a Little League coach who somehow has managed to turn himself into a physician.

Mami was still fixated on my latest name-dropping bomb-shell.

“Say again, joo went WHERE an' deed WHAT?”

“Courthouse,” I said. “Legally changed my name.”

“To WHAT?” You could tell Mami was getting worked up because she emphasized each word by stabbing the table with the lit end of her Kool. Observing this, Andrea, who's vigilant over her furniture and disallows smoking in her home, silently, mentally strangled her.

“To WHAT?” Mami repeated.

Now here's the thing: Mami has perfect hearing and a master's in psychiatric social work. She looks and acts like a young, redheaded Lana Turner. She's lived in this country and has spoken its language, sort of, for more than four decades. She's a worldly, accomplished, professional person with more
outfits than poor dead Princess Diana ever dreamed of owning in her sadly abbreviated lifetime, and more shoes than Imelda Marcos (in fact, Papi's nickname for Mami is Imelda). Yet Mami makes me repeat and reexplicate everything I say as though she's a dimwitted, illiterate, recently arrived, monolingual refugee.

“What do you mean, ‘to what?'” I told her. “To Gigi Anders. Have you ever once called me Rebeca? Rebby? Bex? Beca? Becky? Beatriz? Bea? Beckay? Triz?”

“Triz?” Dr. Big Red Al said. “What the F is that?” He recapped his gigantic jockstrap laugh, shaking his abnormally huge head of fire-red hair. Andrea languidly glanced at him with no expression, returning her gaze to the two smoldering spots darkening her imported tiger maple runway table.

“No, you have not,” I continued, trying futilely to be logical and unsentimental—two adjectives rarely associated with Jubans. “I mostly did this because my taxes—”

Andrea was now up and alternately patting the table burns with a damp cloth and some orange oil.

“My father,”
Mami tearfully commenced, verbally italicizing every word,
“my father never ask-ed me to do anytheengh for heem. De only theengh my father ever ask-ed me to do was to name joo after hees mother.”

Satisfied with her ministrations, Andrea, the soul of Jewish-American tact and brown lipstick, correctly determined it was time to extricate herself and the babies, my niece, Lauren, and my nephew, Jack, from what smelled like a looming Juban shit storm. She feels lucky not to be Cuban at such moments, and really, who could blame her?

“Ooo-kay, it's time to say good night,” Andrea said, dipping each baby straddled on her hips to kiss each guest.

“Well, you can call me Rebeca or Beatriz anytime you like,” I
told Mami, kissing Lauren and Jack. “It's still on my birth certificate.”

Mami shot me The Look. It is not a Good Look. It's a withering combo platter of brutal disapproval, derision, outrage, insultedness, condescension, resentment, woundedness, and wild rage. It's beyond words.

Mami wouldn't speak to me for the entire 22.41 miles home, seething silence being one of her favorite punitive techniques. She just turned up Vivaldi's
Il cimento dell'Armonia e dell'-Invenzione
(Trial Between Harmony and Invention) to decibels heretofore unknown to civilization, lit up a Kool, and drove like a fucking NASCAR freak. She doesn't think of a car as a motor vehicle; for her, it's a weapon. Years ago I gave Mami a Cathy Guise-wite key chain with a picture of a crazed Cathy behind a steering wheel. The caption read, “I OWN the road!” Mami took it to heart, and whenever she's in this state of mind, even hard-core maniac Capital Beltway drivers timidly yield to her white Honda SUV.

“I like to scare dem,” she always says. “Sohkehrz.”

 

Yiyita,
my grandfather Boris called me. Born in poverty in czarist Russia, Zeide (Grandpa in Yiddish) Boris came to Cuba from Kraisk, a place so obscure that no map shows it, in Belarus, near the capital, Minsk. In 1941, during the German bombing, Minsk was pretty much decimated, and my grandfather's parents and siblings were killed, or so we believe. They didn't exactly keep strict shtetl records in those days.

Zeide Boris never spoke of his childhood. He said he didn't want to burden us with so many sad stories. Mami gleaned a few biographical details: Zeide Boris had never had toys back in Russia, so he improvised by playing with stray bullet shells and cas
ings he found on the shtetl grounds. He had two brothers, and the parents, one of whom I'm named after, only had enough money to get one son out of Russia in order to not have to serve in the army. So they sent Boris, who at sixteen was within the then-draft age. My grandfather's skin was dark and swarthy, olive. His thick, straight hair was so shiny and black it was almost blue, like Hawaiians'. He was big, compact, dignified, and hardly ever smiled. He loved fine cigars and playing
dominós
and drinking a shot of good whiskey every night after work. Zeide Boris had a wise, compassionate, sad, faraway look behind his green semi-Asian eyes. Mongolian eyes.
Achinados,
Cubans call it. Chineseified. When I was a little child I once asked Mami why Zeide Boris had such unusual and striking features.

“Are joo keedeengh?” she answered, incredulous. “Back den een dos days everybody rap-ed everybody else! Pogroms, joo know? What ees a pogrom?”

“When they come and hurt poor Jews, like in
Fiddler on the Roof.”

“Das right.”

“And when they come and hurt poor black people, like in
To Kill a Mockingbird.”

“Exactly! Ohldoh Gregory Peck was so beauteefool den, joo know. Ahteekohs Feench. I lohvee.”

“And when they come and hurt poor women, like Dulcinea in
Man of La Mancha.”

“Eet was johs rape, rape, rapeenghs,” Mami said, “all throughout de heestohrees. Johs beeleeohns an' zeeleeohns of eh-sperms an' eggs just goheengh krehsee! Dat ees why der ees no such theengh as a ‘pure' race. Pure, dat ees totally crap!”

“Ivory soap, that's pure.”

“Not all de way. Ees only 99 44/100s percen' pure. I prefer Dove an' so should joo. Ivory's too harsh, joo know?”

“I don't feel clean when I use Dove. It doesn't lather up. I like that squeaky—”

“Dat ees so wrong! Squeaky ees really, really bad. Squeaky means dry, joo know? Dove ees better because eet moisturizes an' das what joo want every damn day.”

“I just SAID that I didn't want that because—”

“An' also Dove ees a symbol of freedom an' peace,” Mami continued, cutting me off. “Ivory ees what?”

“What do you mean, ‘it's what?' What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Ay, que bruta!”
Oh, what a dunce! “Ivory ees from de many, many, many dead elephan's een Ahfreeca dat dey steal for de eh-tusks. So many dead ones! Das really, really bad. Also eeleegahl.”

Sigh.

Mami has normal skin and never uses an
après
bath body lotion. If I did that I'd desiccate. Mami must be blessed with low-maintenance, naturally soft skin. I, on the other hand, am so not. With the exception of the size, shape, and color of my nice but Helen Keller–blind green-golden eyes, I've had to work it and work it hard from head frizz to discolored toenail (from self-tanning overdose, hence the perpetual need for red polish) my whole life just to approximate nonhag normality.

I like to be fairly squeaky out of the shower, then I use industrial strength lotion (Lubriderm Advanced Therapy for Extra-Dry Skin or Johnson's Creamy Baby Oil, or, in the summer months, Lubriderm Daily UV Lotion with SPF 15—I'm delicate and I fry in the sun) from the neck down while I'm still damp, giving special emphasis to elbows (with the addition of Aquaphor Healing Ointment), butt (aforementioned Lube mixed with any good firming body lotion containing alpha hydroxy acid—you'd never want an unsmooth, saggy butt—plus Blisslab's Lemon + Sage Soft Oil
Spray Silky Soothing Skin Soak, which smells delicious and helps the first two ingredients to “slide”), and feet (regular Lube and several squirts of Johnson's Baby Oil, or Burt's Bees' Coconut Foot Creme with Vitamin E, followed immediately by a pair of thick white cotton socks). Then I sprinkle Johnson's Baby Powder with Aloe & Vitamin E Pure Cornstarch under my breasts and in between my legs to absorb any excess lubrication. Otherwise I'd literally stick to myself all day. (I repeat the baby powder routine at night before I go to bed because, at risk of sounding like a douche commercial, it makes me feel fresh.)

Unfortunately, this means that everything in my bathroom—the floor, especially—perpetually has a filmy white layer of
polvo,
powder, all over it. Which is why I'm a maniac about cleaning my bathroom at least once a week.

At any rate, my feet are so soft from having performed the daily moisturizing sacrament for decades, that some years ago my friend Sharyn began referring to them as “the pounded veal cutlets,” which eventually got shortened to “the PVCs” or simply “the cutlets.” A navel-pierced
Raleigh News & Observer
colleague once noted that my toes are so little and round, they look like grapes. My Vietnamese aesthetician, Christine, always says there's no point in charging me for a pedicure because there's nothing to do to my feet except paint the toenails. She means there's no yucky dry skin, calluses, or corns to fix, smooth, cut, exfoliate, and/or sandblast. The fiancé once remarked that my entire body is a cutlet because I take care of it. That was one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten. What do American women do, just never moisturize? And who are these men's first wives who don't?

Suddenly bored with both the topic of the right body soap and the fact that I wasn't agreeing with her choice, Mami abruptly
changed thematic lanes without signaling, signaling being for sohkehrz.

“De point ees,” she declared, lighting a Kool and exhaling an elegant plume of mentholated smoke into my face, “everybody ees an eenterracial meex of everytheengh. Probably Heetlehr was part mulatto like hees demon eh-spawn, Feedehl. Dey both bought eento dat beegehst lie dat white ees right. Dey were de two beegehst, most self-hayteengh beegohts! Dat was der whole problem! Ees so ohbveeohs.”