Jubana! (22 page)

As I emerged daily from Tiny's taxi I considered telling her, “Tiny, let's get lost, let them send out alarms…Let's get crossed off everybody's list…And though they'll think us rather rude we'll tell the world we're in that crazy mood…”

Maybe Tiny, who lived in a trailer cahm with a skeletal unemployed chain-smoking cancer-ridden defeated husband named Cletus, would also like to be a little runaway from the reality of her life. We could just pack up the typewriter, Agua de Violetas and TaB, get in that cab—and drive.

I
n
The Vagina Monologues,
Eve Ensler writes that you cannot love a vagina unless you love hair. That is patently ridiculous—for a Jubana. That's like saying you cannot love an eyebrow, upper lip, jaw line, armpit, arm, knuckle, leg, or the top of your big toe unless you love hair. I love my body just fine, thanks (when I and a few choice others are not abusing or neglecting it), and I'm glad I have one, considering the alternative. But the only hair that I care to have on it is what's on my head, and even that grows as if it's on steroids, thereby forcing me into Jean-Paul's very expensive hair chair on a strict monthly basis. Growth means roots, of course. When Papi had surgery for a (benign, thank God) brain tumor in September 1999—it was the second such surgery in two consecutive years—my otherwise auburn hair turned white in a week. It's quite ugly and badly textured if left uncolored anymore, so I never do. Costs an unnatural fortune just to look Jubananatural.

I have a dark-haired, olive-skinned Latina heiress acquain
tance who's had her entire body electrolysized from the hairline down—and even that was realigned.

“I used to be a gorilla,” she said.

Well, once my puberty kicked in at age twelve, I never resembled a gorilla—I'm too Ashkenazi fair, thank God—but hair that didn't used to be there before suddenly was. And until I discovered shaving, tweezing, depilatories, waxing, and electrolysis for myself, that hair was there to stay, presumably even after I expired. The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai actually wrote a poem devoted to this unfortunately eternal grooming challenge, called “I've Grown Very Hairy”: “I've grown very hairy all over my body. I'm afraid they're going to start hunting me for my fur.”

Amichai started hunting me, and not merely for my fur, when I met him at a poetry reading in Washington in the early nineties. But that's another hairy story. For now, let's just leave it that he was one of my first older men.

 

Older men would become a leitmotif in my romantic life. Though I've been lucky to have a healthy father throughout my own life—until the second and crippling brain tumor surgery—I've also had a remote father. Once I hit puberty, that remoteness became physical. I remember seeing Papi at the end of the day and when I'd go to kiss and hug him, he was like a bull butting heads with a cow.

“Why did you ever have to grow up?” Papi would say. “You were so much cuter when you were little.”

“How do you respond to that?” I'd ask Gramps, years later. “My father won't even touch me. It's like he wants to get it over with when he sees me. He's so uncomfortable. He won't sustain eye contact. It's like he's embarrassed to look at me.”

“You hug him and kiss him and look at him anyway,” Gramps
advised. “You take the lead, even if he doesn't respond at first. Believe me, you keep that up, he'll get the hang of it. You have to teach him how to show love.”

“Why? Why do
I
always have to be the one to take charge of every fucking thing? Teach my own father. Why can't someone else be the mensch for a change?”

“Because,” Gramps said, “you're stronger than the people around you. Certainly you're the strongest person in your whole fucking fucked-up family.”

My whole fucking fucked-up family would have had a hysterectomy over that one. They think I'm a
pobrecita,
a poor little thing. I'm the least financially successful one of us. I'm the most observant and emotionally expressive. I'm the most creative and literary. I'm the most never-married and stuck with an alarmingly dwindling number of viable
huevos.
None of this holds any value.
Au contraire,
it creates
beaucoup de
hassle. What counts, what really matters in the Juban end?
Dinero.
Being attractive.
Dinero.
Never wearing the same outfit twice.
Dinero.
Marrying well.
Dinero.
Procreation.
Dinero.

Otherwise you're a sohkehr.
You're going to starve to death with your little poems.

As my very, very, very flush-from-nonkosher-pork-products brother Eric once remarked, most Virgo-ly, “In our, like, childhood, you were why we ever had problems and fights, okaaay?”

Okaaay! Was Eric saying this because I used to sadistically pull out his long eyelashes? Because I mimicked his strangely Valley Girlish diction and the way he made virtually every declarative statement sound, like, a question? Because whenever my parents went out on Saturday evenings and I was forced to babysit I'd throw him, baby Big Red Al, and our bulimic poodle, Martini, in the backseat of the car and take off barefoot in Mami's turquoise Corvair (garlanded with neon flower-power daisy stick
ers) on joyrides, smoking Mami's Kools and getting too mentholatedly dizzy and phlegmy to figure out how to release the emergency brake?

“I may have been only twelve or thirteen but I was an excellent driver,” I reminded Eric. “We never
once
got stopped all up and down Sixteenth Street and Military Road. And it was at
night,
too, when it's so much harder for a Helen Keller like me to see.”

“You made Martini upchuck!” Eric said. “And then we had to clean it all up before Mom and Dad got home and spray it with Lysol?”

“Are you saying we
shouldn't
have sprayed it with Lysol?”

“That's not, like, the point or whatever?”

“It's
totally
the point. Name one Hispanic, regardless of class, who does not consider hygiene first and foremost. Even in Cuba, the poorest poorest Cubans, all they ever ask all the tourists for—if sex for American cash is a no-go—is SOAP, SOAP, and SOAP.
Jabón! Jabón
forever! Lysol would be, like, the Balenciaga of hygiene products for them. Hello!”

The conversation kind of devolved from there. No one in my family, least of all my brothers, ever has any idea what I'm talking about. Anyway, I'm sure Eric was right about everything because he is a pork products prodigy in a Roberto Cavalli leather jacket. And I am, after all, not.

 

I was twelve and Rebeca was giving me what would presently become my final nightly bath with Rebeca. As I got out of the tub I said. “I'm thinking of letting my hair grow out again.”

She stared down between my legs and, smiling a weird smile, said, “You've got hair growing out all over now, don't you?”

What. A. Freak. That was the last time I allowed her or anyone else in my family to bathe me or see me naked. My new need for
modesty and privacy made Mami mad, especially when I refused to get undressed in front of fifty strange women in Loehmann's cattle call dressing room in Rockville, Maryland.

“What ees de problem?” she asked. “Deyr not lookeengh at joo!”

“I don't like being stared at,” I said. “And I don't like when
you
stare at me, either.”

“Stare? I'm joor mother! I can see whatever I wan'!”

“Actually, no. You can't. News flash: This is
my
body.”

“Dat came out of ME—an' den I had to say bye-bye to de beekeenees an' hello maillots. Stretch marks. Really really beeg ones dat don' go 'way! Ever. Ees de same theengh eef joor room ees so messy. Eet can't be because dat room ees een
my
house!
¡El que paga, manda!”
Whoever has de money has de power!

“If you and Dad want to walk around in your underwear at home,” I said, “that's your business. But I'm not. And I'm not gonna strip in this fucking dressing room. It reminds me of Auschwitz newsreels.”

“No! Eet does NOT! Eet's not at ALL like dat! Dees ees
Loehmann's,
not de cahms!
¿Tu 'tás loca?
From where do joo get dees krehsee heestohree-ohneeks? Because ees not from ME, das for choor.”

“Sunday school. That YOU send me to.”

“Cahm Auschweetz ees a totally separate eeshoo dat has notheengh to do weeth de heres an' de nows of Rockveel, Mareelan' an' Loehmann's. Joo can suffer a leetl beet in here because de prices are de rock's bottom.
Coño. ¿Qué te pasa a ti?
[Dammit. What is wrong with you?] Dees ees about de choppeengh an' de bargains, okay?—wheech ees probably de only goo' theengh about dees whole fohkeengh country—an' not about de gasses an' de chambers!
Por FAVOR. ¡Tranquilízate!”
P-LEASE. Calm down!

“I'll wait for you outside by the ‘Deep, Deeper, Deepest discount' pile. Happy strip search.”

 

Maybe those black-and-white Auschwitz newsreels really
were
too graphic for Sunday school sixth graders to see, the bulldozers sweeping up piles of naked, limp corpses. But at Temple Shalom, the Chevy Chase, Maryland, Reform shul we had joined in order to have no more “Chri-ist the Lord” episodes, students were exposed in small but unforgettable doses to Jewish realities, sometimes inadvertently, such as the fact that Passover candy sucks compared to Easter candy. (You can't beat the Reese's peanut butter egg with a jelly fruit slice. Sorry. You can't. I wrote a whole story about this in the spring of 1996 for the
Washington Post
's food section. I offended Rabbi Bruce at the time, but I earned my Gentile candy cred.)

Temple Shalom was a cozy, modest, smallish congregation, with several hundred families. It had nowhere near the power, money, and clout of the better-known Washington Hebrew Congregation in Northwest D.C., where all the big-bucks Reform Jews belonged (including the few other Jewish kids at Sidwell). But Temple Shalom was a six-minute drive away from our new Neil Greene–designed house, located two doors down from his on a leafy, peaceful cul-de-sac of Neil Greene–designed houses, some of them with swimming pools in the basement, in Silver Spring. No swimming pool for us, but there was a turquoise bidet for Mami and lots and lots of wall space for Mami to hang all her suicidal Carroll Sockwell paintings and an atrium that Mami called “de hole een my house” from the roof skylight all the way down three floors to a boxed-in garden in the basement. From its top hung a cascading series of huge round glass light fixtures on white cords like an Alexander Calder mobile vertically turned on
its side. Before dinner parties Papi would get a broom and pull in the cords to Windex
mis bolas,
my balls, as he called them. I used to tell my Sidwell friends that many, many men gave their lives to build the new manse, falling straight down the atrium shaft to their untimely deaths. A few gullible ones believed me. Sohkehrz.

I think Papi wanted to build Mami a castle, to re-create or recapture or in any event approximate what we'd lost in Cuba after the fall and the expulsion from paradise, something grand, something amazing, something that could never be taken away. But the money ran out before the construction ended. This is because of my family's tenacious Cuban belief in dreams, magic, the fantasy of infinite resources. In reality, we were comfortable, not rich. That discrepancy, however, was at odds with Papi's need to always say yes, to Mami especially. It
seemed
as though nothing was beyond our reach and that we'd never ever have to really worry about money. That wasn't true, of course. But it is impossible to live within your means if your past life, a wistful, forlorn Cuban siren song, keeps beckoning and beguiling you like Circe. Americans say, “I think I'll re-create myself.” Cubano exiles say, “I think I'll re-create my pre-Castro Cuban life.”

It's like in
The Great Gatsby,
when, late at night, after another crazy party at his mansion, Gatsby tells Nick all that he expects from Daisy: to tell her husband, Tom, that she never loved him and to marry Gatsby:

“I wouldn't ask too much of her,” [Nick] ventured. “You can't repeat the past.”

“Can't repeat the past?” [Gatsby] cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

Baba Dora offered to make up the rest of the funds needed to finish the new house. She and Zeide Boris had been living with us in the guest room of the Southwest town house while Zeide was in
the last stages of liver cancer. After our family's six-month Miami Beach layover in Las Casitas Verdes, Baba Dora and Zeide Boris and several of our cousins, uncles, and aunts settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, where there were plenty of textile jobs in the mills. It was hardly Camisetas Perro. The
Schindler's List
grayness of my grandfather's pre-Cuban life in Belarus had turned to blinding Technicolor in Cuba. Now after Castro, the grayness returned like
The Wizard of Oz
in reverse, Dorothy Galeowitz falling asleep in color and awakening to a black-and-white world. Sometimes we'd drive down I-95 South to my
abuelos'
modest Charlotte home and stay for a week, Mami's front seat Kool smoke blowing into my backseat face for seven straight hours, gagging me and intensifying my car sickness. My brothers and I would scramble out of the smoke-congested car and run around our grandparents' little house, Baba serving us orange-flavored Hi-C punch and ham sandwiches with French's mustard, melancholy Zeide smoking his cigars and having shots of
wiski
with Mami as the wet laundry flapped on the line in the backyard breeze.

In 1965 Zeide had developed cancer in his left eye. The eye was removed, and he wore a prosthetic one. The cancer eventually returned, though, this time to Zeide's liver. So he and Baba moved in with us for the last three months of his life. Mami came home from work every day at lunchtime to be with Zeide. She'd lie down next to him in his special rented hospital bed, and they'd talk. On the night of August 22, 1968, Zeide fell into a semicoma. My parents took him to Prince George's Hospital Center in über-gauche Cheverly, Maryland, where Papi had hospital privileges. I somehow felt Zeide would not make it because it was a Thursday. Thursdays in 1968 were horrendous: April 4, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and June 6, when Bobby Kennedy was killed. I remember going to see the Beatles'
Yellow Submarine,
and the tag line on the poster in the theater read, “The forces of good! The forces of evil!” I always thought of that whenever Gramps reminded me of
my
internal civil war.