Jubana! (24 page)

“What?” Peggy said.

“Lanz of Salzburg. They make the best flannel nightgowns for winter. Tyrolean prints are so cozy and sweet and toasty. Nerdy but fabulous. My mom couldn't believe
The Sound of Music
movie, though. She goes, ‘Dat Maria ees so fake. Nobody can be dat goo.'”

Peggy began singing: “‘Edelweiss, Edelweiss/Every morning
you greet me/Small and white, clean and bright/You look happy to meet me.'”

In spite of that raging Austrian anti-Semitism, I joined right in. I really love that song. And I've always been good at memorizing words and lyrics.

“‘BLO-ssom of snow, may you bloom and grow,'” we continued.

I was beginning to feel better. Music can change everything, especially mood and outlook. Try staying depressed while listening to, say, “Here Comes the Sun,” one of my all-time fave songs. Peggy's black eyes planted themselves on where she approximated my nipples must be. My breasts, like the rest of my body, were becoming Cubanly voluptuous, the absolute worst kind of body type you could ever have at Sidwell Enemies. Sidwellemies. I was so trying to fit in, if only sartorially, and it was so not working. Petite busty girls with curvaceous derrières look absurd in asexual L. L. Bean or Brooks Brothers striped rugby pullovers and flat-butt straight-leg khakis or thin-wale cords and Earth shoes, combat boots or Clarks Wallabee suede ankle moccasin desert boots—a Sidwell female's idea of stylish, feminine dressing. (Fridays were casual, but still heinously conservative. We weren't even allowed to wear blue jeans for the first few years.) Peggy placed her hands in front of her own nonexistent chest and began making outward circles, suggesting big growing breasts.

“Bloom and grow forever,” she continued singing. She was laughing. Her symmetrical teeth were gigantic white peppermint Chiclets. I had ugly braces on my teeth. Like my frizz-prone hair (amusing new hormones had altered its previously straight, glossy texture); astigmatism; myopia; flan-size pores; acne-prone and perpetually ruddy—in the T-zone—oily complexion (same amusing new hormones struck); soft, short nails; and flat, wide feet, Mami blamed my acute dental sensitivity and need for ortho
dontia on Papi and the Andurskys. My orthodontist turned out to be ineffectual—my teeth actually worsened after his treatment, causing me to have to get braces all over again as an adult—but my parents kept sending me to him because he was a distant Jewish relative and his office was three minutes away from our house.

“‘Edelweiss, Edelweiss,'” Peggy derisively sang on, solo. She was sniggering and laughing so hard she could barely snort out the rest of the words. “‘Bless my homeland forever.'”

I'd long since stopped singing. It was happening again: The blood ascending under my cheeks up through my temples, the streaky squeamy sweaty wet all over. I felt myself melting. Peggy was one wicked Baroness Elsa Schraeder. To take a perfectly innocent, sweet song about a flower and perversify it into a mean little put-down over something I had no control over…I stood there for a minute, watching Peggy stride away confidently, her mile-wide North American shoulders still shaking from her laughter.

This was some kind of country. You had to assert yourself constantly: Kill or be killed. It was exhausting. Was life in the United States just one long Western shoot-out? Because it sure as hell wasn't my tradition. Jews and Cubans really aren't into that Big John–High Chaparral sort of thing. So instead I thought about the story of David and Goliath. Did David
like
having to deal with Goliath? No. But he did. He had to. And it may have happened three thousand years ago in the Middle East, but I felt David's chutzpah and courage was applicable to me in the sixth grade in 1969 in Washington, D.C. It was then my Jubanite BTT (Bullshit Tolerance Threshold) kicked in. It tripped the alarm in my brain, making it beep.

“Hey Peggy!” I said, running to catch up with her. “If you're jealous 'cause I've got great big fabulous Cuban bazoomies and
you have, like, none, maybe you need to see somebody. My mom could get you a shrink. My dad could recommend a plastic surgeon. Board certified. And now, as the baroness would say,
‘Auf wiedersehen,
darling.'”

Peggy Loomis stayed far far far away from me after that. One maroon and gray
gringa
Goliath sohkehr down, seventy-plus to go.

W
hat marks a rite of passage? In my own life, my Bat Mitzvah, for one. What was supposed to be a profoundly serious and moving event—I confirmed my religion before I learned geometry—was recorded for posterity but no record exists. (And I'm not just saying that because my little friends and I snuck into my bedroom afterward for a post–rite of passage passage, i.e., smoking pot for the first time, and I was hazy.)

I'll explain. Stay with me here, you need context. Catholic Latinas have a rite of passage ceremony on their fifteenth birthday called the
quinceañera,
or simply
los quince.
You wear a massive dress resembling a lace parade float, your parents go into massive debt for the ensuing fiesta, and you get a massive number of gifts. Many of those gifts will not be cash or checks and will therefore be disappointing. But! Your well brought-up mami will make you send enthusiastic hand-written thank-you notes to everybody. Expressing appreciation is what civilized people do. It smacks of maturity. As the old saying goes, Today you are a woman. Tomorrow it's back to eighth grade.

For pre-Castro Jewesses, however, there was no corresponding ritual. (Just as there wasn't and isn't for Catholic Hispanic boys. This must be because all such boys are born grown-up macho men.) Sure, Jubano boys all had Bar Mitzvahs at thirteen, as Papi did. Traditional Judaism, like all traditional religions, is patriarchal. Some may even say misogynistic, but let's not go there. Anyhow, there was no Reform Judaism in pre-Castro Cuber. You had Conservative (my family belonged to El Patronato de la Casa de la Comunidad Hebrea de Cuba), and you had Orthodox, and neither recognized a girl's coming-of-age. So Jubanas co-opted the
quinceañero.
Any excuse to shop for cute new outfits.

“Beauteefool party een our home,” Mami recalls of her own
quince.
“My long dress was light blue embroider-ed organza. I have a peecture.”

Too bad I don't. Not a single one. Of my Saturday, May 22, 1971, Bat Mitzvah, I mean. Not that I'm bitter. It was only the most important day in my young Jewish life. I had only spent six intensive months every day after school at the Hebrew teacher's house, preparing my haftorah and crash-learning the Other mother tongue. We had only invited one hundred friends and relatives from across the country to the ceremony at Temple Shalom and to the lunch party catered in the new house's expansive backyard. Plus, I had to pay, albeit at a discount, a klepto Sidwellemy consort for a huge eye shadow palette I coveted. You'd see makeup you wanted at the store and tell her, and she'd produce it within a week for half of the retail price. This particular item was a big plastic turquoise compact containing a virtual rainbow of assorted pastel hues, most of which picked up the colors of my bespoke Bat Mitzvah dress. In 1971 so-called granny dresses were all the rage, sort of a prairie-Victorian attitude. You'd wear them near ankle-length with kick-ass construction or cowboy boots. Mami bought the fabric, a peach, ivory, and violet
pattern of tiny roses inside vertical stripes that looked like a Victorian girl's bedroom wallpaper. We took it to Mercedes, a Cuban friend and talented seamstress who lived in Virginia. Mercedes could make anything. She once made me a wonderful ice-blue linen coat dress with faceted navy-blue buttons like Julie Christie's in
Darling.
And Mercedes made me my Bat Mitzvah dress, which I wore not with boots but with a pair of strappy low-heeled white sandals in size 7N that killed the PVCs. I spent an hour in the bathroom coordinating the makeup with the outfit.

Not that there's a single picture of it.

Mami's older brother, Tío Jaime,
quien en paz descanse
(may he rest in peace), was an amateur shutterbug. He offered to shoot the event as his gift. Ever eager to save a buck—on me, especially—Mami agreed at once. So Tio Jaime shot away, hundreds and hundreds of pix.

Not a single one came out.

Tío Jaime forgot to remove the lens cap.

It was a pivotal you-get-what-you-pay-for moment, which is why, when it was Eric's and Big Red Al's turns, Mami had professional photographers shoot their respective Bar Mitzvahs. Which is why I'm glad I was stoned for most of my own party, not that I particularly enjoy grass or similar major hallucinogens. But on that day it did kind of prepare me for the inevitable subsequent fallout. A week or two later Mami “mentioned” it as an aside, avoiding direct eye contact. I'd just returned from seeing
Klute,
however, and though I lacked the requisite don't-FUCK-with-me shag haircut and tiny pert breasts with protruding nipples, my Bree Daniels-prostitutally-inspired bullshit detector was on high alert. I was thinking,
What would Bree do? What would she say?

“Joo know, I'm really sorry about the peectures,
mumita,
” Mami said. We were in her bedroom. As usual, the TV was on, loud. Martini lay curled asleep on the bed, a pink satin ribbon
tied in her manicured head. Three hundred and ninety-seven
Hola!
and
Vanidades
magazines were stacked on the floor. Mami was sitting in a rocking chair facing the TV, surrounded by three picnic baskets containing seventeen thousand mani-and pedicure accoutrements, a lit Kool in a stolen Argentinean beefsteak restaurant ashtray, and an espresso. The combined smell of cigarette smoke, acetone, and foamy Cuban coffee permeated the air, pungent and powerful.

“Pictures?” I said in my best ironic, sardonic, world-weary Bree Daniels imitation. “What pictures? There ARE no pictures.”

“Well…”

“Way to go,
mother,
” I said. “Jesus Christ, think you can open a window? The fumes in here could kill Martini.”

Mami shot me The Look. I stared right back at her, my arms crossed.

“Joor oncle meant well,” she said. “What can joo do? Cheet happens. Das eet. De meelk ees on de floors, speelt.”

“Thanks for the memories,
mother,
” I said. “I can see why it was all worth it now. Maybe we can get Tio Jaime to shoot Eric and Alec's Bar Mitzvahs.
Mother.
”

I knew I was being insufferably bratty—which is perhaps why Papi preferred me prepubescent—but this is what hormones do to you at this age, so I couldn't help it. Mami may have felt ten times worse than I did, and was probably embarrassed and guilty as sin, too. But I didn't give a shit. She should feel bad. I saw the whole ignominy as her fault for choosing cheapness over non-cheapness and for not having used better judgment. At least I'd gotten a few good gifts out of it: Anitica, Mami's Cuban friend who had sat with her in silence in Mami's locked Miramar bedroom after Cecilia's death, had given me a beautiful antique rose gold bracelet with an opal and two tiny pearls. Nedda, the wealthy bohemian Cubana who lived in Mexico City and whom
Papi briefly dated in Cuba after a spat with Mami, had my invitation framed in an elegant hand-painted rustic Mexican frame. My Sidwell friend Laura Hart, the Lauren Bacall-ish daughter of the late Senator Philip Hart (as in Hart Senate Office Building), the distinguished Democrat from Michigan who was the only senator in his time to sport facial hair, gave me a wonderful photo album with a psychedelic pink and yellow hologram cover. Not that I'd have any B-M pix to put in it. Oh well. I could always go drown my sorrows in Laura's sunken round bathtub. Every time I'd go to sleep over I got to bathe in it. Laura would turn on the jets and sit on the rim while I'd have myself a lovely whirlpool. Plus, we never used the same towels twice. Laura's maid changed the towels and bed linens every day at that house, and not just for guests. I had no idea American people lived this way. It was so exciting.

“Joo know what?” Mami finally said, exhaling her smoke in my face in a streaming cloudy bullet. “I hope dat when joo have a daughter chee comes out johs like joo. Den an' only den weel joo know what I have to deal weeth.”

“Poor you,” I said. “You have it sooo hard. I'll bet you were just a dream angel of goodness child when you were my age. I'm sure that's what Baba Dora would say.
Mother.
”

The only reason I was able to get away with that snottiness and retain my dentiture was that Mami's lap was covered with a hardback book that was covered with a paper towel that was covered with nail polish and acetone bottles, orange sticks, and cotton puffs. Also, her nails were wet. When it's a choice between smacking your provocative pubescent upside the head and not fucking up your nails, Mama Jubanas have their priorities in order.

 

Life in general and Algebra I in particular and I were
not
getting along. Cutting class, shopping, and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
were pretty much all I had to live for. I was moody, restless, unfocused, a Jubana out of water. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
That's how teenagers are.
When I'd pile up enough demerits to get suspended for, say, talking too much in class, smoking in the bathroom, or wearing too much eyeshadow and too little minis (my fave that year was a faux pony hair micro-mini), I'd think of it as an opportunity to catch up on lost
Days (of Our Lives),
sleep, and back issues of
Seventeen, Rona Barrett's Hollywood,
and the Style section, sort of a little tasty-break from daily hell. Mami would pick me up at the unamused headmaster's office and scream obscenities all the way home as we barreled up Wisconsin Avenue and through Rock Creek Park's circuitous single lanes. She once drove so fast on Wise Road and Beach Drive, she almost ran over a Bambi!

“You practically hit that baby deer!” I yelled as we screeched past yellow-and-black horse-rider and deer-crossing road signs. “Animals live in the park! Are ya gonna try for a pony next?”

“Fohk dem,” Mami said, exhaling her Kool smoke. “Deyr not endanger-ed. But joo are. Oh an' by de way, CHOHT
UP.
Joo are grounded. Joo don' get to talk.”

“Bitch, I can smell your tires burning,” I said.

“Well guess what?” Mami said. “CHOHT
UP.
”

To teach me a REAL lesson, Mami hit me where it would hurt most: She confiscated my fabulous stolen eyeshadow compact, the one whose pastel palette I'd used to coordinate with my Bat Mitzvah dress. That was cruel. But, whatever. The suspensions only temporarily suspended my
amour fou
for talking, nicotine, makeup (I was amassing a private stockpile), and anti-Quaker haute couture. In terms of a fear factor, punitive techniques didn't work; they only made me more mutinous. I'd cut more
classes, feel madder at the punishers and more aloof about consequences. Mrs. Katharine “Kate” Henry (B.A., University of Reading; L. es L., University of Dijon), my veddy British English teacher, once observed, “Gigi, you are so veddy unbalanced!” I said, “Indeed, m'lady, I quite agree with thee. But what do we DO about it?” She just shook her hoary Dickensian head.

There it was: Observation astute, solution nonexistent. Concept: Since my intellect wasn't at issue, how about exploring other possibilities, like, oh I don't know, how about…MAYBE THE JUBANA-ANASTASIA REFUGEE PRINCESS IS FUCKING DEPRESSED IN HER HOME AND SCHOOL ENVIRONMENTS AND NEEDS TO SEE SOMEONE AND POSSIBLY MAKE SOME CHANGES. Maybe something along the lines of a really good adolescent psychiatrist. I'd have never been in this mess in the first place if only those black parents in Southwest had adopted me as I begged, cajoled, and wheedled them to. But no. And the therapeutic support option just never occurred to anyone. Sorry, but you can't expect a kid to think of everything, even a kid like
moi
—that's what teachers and parents are supposedly for. Back in the dark ages of 1972, though, depression was stigmatized. I remember feeling more depressed than usual when George McGovern dumped his Democratic presidential running mate Thomas Eagleton (whose sweet towheaded son Terry was a schoolmate and friend) because he'd had electric shock therapy and had been hospitalized for depression and bipolar disorder. That July I was on Tío Bernardo's motorboat. As we bounced through the choppy, foamy blue waters of Biscayne Bay, Tío kept hollering, at no one in particular, “MAHK-GOH-VERN! MAHK-GOH-VERN!”—that is, until MAHK-GOH-VERN made Eagleton VAH-MOOS. (Tío's battled his own depressive demons, so who could blame him?) During Jimmy Carter's administration, Tío Nano was Carter's lead negotiator in
el diálogo,
the dialogue, with Fidel Cas
tro to free thirty-six hundred political prisoners. Tío made fifty secret trips to and from Cuber to discuss the deets with El Caballo, whom Tío considered a despicable asshole. Hence, no standing on ceremony. Cubans rarely do. Tío Nano remembers it vividly:

 

FIDEL CASTRO:
(using the formal tense,
usted
):
¿Cómo está, Benes?

TÍO NANO:
(using the familiar tense,
tu
):
¿Cómo estás, Fidel?

F.C.:
¿Qué?

T.N.:
Free the thirty-six hundred political prisoners. Let them reunite with their families in Miami.

F.C.:
¿Qué?

T.N.:
You don't give a shit about them, so do it. Besides, it will make people admire you. Like a pharaoh.

F.C.:
¿Qué?

T.N.:
Moses is my hero. I align myself with him. You once said, “History will absolve me.” Prove it.

F.C.:
¿Qué?

T.N.:
And while we're at it, you owe me one million American dollars.

F.C.:
¿¡QUÉ?!?

T.N.:
That was the net worth of my father Boris Benes's business, Camisetas Perro, when you stole it in 1960. Oh, and I'll take a check, although I'd prefer cash. Then we'll understand each other better.