Jubana! (25 page)

F. C.:
¡Adios, cabrón!

 

Castro never did cough up Zeide's purloined business—
quelle surprise
—but he did the prisoners, who were tearfully welcomed back into the arms of their Miami kin. You'd think the Cuban Americans would all be grateful, right? Oh please. Tío Nano's life was practically ruined. He had so many death threats by fellow Cuban Americans that he took to wearing a bulletproof vest to
work every day for years—while he still had a job to go to, that is—and was accompanied by a bodyguard. Tía Ricky was at risk. The kids—my cousins Joel, Lishka, and Edgar—were derided at school every day. All because certain members of the exile community could not “forgive” my uncle for committing the ultimate exile sin: talking to the dictator. I'm sorry, but that is fucked up. And it hurt me, too. Whenever the
Post
sent me down to Miami on assignment, I could never meet publicly with Tío Nano—on whom I relied for background and sources—because he was such a bête noire.

“I'm persona non grata here,” Tío told me. “Eef dey see us at Versailles [restaurant], nobody weel talk to joo. Deyl theenk joor een bed weeth de dehveel. Joor life might even be een danger.”

We stuck to phoners after that.

 

Hence, back at Frenzy and barring an expander, I'd just hop the 30 bus and go down Wisconsin Avenue to Georgetown for lunch at Maison des Crêpes, which I fondly called Maison des Craps, and hot pink and lime-green espadrille perusal at Pappagallo (very Palm Beach)—or up Wisconsin Avenue to Friendship Heights to grab a bite at Booeymonger's for preshopping sustenance and then hit Woodies department store. On those days I'd instruct Tiny in the morning to pick me up wherever I was on that given afternoon. She always went along with it. Sometimes my platonic Frenzy boyfriends Rob and Peter would join me on those extracurricular excursions, and if we had the money we'd eat chef's salads with gallons of Thousand Island dressing and sweet little corncakes with butter on the side at HH (Hamburger Hamlet). Then I'd hit Woodies, with or without them. My father had given me a credit card “for emergencies only,” which had to be a joke since I didn't even have a legal driver's license yet (not that
that had ever stopped me from taking my illicit joyrides), and Papi's technical definition of “emergencies” precluded anything short of engine failure.
My
“emergencies,” however, were pretty much all retail. Mami didn't buy me enough clothes, that was all there was to it. She didn't enjoy going shopping with me because we always ended up fighting. Our styles and approaches were incompatible. She was Loehmann's, sales, quantity, earth colors, amassing. I was Ann Taylor, full-price, high-quality, happy colors, minimalist (not really, but at least my nickname was never Imelda).

For his part, Papi would do anything to preserve the domestic peace and status quo and avoid any confrontations whatsoever. So when he reviewed the credit card statements every month he never said a word, even if I had gone berserk. My semierroneous interpretation: There were no limits to what we could afford; I could only ever depend on Papi, not Mami, for financial aid; Papi felt guilty for doting on and preferring my brothers, whom he regarded with moist-eyed hero worship, so allowing me to charge myself into a Jubanique stupor on his dime was his way of paying me back for that lack (although my routinely doing so would advance and deepen his resentment toward me for “using” him); having a budget, sticking to it, and openly discussing money is boring, taboo, threatening, and vulgar; life has no real cost if you have Papi for a dad; and it will all go on and on like this eternally because unlike mere mortals, Jubanos are too Ju-ttractive and Ju-special to ever get sick, incapacitated, old, or die. Max out one credit card, open a new one.

Repeat.

Forever.

It was a rude shock—to Mami as much as to me—to discover how brief Forever is. After Papi's second surgery for a brain
tumor, when Mami took over the family finances, we realized how much strain we'd both put on Papi's bank balance.

 

We'd discuss at length the relative merits of Herbal Essence shampoo over Flex (Rob and Peter both had long, straight, thick hair that retained the shampoos' smells better than mine; my Agua de Violetas may have contributed), and Rob dished the dirt on Cher, his idol, with his customary Robin Williams manic delivery. Peter regaled me with stories of weekends at Camp David, where he and Rob went with Peter's dad, H. R. Haldeman, Peter's mom, Joanne, known as Jo, and President Nixon. (We never discussed politics. I don't ever remember Peter saying “Watergate.”)

Jo always told the boys, “You cannot go to Nixon's cabin, there's Secret Service all around it.” Now, Peter was brilliant, hysterically funny, and gorgeous. He had probably the prettiest face I'd ever seen on a boy. Huge hazel eyes with very thick, long, black eyelashes, a peaches-and-cream complexion, and that perfect, naturally streaked blond-brunette hair. He could have been a Leonardo
cherubino.
But Peter, who favored navy-blue Chuck Taylor All-Star Converse canvas oxford low-rise sneakers, was a provocateur with an edge and really strange mood swings. This one time, Peter talked Rob (who could be talked into anything, a key part of his charm), into a golf cart in the middle of the night. Peter started driving a thousand miles an hour to the presidential cabin; everybody stayed in separate cabins, whereas I'd always imagined Camp David as a kind of ski lodge situation. He told a terrified Rob to “just follow my lead, darling.” They charged right up to Nixon's cabin and sirens went off and two dozen guns were suddenly trained on their heads.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?” a security agent barked.

“I'm Peter Haldeman,” Peter said, nonchalantly. “H. R. Haldeman is my father. We're here to see the president.”

“YOU CAN'T MEET HIM!” the guy said.

“Sir, I really feel
terrible
about bothering you at this late hour,” Peter continued, dabbing faux tears and sniffles away, “but my friend here, he doesn't have much time to live. [Whispering.] Terminal cancer. [Pause.] And all he's ever wanted is to see where the president of the United States stays in Camp David. [Whispering.] Dying wish.”

“Sorry about your friend. Really. BUT YOU CAN'T MEET THE PRESIDENT!”

In the morning, Jo confronted Peter, who actually took pleasure in seeing if he could get out of these things: “It was late, Mother. We got lost. I could have SWORN it was our cabin. I got mixed up and turned around. I feel just
terrible
about compromising dad.” And H.R., who was one scary mutha to begin with—that buzz cut alone—would EXPLODE. Peter knew this was not proper. Going to Nixon's cabin during the day would've made more sense. But Peter was just like that.

Another time there, Peter and Jo were playing doubles against H.R. and Rob. There was a telephone on the tennis court. It rang and H.R. told Peter to pick it up since it was on Peter's side.

“It's DICK for dad!” Peter shrieked, not covering the receiver. “Dad, it's DICK. DICK wants you—NOW!”

Jo fainted, Rob bit his lip, H.R. sighed, and Peter threw his head back and guffawed his trademark “AH-hahahahaha.”

Peter left Frenzy in April 1973, tenth grade, one month before H.R. was forced to resign over Watergate, one year before H.R. was indicted, not quite two years before H.R. was convicted and sent to a federal slam for eighteen months. The Haldemans moved back to California, where they were from. Nobody at
school knew what really happened. I saw Peter and his parents in the maroon and gray upper-school hallway by the headmaster's office, all looking very grave, and that was it. There were lots of rumors. I got a card from Peter later on, with a color photograph of him with H.R. (buzz cut grown out), Jo, and Peter's three attractive siblings, Susan, Hank, and Ann. Except for H.R.—who's off to one side inspecting what appears to be a camera, slide projector, or tape recorder—the family's standing around a yellow touring bike in the yard of the Haldemans' house. Peter's leaning on the upright bike, looking down at Hank, who's on the ground checking the rear tire. The environs were ordinary yet lush, a lush life “where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life / To get the feel of life…” Three pots of red chrysanthemums are lining the brick porch, with lots of sun shining on the flora. I wrote Peter back but we lost touch after that. I always adored him, though. At Frenzy, Peter made me look normal.

 

After recording the day's events on my Valerie typewriter, I'd get in my pajammies, sprinkle Agua de Violetas in my hair, refresh my body with Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche Eau de Toilette spray, and pore covetously over my latest FBS catalogue—my kind of nighttime poetry and porn—with the pages folded into neat triangles on the outfits I desired. I always got tons of fashion catalogues in the mail but I really lived for FBS. The letters stood for French Boot Shop, an upscale, hyper-trendy boutique in exotic, far-flung New Rochelle, New York. (That's where I bought my Corkies, those fabulous pigskin crisscross sandals with a cork wedge heel that I scuffed on that psychotic plane ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca with the 'rents when I was sixteen.) If the
Sex and the City
gals were catalogue shopping in the seventies and eighties, FBS would have been their fashion mecca. (Of course,
they would have lived in Manhattan, so why would they have bothered?)

Living in Washington, D.C., an excruciatingly conservative, government-and politics-obsessed, culture-and style-starved city of streets named after states and granite monuments and mausoleums, presented serious sartorial challenges. So I was forced to shop outside the federal box, as it were. FBS transcended my fashion magazines because unlike the mags, you could actually order the clothes in the photographs. FBS showed me the girlishly unexpected and lavishly quirky that somehow just worked: a mustard-yellow Norma Kamali fleece pullover dress in the shape of an inverted triangle with an exaggerated funnel turtleneck and Velcro'd shoulder pads, worn with opaque black tights and red suede Joan & David pumps. A poofy Esprit khaki flight suit feminized at the waist with a wide cinched floral embroidered belt, and worn
sans
socks and with copper metallic Joan & David flats. A lemon-yellow Betsey Johnson halter tube dress scattered with tiny pink rosebuds, with a shirred, gathered bodice and a full skirt, worn with high-heeled wooden slides whose straps were clear plastic panels decorated with lemon-yellow and rosebud-pink sequined butterflies.

Those images, those wonderful clothes, most of which I could never afford (Papi didn't give me a hard figure limit but I sort of intuited how far I could push it) or wear to school or anywhere else I was likely to go, conjured up correspondingly fantastic situations. I'd cut out the images and glue them to the back of my bedroom door, creating an intricately layered, overlapping collage, and stare at them. That was one way to acquire the attire. Pin down the outfit and the occasion will present itself, that's my motto. For instance, if I only owned that icy pale blue cashmere bathrobe wrap coat and those Victorian pearl earrings the color of brushed button mushroom caps, I'd surely wear them (with a ton
of red lipstick) over the olive-green quilted satin pullover bomber-style sweatshirt and ash-gray silk cigarette pants and blue suede stilettos—to see my French lover who looks like Jeremy Irons. Wet autumn leaves on the New York City sidewalk, last night's rain running along gutters,
moi
scurrying along in the cold, shawl collar turned up, cheeks flushed, loosely piled-up hair juuust beginning to come undone like Meryl Streep's in
Manhattan
or
The French Lieutenant's Woman.
And Jeremy would embrace me in my coat that faintly smelled of him and of Coco perfume and he'd make my hair come undone…Afterward, I'd look like Carly Simon on the cover of
Boys in the Trees
—feminine, soft, romantic, suggestively sexy, languorously European, wearing a pale peach satin slip and pulling up a sheer silk stocking, and not like Carly on
Playing Possum
—open-mouthed and kneeling in a hard-core black lace teddy and black leather boots. My friend Amy, whom I met in Paris during my college junior year abroad, used to say, “Carly tries to sing like it's from her soul but it's really from her beaver.”

Either way, what an orgasmic dream life can be!

O
ur mutually bespectacled eyes met across the
huevos a la Malagueña.
He was cute-ugly in a Jewish, left-wing liberal, blond balding hippie, late Elvis sideburns, communist-pornographer kind of way. Let's call him by the initials T.P.—or Teepee—to keep it uncluttered. You'll see why. Trust me. Mami worked with him at St. Elizabeths. I was a fourteen-year-old ninth grader struggling—to put it mildly—with algebra. He was older and, true to his generation, wearing purple hip-hugger wide-wale cords on that Sunday afternoon in late May, a batik-y dashiki, and thick glasses with round gold metal frames as he introduced himself to me at brunch at our house and I introduced him to
huevos a la Malagueña.
Sizing him up, I knew his type instantly. Anything un-American was good, even Mami's half-assed huevos, of which Teepee enthusiastically ate two helpings. He probably loved—gag—Indian food, too.

“These
huevos
are just delicious,” Teepee said, sitting next to me in the living room as I cleared away 893 stolen tchotchkes from the coffee table to make room for our plates and glasses.
There were about twenty other non-Cuban guests who appeared to agree with Teepee's inane
huevos
assessment. “I've had Spanish omelets before, of course. With potatoes. But these are really good.”

“What you're eating
is
Spanish,” I said, biting into a sesame bagel with cream cheese. Pretty soon I would have to go upstairs and sneak a cigarette. I'd begun smoking regularly. I liked True Blues, liked the recessed filter, liked the ritual of lighting a cigarette after meals and the relaxed-full way it made me feel. I loved it, actually.

“Oh!” Teepee said, smiling and nodding. He was Looking at me. Capital L. His eyes were blue but not true-blue. Behind him Carroll Sockwell's suicidal self-portraits in shades of blue gloomed in multiple heavy layers of dark oil.

“Spanish conquistadores and African slaves made Cuban food Cuban,” I said, feeling
muy
authoritative and shaking stray sesame seeds off my lap. I was wearing my favorite sleeveless capri jumpsuit. Bright yellow with tiny blue birds and matching tiny blue bird buttons down the front. It was a bitch going to the bathroom, but I was still at the stage where suffering for style was a given, not to mention proof of my superior aesthetic sense.

“Wow,” Teepee said. “Are you a chef? A historian?”

“I'm a Cuban,” I said. “Cubans know their Cubanity. I just turned fourteen in December, what are you talking about? I just had my Bat Mitzvah last spring. I'm an official Jewess in high school, honey.”

“Really? I would have never guessed.”

“That I'm a Jewess? Why? You're a Jew, right? I'm a Jew, you're a Jew, everyone's a Jujube.”

“No, no,” he said. “I just meant you seem very…mature.”

“Oh, I'm mature,” I said, flattered by the observation—which I'd heard all my life—and by the fact that this man was actually
paying attention to me. Growing up with parents with exceedingly low boredom thresholds, I've always expressed myself volubly—a lot more so than even a regular Cuban—and fast, because I've always felt the meter running out on parental attention spans. Really, my heart races and everything. (Or maybe it's just my metabolism; I usually think, move, and feel a lot faster than other people.) I realize not everybody is my parents. But I can't usually tell the difference when I'm on a roll or nervous because I have so much energy and so much I want to say. Excitement versus panic; sometimes I can't distinguish the two. Who can tell the dancer from the dance, right?

“Very mature, indeedy,” I continued. “Don't let the zits fool ya. I have camouflaged them pretty well, though, I think. Which is really saying something since these are golf ballers.”

“Golf ballers?” Teepee said.

“Pimples big as,” I said. “I've got a friend at school who shoplifts makeup for me for cheap. She invited me to her birthday party at Kenwood Country Club? So my mother takes me and we drive around for three hours and never find it. We finally had to give up and go home. It's right there on River Road in Bethesda! Big sign and everything. Anyway, about the zits? My dermatologist Dr. Kanoff, she's terrifying. She's real strict and severe and she chain-smokes. I love her. The first time I went to see her and she examined me? We sit down in her office afterward and there's all this cigarette smoke everywhere. She gets out a prescription pad and on the top writes the word
NO
and underlines it, like, three times with a thick black fountain pen. Then under
NO
she writes this list: ‘Iodine (shellfish, etc.). Chocolate. Nuts. Cola. Cheese. Whole milk. Fried anything.' I was, like, ahhh, just kill me now. I go, ‘This is strict!' She goes, ‘There are doctors who believe what you eat has nothing to do with how your skin acts. I'm not one of them.' So I decide to humor her to her face? But I go
home and totally ignore this Nazi food list on the refrigerator. Mami always said to cut every corner. Like in
The Sound of Music,
‘Climb Ev'ry Mountain'? This would be her version: ‘Cuuu-t eeev'ry corrr-nerrr, searrr-ch high an' lowww…' So. I go back for my next appointment and Dr. Kanoff looks at my face and she goes, ‘Are you eating any of the foods on that damn list?' I go, ‘Well but we just got a brand-new Skippy. Crunchy. A whole JAR.' And she goes—she scared me half to death—‘You'll either do what I recommend or you won't. If you won't, please don't bother coming back. It's a waste of our time. Good-bye!' I liked her ever since 'cause she sets rules and limits and she's not afraid to kick your ass when you're bad or lazy. I'm not used to that. My parents are out to lunch. They're in Europe and Israel and Latin America half the time. My father hates going anywhere, but my mother, well, you know how in the government they give you a lot of vacation? Plus she never gets sick so she's got shitloads of sick leave.
Joos eet or loos eet.”

Teepee chuckled at my rendition of his coworker's argot. He said, “What I meant before was you come across as very precocious, very worldly.”

“Well I do,” I said. “The only thing I can't handle is algebra. It's my
nemesis.
Oh now there's a word I can expect to encounter somewhere in the verbal part of my SATs. I'm fourteen and I was supposed to be obsessed by my SATs ten years ago like my Sidwellemy classmates were, except I was busy fending off delusionals and paranoid schizophrenics at the time. So I'm way behind the curve. My mother's my nemesis, too, actually, but in a completely different way. Or maybe not in such a completely different way—”

“Are you wearing a citrus scent?” Teepee said in a strangely overfascinated tone.

“‘A citrus scent'?” I said, gently mocking what sounded to me
like an arch, queer phrase right out of
Mademoiselle.
“No dear, I'm wearing Agua de Violetas. It's a traditional Cuban hair cologne. Violets and orange. ‘Citrus.' Please.”

“It's very alluring,” Teepee said, leaning his face in my hair. “Mmm, I love it. It's wonderful. So fresh and feminine…”

“Just like using a turquoise bidet! That's what my mom does. Anyhow, I heard they give you, like, two hundred points just for getting your name right on the SATs. I know I'll fail the entire math section. I'm already failing Algebra I. I hate my school. I hate the people except my few friends. I don't have any friends who live around here 'cause I get shipped off every day in a yellow taxi with a morbidly obese trailer park woman named Tiny. The kids here go to public school in a normal yellow school bus. And the ones at Sidwell—that's my school, another nemesis—they don't live around here. Silver Spring is, like, beneath them. It may be beneath me, too, actually. I probably belong in New York City ultimately. What do you think?”

“Sidwell?” he said, reaching for his espresso. “That's a tough school to get into. You must be really smart. It's Quaker, right?”

“Yeah, right. Peace, love, tie-dye, and granola—and a big fuck you to you. They're all totally cutthroat phonies. Ivy League! Gotta go to the Ivy League or why keep on living! Gotta beat Muffy and Puffy and Huffy into the Ivy League! Muffy, Puffy, and Huffy—Snow White's little preppie dwarfs!”

Teepee laughed.

“Gotta live in Fat City and hit the club for cocktails and tennis and adultery after a hard week at the dwarf Ivy League law firm!” I continued. “Anyway. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna fail algebra. So tah-tah, Hahvahd Yahd.”

“I was always pretty decent in math myself,” Teepee said. “Mm, good espresso.”

“Oh, my God, you're not gonna tell me you
like
it, are you? That it's…
fun?
Because I may throw up.”

“Espresso?”

“Math.”

“Okay, I won't say it's fun or I like it,” Teepee said, touching my freckled arm. “Can I just say why it intrigues me?”

“No. I avoid discussing power raising, root extraction, and radicals whenever possible. Call me crazy.”

“Because it's concrete problem solving. That's what life is, you know? It's why I'm a social worker.”

Was it my imagination or had the fucker just moved in closer to me AGAIN?

I pulled away my arm and placed one of the 782 stray sofa cushions on my lap.

“Problems aren't always concrete,” I said. “Maybe in algebra but not in life. Frenzy likes to say—this is such bullshit, how they describe algebra in their course curriculum, I love this—‘Problems are related to those encountered in daily life.' Yeah, right. Anyway, that's why I love writing. Love love love it. People are the real puzzles, not equations. I think life is a mystery. My mother sucked at math and science because she was expected to, being a Latina and everything. Now we're in a whole different country, a
continent
instead of an island, but I'm still supposed to be just like her. I don't know which one to be loyal to, my mother and our little culture or my school and that whole world outside of
gringos.
'Cause those Sidwell girls can all do algebra
and
ice skate. But I can write them under the table. So. I'm either algebraically incompetent or else really confused and frustrated. Which would make me
resistant.”

“‘Resistant'? What do you know about resistance?”

“I
said
I was on the psycho kiddie ward—at your current institutional employer—when you were about the age I am now.”

“I thought you were joking.”

“Mental illness is no joke, dear. I almost got slashed and stabbed to death by a boy with a huge scissor on my thigh because I wouldn't kiss him.”

“I don't blame him,” Teepee said.

“Oh that's nice,” I said dryly.

“No, I meant he had good taste,” he said, tapping the second and third blue bird buttons on my jumpsuit for emphasis on the
good
and the
taste.
The blue birds were right between the 'zoomies. I should've put a cushion there, too. “Except I'd personally leave out the scissors. Staff or patient wanted you?”

“Patient,” I said. “An older psychotic man of twelve. Only crazy boys like me.”

“I'm sure that's not true.”

“Well, another one broke my finger and practically killed my beautiful blue swan when I wouldn't kiss him. So sad, my swan. Papier-mâché. It got lost when we moved to this house. Typical. Long story.”

“You inspire great passion in men.”

“The blue swan killer was a black fourth grader named Maurice,” I said, standing up. “Now he goes to Sidwell, too. So does my old Southwest D.C. friend Mara. It's weird. But most Sidwell boys don't like me. I repel the white preppie male element. They don't get me. Few straight XY chromosomes do. Starting with my father. My mother says he's not ‘attun-ed' to me or my needs, not that she does anything about it or picks up the slack. The only female my dad can relate to is the wife unit. I have no relationship with my brothers. I don't understand their existence or its point. My little baby sister, Cecilia, is dead, in Cuba. I'm like Marilyn on
The Munsters. Voilà: Moi
's life in a coconut shell.”

“Where are you off to?” Teepee asked.

I bent down and conspiratorially whispered, “To my room. To
smoke a True. To be bad behind my parents' back. I'm a kid, I'm in that adolescent angst phase. Hormones, you know. I rebel. I'm secretive. I'm pissed. It's what I do. It's my job.”

“But your mother smokes. I thought you didn't want to be like her.”

“That's the thing,” I said. “Life is not concrete. I am
ambivalent
and
conflicted.
Kiddie ward words.
Adios,
dear.”

“Can I come?” he whispered back, his face perilously close to mine.

“Shoe shine?” Eric said. “Just a dollar. Bargain.”

My little capitalist seven-year-old brother had been making the rounds and now it was Teepee's shoes' turn. Eric had just saved my life. A grown man in my bedroom! In my boudoir! What would I have done? Was having seen
Klute
enough of a qualification to deal with a man nearly twice my age? And why was Teepee concentrating so much on me to the exclusion of the other guests his own age, anyway? It felt very odd, and I couldn't decide if it was odd cool or odd creepy. Excitement versus panic. I knew siccing Mami on Teepee would be fruitless. She'd
looohv
for him to go upstairs with me. After all, wasn't it Mami who'd rejoiced over the onset of my menses two years before because I could finally start dayteengh? As for Papi, he would always defer to Mami and, like her, would consider denying any guest in his home anything a social breach. If only Rebeca were here. That pygmy maid would slice off Teepee's moyeled pecker with one fell swoop of her cucumber knife and go right back to making
la ensalada
without missing a beat.