Jubana! (27 page)

The Prick picked me up and this time we went out on a proper date, to the Japan Inn on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, the oldest Japanese restaurant in Washington. (I'd have preferred HH, but whatever.) We sat in the so-called teppanyaki room, where a severe chef cooked our food on a flat grill before us. I passed on the tako su (vinegared octopus and cucumber), and went with the miso soup, lobster, and filet mignon (The Prick did say to order whatever I wanted), and chocolate ice cream with mandarin oranges. The couple sitting across from us kept staring and whispering to each other. The Prick and I must have looked like a mismatch; he looked older than he was (balding head and
newly sprouted Fu Manchu mustache) and I have always looked much younger than I am. My entire life, people, perfect strangers, ask me how old I am. Why is this? I'm guessing the combo of Jubana genes and tiny body with abnormally large head. Mami Dearest says, “Ees because joo look so johngh but soun' so ol'.” So at fourteen I must've sounded sixty-seven but looked eleven—except with big bazoomies.
Foxy, foxy!

In the morning in his Crystal City apartment I awoke before The Prick. I put on his cotton bathrobe and wandered out to the kitchen for coffee. A woman was sitting on a dining room chair, bent over and lacing up the long, thin white straps of her gladiator sandals. Her hair was a rat's nest from the back, and rolls of fat hung over the sides of her waist. On the table was an open pack of Virginia Slims Luxury Lights 120s, a lighter with peace symbols on it, a full ashtray, a key chain with 116 keys, a bad faux leather purse, and that morning's
Washington Post.

“Hello?” I said.

She slowly turned with a haggard, puffy, pasty face that needed major concealer, loose powder, and blush. Not to mention mascara. Lipstick. Eyebrows.

“Morning,” she groaned. “I'm Sylvia. Syl. And who're you?”

“Hey, you must be Gigi,” said a tall, dark-haired guy with a beard. He was coming out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee in one hand and two mugs in the other. “I'm [The Prick's] roommate. Well, one of [The Prick's] roommates. There's three of us—sometimes. Coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, completely perplexed. I knew The Prick had two male roommates, but who was the broad?

“Sylvia?” he said. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, coffee,” she said, lighting a Virginia Slim. “Coffee and cash to go, honeybuns. Gotta hit the road.”

“I'll be right back,” he said, disappearing into a bedroom.

“How old are you?” Syl asked me. See what I'm saying? People never stop with the fucking question.

“Old enough, it seems,” I said.

Syl gave a dubious look and went to the phone. I poured some coffee in the mug, lit one of her cigarettes while her back was turned, and walked over to the balcony window. Gray high-rises. A sliver of sky. Virginia sucked.

“Honey? Yeah. Mommy, who the hell ya think it is? Yeah. I'll be home in an hour, maybe less. Uh-huh. Baby okay? You watch him good? He did? Good. Anybody call? Huh? Watch that tone, missy. Yeah. See ya soon.”

“So come 'ere and talk,” Syl said. I sat down at the table and put out her appalling cigarette. Syl was right out of a Raymond Carver story. “Met him in a bar last night.”

“Mm!”

“Yeah. But I think I had one too many. My head's crackin' open, I swear to Christ. You got any aspirin?”

“No, sorry.”

“It's all right. That was my kid on the phone. My daughter. She watches my son while I'm workin'.”

“Oh, uh-huh.”

“You look about my daughter's age. What are you, like, twelve?”

“I'm almost fifteen,” I said, wishing the Prick would wake the hell up.

“Well, 'cause if you was my daughter,” Syl said, crossing her fleshy white veiny legs, “I'd beat your sweet little ass black-and-blue and twice on Sunday. You shouldn't be here. What're you doin' here, kid?”

“I don't…I don't really know,” I said. “It's like a mini runaway, I guess.”

“A what?”

“It's like running away but not all the way.”

The roommate emerged. Syl wearily got to her feet, stuffed her cigarettes and lighter in her bag, yawned, grabbed her 116 keys, and talked to her “date” by the front door as I pretended to read the Style section.

“This ought to do it,” I heard the man say.

“Cool,” Sylvia replied. “Thanks. And hey, Gi-gi.” She pronounced my name with a hard G, like
giggly.
She walked over to me and whispered, “Don't forget what I said. Black-and-blue and twice on Sunday. Get the hell outta here and don't come back. You don't belong. Don't be me.”

 

They say the third time's the charm, but not for me, unless we mean “charm” ironically. The 'rents had returned from their holiday, and on this final, fatal school night I was late getting home from Crystal City, Vagina, as I'd taken to calling it. The Prick and I had fallen asleep. I'd called home around 8:30 or 9
P.M
., assuring Mami Dearest I was fine and that the (fictional) ice-skating lesson had run long. She said, “Okay an' by de way I bought joo some cute panties on sale at Lor' an' Taylor.” Panties. That's funny. But just between Jefferson Davis Highway and I-395, there was a major backup, and the drive that normally took half an hour was three times longer. So by the time I got home the frantic 'rents were in the carport, about to go to the police.

We went inside, Mami Dearest screaming and cursing Cubanly the whole way, Papi silent.

“WHERE WERE JOO?” Mami shouted. At the moment I was out of my body. And, now that I was alive, Mami could kill me. “WERE JOO WEETH [DE PREEK]?”

“Who do you think?” I said. Rebeca looked at me quickly
and scrammed. I knew it; she'd known all along what was happening and had ratted me out. AFTER I'd phoned home. What. A. Bitch.

“JOO WERE WEETH [DE PREEK]!” Mami yelled.

“Okay,” I said. “If that's what you wanna think.” My voice sounded mechanical, remote, unfeeling. Statue Voice. This would be bad.
Really
bad.

“JOO WERE! WHAT WERE JOO DOEENGH WEETH HEEM?”

“Doing?” I said, Bree Daniels irony mounting. “Talking. We were talking. I fell asleep on his couch. Sorry.”

“¡LO PROVOCASTE!”
You provoked him!

I sighed numbly and looked at my father. He was crying. He looked so sad, like a helpless, lost child. Sadder than the only other time I'd ever seen him cry, over a decade ago back at Las Casitas Verdes when the Bay of Pigs invasion failed.

“DON' JOO SEE JOOR FATHER EES CRYEENGH?” Mami shrieked. “DON' JOO THEENK JOO SHOULD GO AN' COMFORT HEEM?”

“Comfort HIM?” I said. That was rich. “No, I don't think he wants me to touch him right now.”

“WELL, JOO ARE BEYON' GROUNDED!” Mami continued. “JOO ARE EEN SO MUCH TROUBLE! HOW DARE JOO WORRY PAPI AN' ME. HOW DARE JOO. JOO ARE SO SEHLFEESH. JOO LIE, JOO DEESREHGAHRD CURFEWS. JOO DON' CARE ABOU' ANYBODY BUT JOORSELF. JOO BLEW EET!”

“Oh
I
blew it,” I said. My voice sounded tinny and flat, as if it were inside a cartoon bubble. “I see. Okay.”

“NO!” Mami screamed. “JOO DON' SEE. EES NOT OKAY!”

She went to the kitchen, found one of Papi's ubiquitous prescription pads, and handed it and a black Magic Marker to him. On it he wrote the word
NO,
underlined several times. Underneath was a list:

TELÉFONO

COMPRAS [shopping]

CARRO [car]

AMIGOS

AFTER SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

FUN

 

Mami posted her NO prescription list next to Dr. Kanoff's. My parents couldn't even be original to punish me; they had to rip off other people's Nazi NO lists.

“READ DAT EVERY DAMN DAY,” Mami bellowed, “AN' MEMORIZE EET. FOR LIFE.”

My “life” sentence lasted a week, maybe two. The 'rents caved and we never talked about It again. It was as if It had never happened and The Prick as anything but a nice colleague and family friend had never existed.

Mami insisted on giving The Prick, whose move West was impending, a friendly farewell brunch. At our house. With all of us there. And the
huevos a la Malagueña.
It had a nice circular arc to it, I had to admit. We'd started out on a Sunday with the
huevos;
we'd end up on a Sunday with the
huevos.

“If that
cabrón
comes in my house,” Papi impotently told Mami, “I won't be there.”

“We'll mees joo,” Mami replied, exhaling her Kool and checking her manicure for chips.

I knew Papi would never NOT be there, but I could not believe The Prick would have the chutzpah to show up, especially after I'd warned him not to. While I was on parental probation, I'd talk to him from the pay phone at the Roy Rogers just up the street from Frenzy. He said he was sorry I got busted and that he loved me. He said we'd write to each other (my Temple Shalom Sunday school pal Sherry had agreed to have the Prick send his letters to
her house). He said the world would never understand “our special secret love” and that we'd be together forever “someday soon.” Even I had to laugh at that one.

“I think you'd better hightail it outta Dodge for good,” I told The Prick. “It's not good for you to be around here.”

But he came to brunch! Can you believe the balls on this Jew? Couldn't stay away from the
huevos,
I guess. I could barely look at him when he got out of his beetle, the VW bug that had transported me across state lines and the Potomac River to a changed self. By now I had turned fifteen and it was late May of 1973, May, that merry merry month. Peter Haldeman had left school the month before, and now this. All that remained of Juliet, Bathsheba, and Marilyn were bundles of illicit love letters sent to me in care of Sherry, which I kept hidden in a shoe box.

“Hey guys,” The Prick said. My two little brothers were playing catch in the front yard. “How about we play after brunch?”

The Prick smiled at me. My stomach rolled, nauseating me.

“You coming in?” he asked.

I just shook my head.

The Prick shrugged and went in the house with the boys. I stayed in the yard and read my
Mademoiselle
under a cherry blossom tree. There was an article about taming your uncontrollable curls. Once I hit puberty my formerly
Funny Girl
Fanny Brice–straight locks hormonally morphed into a
The Way We Were
Katie Morosky Chia Pet. So I watered it, hoping it would magically remorph, maybe this time into Joni Mitchell or Cher hair. I blow-dried it on the hottest setting to within an inch of its life. I slept with it wrapped around empty coffee cans. I poured gallons of antifrizz conditioner on it. Not evenly vaguely like Joni or Cher hair. Still a Chia Pet.

I put down the magazine and lay back on the grass. The sun felt good on my face, slowing my breathing. I thought of my father
crumpling into tearful sobs and of my mother screaming how I'd Provoked This. (Must've been my outfit. Who can resist big bazoomies in small halter tops?) But the warmth of the sun relaxed me, bleaching away those immediate images. We really needed a strong leader in my family who was a grown-up; my parents and I were having a terrible time raising ourselves. They were two innocent little babies in adult bodies, aging children who didn't know what the fuck they were doing or what to do or how to help me or stop people from doing what they wanted to do that might hurt us. Even now, Mami says, “Joo tol' me joo fell asleep on hees sofa.” When I ask what a fourteen-year-old girl might be doing at 9:30 on a school night alone in an apartment in another state with a twenty-something man, she says, “I don' know. What I do know ees dat joo were a liar an' broke de curfews all de time. Ehreek an' Alec never deed dat. Deyd come home early from der curfews. Eef jood been honest I would have gone to de police an' confronted heem. Are joo krehsee? I would never have heem een dees house eef I knew!”

Hm. Teenagers discussing their sex lives with their parents? Don't think so. Teenagers aren't even supposed to be
having
sex lives. Sure, my Ivy-bound Sidwellemies were smoking pot, snorting coke, drinking, and making out at parties to the Stones' “Angie,” Grand Funk Railroad's “I'm Your Captain,” and George Harrison's “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).” And who knows, maybe they were even sleeping together to Carole King's soulful album
Tapestry.
(One girl in my class always carried a diaphragm in her Coach purse. Her slogan: “I'm in demand. Better safe than sorry.”) Maybe it's me, but I seriously doubt any of those born-to-be-mild teenyboppers were off having sex after school in Crystal City high-rise complexes with men past the legal drinking and voting age who worked at mental asylums.

“See ya,” The Prick said.

I squinted up at him. His head was nebulous and yellow. I got up, feeling dizzy. I knew he wouldn't. See me again, I mean. Juliet, Bathsheba, Marilyn, even
tafetán color champán
—all bullshit. Just myths, just stories and dreams.

“Good
huevos,”
The Prick added, sounding and looking nothing like Jeremy Irons. “There's still some left.”

The sun glinted off his dirty blond Fu Manchu mustache, the round gold frame of his eyeglasses, and the yellow car keys. He started to hug me but I pulled back, feeling sick to my stomach again. My mentor's mouth smiled. “And whatsoever Mouth he kissed—” as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Is as it had not been—”

Ick.

I couldn't believe it: For the first time in my voluble life I couldn't think of a single thing to say. It doesn't get much worse than that for a Jubana. I watched The Prick drive away, up the cul-de-sac, for the last time. I looked down. Sweat from my hand had puckered my rolled-up magazine. The American model's pretty face was obscured, as was part of the “Kill That Frizz!” headline.