Jubana! (26 page)

I heard Teepee ask Eric, “You know how to shine sneakers, buddy?”

I was already halfway up the stairs. I suspected our
intime
little tête-à-tête would make killer diary entry material, especially that shit with the buttons.
Good
and
taste.
My green Valerie
typewriter awaited me. Me and my tiny but mighty right index fingertip.

 

I failed Algebra I.

Sidwell Frenzy said to get a tutor and I could retake the ninth grade final exam pass-fail at the end of the summer. Why the 'rents never asked Frenzy for qualified tutor recommendations is anyone's guess. Maybe Frenzy told them it was their responsibility, not the school's. Maybe Mami didn't feel like making the effort. Or maybe she didn't feel like coughing it up for one—it might have put a crimp in her personal retail budget. Hadn't she learned anything from the Tío Jaime Bat Mitzvah camera disaster, that you get what you pay for? Nooo, not as it applied to me. Enter Teepee, who offered to do it for
free.
(Well, almost. He wanted Cuban coffee in return for weeknightly tutorials.)
F-r-e-e,
Mami's favorite four-letter word after
f-o-h-k.
Did I have any say in this? Of course not, I was the
bruta
who'd yet again fohk-ed up. Did Mami perceive a possible conflict of interest, as she worked with Teepee, or the impropriety of having a decade-older man tutoring me alone? Of course not, he was a goo' frien' and he was
f-r-e-e.

And so Teepee began pulling up on our cul-de-sac in his VW beetle just as Rebeca was serving the after-dinner espresso. We'd all sit around the round white mod table from Scan in the family room until the
café
was quaffed. The 'rents would go up to their bedroom to watch TV for the rest of the evening, and Eric and Big Red Al went downstairs to the basement to play or to their rooms to do whatever it was they did in there. Only Rebeca lingered, clearing the table, wiping it off, eating her dinner (as usual, after we did) at the breakfast counter outside the family room. She took a
real
long time eating whenever Teepee was around,
and spent at least another hour dish-washing and leftover-storing and broad-spectrum kitchen anti-bacterializing.

“Why is she still here?” Teepee whispered.

Gee, maybe because she's the only one around with a clue?

“Who knows?” I said, batting my hand dismissively. “Who cares? She's a paranoid Ecuadorian. Ignore.”

“She seems…hostile.”

“She's never been the same since
This Is Tom Jones
went off the air. She goes around singing
‘No es inusu-AL'”
all the time. She can't speak a word of English but she loves that Welshman. It's about, you know, the
feeling.
The universal language of luuuv.”

“She goes around singing WHAT?”

“‘It's Not Unusual.' Tom Jones's theme song?”

“Whose?”

“You're kidding, right? ‘What's New, Pussycat?' ‘Delilah'? ‘She's a Lady'?”

“Sorry,” Teepee said, shaking his head. “At least you'll never fail popular culture.”

“Pop,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Not popular. Nobody says popular culture. Unless they're
un
popular.”

“Hey, give me a kiss,” Teepee whispered, leaning into me.

I grabbed my TaB—bet you didn't know it's officially kosher—and sipped through my straw. Too bad I couldn't smoke out in the open. I
so
needed a True. Who WAS this guy? Why was he saying this?
Hey, give me a kiss.
He was new in town but still, why wasn't he asking girls his own age to
Hey, give me a kiss?
What the fuck, should I go for it?

“On the cheek?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Oh. All righty.”

I heard Rebeca loudly clear her throat and slam down a pot.

“I've wanted to kiss you since the first time over the
huevos,
” Teepee said.

“Well,” I said, glancing at Rebeca, who stared back with fierce black crucifix eyes, “dream on—at the moment.” It wasn't as if I'd never been kissed, but this was a Big Boy.

“Afterward,” Teepee said. “We'll wait till she goes downstairs. And then you'll walk me to the car. It'll be our secret.”

It was hard to concentrate exclusively on algebra after that. Teepee and I got into this flirtatious routine: He'd show up, drink the coffee, wait for everyone to disperse, and then punctuate the mind-numbing monotony of linear equations, inequalities in one and two unknowns, and quadratic equations with gradually deeper French kissing and touching. Then we'd walk to his car and kiss some more. It made me giddy. It was exciting and sexy and fun, and hell if it didn't liven up monomials and polynomials, not to mention what would have been an otherwise stupefyingly torpid, malaise-ridden summer in the Siberia of Silver Spring. Mami didn't
look
like a pimp, but hadn't she in fact brought us together? The Cuban in me said,
“Caramba!
Young brides are the best! Remember not the Maine, but the
tafetán color champán!
” The Jew said, “Oy! Remember Hitler at Munich! Then again, Teepee is Jewish and single!”

 

Teepee eventually complained to the 'rents that the family room was “too open and noisy and distracting for Gigi to absorb her lessons.” Since both my parents lack that Cuban “Not with My Daughter!” gene, they immediately complied. Teepee and I began meeting downstairs in Papi's basement office. It was a tiny room but far from the madding crowd, and it had a door that locked. The office, however, was just across from Rebeca's bedroom. We
could hear the humorless Andean warden pacing aggressively outside our closed door, clearing her throat and snorting and listening for prolonged silences. Rebeca could hover and eavesdrop in her overt, heavy-handed way, but she could not control everything. My parents may have told themselves and Rebeca that Rebeca was a member of the family, but in the end she was an employee, as I impertinently reminded her whenever in her pre-Columbian way she overstepped her bounds and tried disciplining me physically.

By summer's end, Teepee had me remedialized. On what I expected would be our last session, I walked him to the car to kiss him good-bye forever. Such sweet sorrow.

“Thanks,” I told him. “It's been groovy. You really taught me some things, huh. ‘The
new
algebra.' Haaa.”

“You make it sound so final,” he said.

“Isn't it?”

“Not right away.” He was planning a move to a new job out West. “I still have some stuff at work to finish up.”

“Oh.”

After a pause, Teepee said, “I think we should be lovers.”

“What?”

He had to be on junk. I mean, making out behind my parents' and Rebeca's backs was one thing; it was safe-naughty and something to do all summer long to break the ennui and I could feel as though I had a kind of boyfriend. But I knew I was no more ready for Actual Sex than I was for a Pythagorean Theorem.

“Yeah,” Teepee said, holding my hands. “It's time.”

“Don't you think I'm a tad YOUNG for that?” I asked, pulling my hands out of his.

But Teepee had listened to me too closely, become my confidant, and studied my mother at work and my family's dynamics at home for months. He was much too sophisticated and cunning
to ever force himself on me the way you usually hear about these things. In other words, my mind had been the first organ he'd penetrated.

“I think,” Teepee said, “you're every bit as much of a woman as your mother.”

 

I somehow managed to pass my algebra final, and Teepee and I set up a “celebratory” tryst in Arlington, Virginia. I was a new tenth grader, at least a year younger than my classmates (thanks to Mami forcing me prematurely into kindergarten), with a big secret. The 'rents had taken off the entire month of September to vacation in Israel or Europe or South America. I really had nothing better to do; that was why I told Teepee yes. What I told
myself
was that we were like Romeo and Juliet, misunderstood by Society. Or like David and Bathsheba, sinful and secret. Or like Dimaggio and Marilyn, luminous December-May stars. Sure, I was jailbait and sure, Teepee was, like, about a decade older. But he'd marry me. He would. Probably. Right?
I'd
marry me. I was a saucy
señorita,
ready for love and ready to please my man, though I had no idea what that meant or what I was doing or why, exactly. I wanted to be like Bathsheba, bathing on the roof, and, to rearticulate Leonard Cohen, make my beauty and the moonlight overthrow him. But that was in another country. Virginia struck me as the kind of state that
would
take prisoners, take Teepee prisoner, I mean, if anybody found out. That would be bad, him being a felon. But look at the risk Teepee was willing to take, for
me.
Isn't that so touching? What had already been seduced in me from the neck up was
really
compelling. Was it panic or excitement?

As it always does for weeks after Labor Day in the swamp that is Washington, it was sweltering on the appointed day. I told Tiny
and Rebeca I was going ice skating at an indoor rink after school with some girlfriends and would get my own ride home. It wasn't a total lie; I
had
taken ice-skating lessons the previous winter at the OUTdoor rink of a Virginia Marriott. My poor teacher. She had to practically hold me up the entire time. Meanwhile, all the other Sidwell girls whizzed by us like athletic sylphs, casting slush, although I will say my teacher remarked favorably on the bouquet of my Agua de Violetas. Nonexistent arches like mine cannot cope with laced-up, structured ice skates, we discovered. And no matter how cute your outfit is, you'll spend the entire time either grabbing on to the rail or your teacher, or on the ice on your color-coordinated ass.

It's a cold, hard country.

In Teepee's VW bug, as we crossed the Potomac into Dixie, I saw monuments and planes and the Pentagon and a lot of nondescript office buildings and high-rise apartment “complexes.” Teepee and I were heading into Crystal City, a part of Arlington that's as antiseptically Republican as its name. I'd changed clothes in the bathroom after school, opting for a more event-appropriate cha-cha outfit. I borrowed my friend Mara's halter top with tiny red and white roses on it and paired it with my own very low-waisted hip-hugger jeans and caramel leather and wood platform sandals. I thought I looked like I had sex appeal, but this is what you think when you're fourteen. Teepee complimented me, and the radio played a Jimi Hendrix song: “You've got to be all mine, all mine…/ooh Foxy Lady.”

Before going to Teepee's apartment, we stopped at a Safeway to scan cheeses and other snackies for a light postdefloration repast. It was over-air-conditioned in there, but my sweat glands were kicking into high gear
and
I had the shakes. Terrible combo platter. Teepee was asking me questions, something about “laughing cow” and “baby Brie.” Bree? Bree Daniels? From
Klute?
She has a cheese? God, I was so out of it—my body, that is—and floating up above us, looking down dispassionately.
This is weird, even for me. Only a man would think of food products at a time like this.

 

What I recall about my First Time:

• The look of lust on The Prick's face (an expression I'd seen before only on Kevin, the scissor-wielding twelve-year-old St. Elizabeths patient: lidded eyes, open mouth—both kind of ick).
  
• How messy and sticky the white contraceptive foam was that The Prick had bought and how it mixed with my blood on my belly and thighs and the sheets (ick).
  
• How I could feel The Prick's but not my pleasure because he never pleased
  me,
  not that a Jubana who's told from day one that nice girls always wear panties—and occasionally bras—to bed would have any clue about her own sexual potential in the first place (ick).
  
• How after a shower I changed for The Prick back into my very Audrey Hepburn original school outfit (sleeveless tomato-red cotton linen pique dress with navy Nehru collar and vertical seams all across the bodice, and navy Ann Taylor ballet flats—both fabulous).
  
• How I passed on The Prick's
  après-sexe fromage
  product (ick), chain-smoked Trues (fabu), and chewed Dubble Bubble all the way home (fabu-fabu).
  

But here's the thing. You must have noticed I'm no longer disguising my feelings by referring ever so gently to Teepee. Let's call
T.P. The Prick. It's as close as I can get without terrorizing the lawyers to characterize the older man who deflowered me when I was below the statutory age of consent, The Prick.

The Prick dropped me off at the top of my long cul-de-sac and I walked down to my house, explaining to Rebeca that the school bus didn't do door-to-door. That night I stared at my face in the bathroom mirror. Did I look any different? Not really. My complexion still resembled Manuel Noriega's. Was I any good at Actual Sex? Well, I may have been clueless, but I must have been clueful enough to be asked back, because The Prick wanted to see me again. A Friday night sleep-over this time. Wow, I must be
pret
-ty hot stuff.
Foxy, foxy!

 

It's the price of tafetán color champán,
I kept thinking. The 'rents were still shoplifting their way through foreign countries, stealing fancy hotel ashtrays and sterling antique sugar bowls from assorted room services and restaurants. I told Rebeca I was spending the night at my Sidwellemy friend Pam Palmer's house. Pam's Chicago forebears built the Palmer House Hotel on East Monroe Street and the Cubs'—originally known as the Chicago White Stockings—first ballpark. (I went to the Palmer House with the flaxen-haired Pam once. It looked like a gilded castle inside. Almost twenty-five years later, in 1995, I stayed there again to do a cover story profile for
USA Weekend
on Heather Whitestone, the first deaf Miss America. It still looked like a gilded castle inside, only now they had modems, ATMs, and fitness centers.) Anyway, I told Pam I had this “friend” and he'd be picking me up
chez elle,
so she only had to entertain me for a little while, just a couple of hours until The Prick could leave work. Although people in our immediate circle didn't have “jobs,” Pam didn't ask too many questions; she was good that way. She didn't come to Frenzy until
ninth grade, in 1971, so despite her family's wealth and stature, she lacked that typical “lifer” conceit. But Pam was in the affluent cool white
gringa
girl gang, so I was cautious around her. Not that she was superior to me—please, the girl spelled
all right
as one word with one
l
—but still, hers could be a vicious little clique, so you never knew. (One time things got so bad between those girls and me that Mami Dearest stepped in for a “tehrahpooteek eentehrvehnshohn cheet-chat.” To their credit,
las gringitas
all came over on a Sunday morning, sat in the family room, and ate up all the
empanadas
and blintzes Rebeca had prepared ahead of time.
Then,
they proceeded to ignore me utterly and spent the rest of the time talking to Mami, praising her stunning red hair, her gorgeous figure, her adorable accent, her magnificent makeup, her dramatic ankle-length sleeveless cotton empire hostess dress with bright green, orange, hot pink, yellow, red, purple, and turquoise-blue birds of paradise, hibiscus, and ginger flowers all over it. I couldn't blame the girls for their adulation; I knew I couldn't compete with Mami. And academically, I couldn't compete with the Sidwellemies. I mean, I could, but even getting straight A's couldn't beat or even equal the reality of Eric's and Big Red Al's superior phalli. So why bother trying?)