Jubana! (29 page)

“Seriously, all you need's a social security number or a driver's license.”

“Are you gonna help me, if I do that?”

“What happened is OUTRAGEOUS,” Paul said. “Period.”

“Seeing The Prick won't change my life,” I said. “It might make it worse. Will it undo the Braloves' bathroom? And everything else that brought us here to my Ikea sofa?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “It will.”

“Jubana goes vigilante on the trail of her baby rapist?”

“You're goddamn right.”

“I think it would help more, or as much, if my parents—well, my mother, anyway—could say, ‘We're sorry we let you down. We love you. This wasn't your fault. What can we do to help now?'”

“Good luck on that one,” Paul said acerbically.

“I mean, I wouldn't have an answer but at least they would've tried.”

“Well,
I'm
sorry,” Paul said.
“I'm
sorry. It's not enough, I know. It sucks. But
I'm
sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said, kissing him. “That's really nice. I'm gonna go take a bath now. I feel dirty.”

“Now? You're not dirty. Jubanas never are. They can never be. Jubanas always smell like Agua de Violetas.”

The fiancé had a point, a sweet one. But I went and took a long, hot bath anyway. If it was good enough for Blanche DuBois it was good enough for me.

Period.

W
hy is your right sneaker torn?” Gramps asked as we settled in for one of our sessions.

For this he gets $4 a minute?

“Ah, it's always torn there,” I said, touching the thick white cotton sock-encased ball of skin and bone protruding just beneath my big toe. It and its less protruding but still ballsy left foot twin eventually break open all my shoes, not just the white leather Keds I was wearing that day. That's partly why I have a lot of shoes. You can share the love that way, spread it around.

“I know it's always torn there,” Gramps said. “Why is that?”

“Just…normal,” I said, shrugging. I flexed my short little legs across the ottoman. They always feel better elevated.

“No,” Gramps said. “It isn't.”

“All my shoes tear there. My feet always hurt me. Since I was little they have. In ballet class and ice-skating and birthdays. It's 'cause I don't have any arches. You know Reed Whittemore?”

“Who?”

“The poet Reed Whittemore? God, have you ever heard of anyone?”

“I've heard of fucked-up feet,” Gramps said, regarding the PVCs. “And
those
are fucked up.”

“Thanks.”

“You're welcome.”

“Reed Whittemore taught me Shakespeare at Maryland. He has this wonderful book of poems,
The Mother's Breast and the Father's House.”

“Oy.
She's starting in with the poetry. The Mamaleh's Booby and the—”

“Anyway. There's a wonderful poem in it—well, all the poems are wonderful—but there's this one called ‘Writer and Reader': ‘Let us agree…the truth is…in bare feet.' See? We wandered far off shore. You didn't think I could get us back but I did. So. Bare feet. He meant truth and freedom lie in bare feet. I've been squiggling out of my shoes and putting my legs up my whole life. It's what I do.”

“Why?” Gramps said.

“'Cause I'm in pain,” I said. “It relieves me. That ball there? It gets really red and sore by the end of the day. It vibrates, sort of like a pulse. The left one, too, but less. I guess 'cause the right side of my body is bigger and I use it harder.”

“I want you to see a podiatrist immediately.”

“You do?”

“Oy!
Expansion! Thank you, God, the poem quoter heard me!”

To humor my expander, I went to see a colleague of Papi's. After examining, measuring, and reexamining the PVCs, the podiatrist said, “Your feet—the right one particularly—have developed swollen big-toe joints.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, simply happy to be out of my shoes and in a doctor's office. I've always loved medical environments. So clean
and precise. Then again, I grew up on a mental ward, temped in Papi's office through my teens, and accompanied him on his rounds at the hospital.

“Bunions,” the doctor said. “Permanent. The shape of your feet is deformed.”

“No no no,” I said, smiling. “They're pounded veal cutlets. They're
supposed
to be this way.”

“What size shoe do you wear?” the doctor asked, typing something into his tiny laptop.

“Seven narrow,” I proudly answered.

“You're a seven-and-a-half medium at the very least,” he said. “Preferably an eight medium, depending on the shoe.”

“Nooo. I'm a seven narrow. Tiny skinny little feet. I'm just like poor dead Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis—so sad—and my mom.”

“No. You're not. And incidentally, I always heard Jackie had big feet.”

“That's impossible,” I said, still smiling but getting hot under the 'zoomies, armpits, and face. I could feel the blood rising under my cheeks. If I'd been wearing my glasses instead of contacts they'd have been sliding down my nose. My heart raced. Fight or flight.

“You've been wearing the wrong size shoe for…twenty years,” the doctor said, reviewing my patient form. “Your feet are malformed. Do you have pain?”

I suddenly thought of Rich's Shoes and Mami's former patient who worked there. I was attending a birthday party to seduce black parents into adopting me, and Mami bought me thin-soled maroon patent leather Mary Janes with squared-off toes and pearl button clasps. Beautiful shoes, painful shoes.
All de Jubanas
mas finas [most refined]
have dos same feet. Jackie Fohkeengh Kennedy has dos feet, okay? And her husband ees
dead!
I flashed to “The Little Red Shoes,” the folk tale I'd read as a newly arrived Jubana refugee child. How Karen had suffered for her own shoes! That girl had her feet chopped off by a hangman with an ax—while the red shoes were still on them! Maybe Karen was a
Chinita
(little Chinese girl) in extremis. Maybe her golden lotus blossom feet were, like, bound. Moral: You must suffer to be beautiful. Or, if you're already beautiful you must suffer, perhaps to become more humane, like Pilar and her mother in José Martí's poem “Los Zapatitos de Rosa.”

“I don't really notice the pain,” I told the doctor. “I mean, it's chronic so it's just part of me.”

“Nordstrom has a good selection of widths,” he said. “Go try on the right size. Don't wear narrow again. It's not for you.”

For the second time in my life—and both times had happened under Gramps's tutelage—the top of my skull popped open. Metaphorically, of course. Then tears streamed down my face, not at all metaphorically. Great. The doctor regarded me with mystified sympathy.

“Can you fix them?” I said, looking around for something to blow my nose in. I really should carry those pocket packs of Kleenex like Papi. “Like, surgery?”

“Foot surgery is risky,” the doctor said, handing me a tissue. “It can actually create more problems. No, no surgery. Just go to Nordstrom.”

“But, you know, I just…I can't be that big. It's like monster feet. I already have an abnormally huge head.”

“It's not that big,” he said reassuringly.

I wasn't sure which extremity he meant. I dabbed my fallen, uncurled eyelashes. Shit! First it was tah-tah, Hahvahd Yahd. Now it was
adios, tafetán color champán.
Shit!

I went home and told Mami what happened. The chic denial freak couldn't argue with a
doctor,
a board certified, highly experi
enced
podiatrist
and
surgeon.
She exhaled her Kool smoke impatiently, raised the volume on
Now, Voyager,
and returned her concentration to applying Revlon top coat to her long ice-white talons.

“So?” I said, a little edge in my voice. Hey, I'd earned the right. I officially had eternally fucked-up feet, thank you very much. It was like being blind before I got glasses; I assumed everybody danced into cars after seeing
West Side Story
or
My Fair Lady
and that their feet hurt while they did it. “What do you think of THAT?” I continued. “Turns out I've been wearing the wrong size shoes since I was—”

“OKAY, DAS ENOUGH!” Mami exploded, momentarily lifting the wet wand's tip from the top of her nineteen-inch-long left thumbnail. God forbid a smudge. “OKAY?”

I grabbed the remote off the arm of her rocking chair and turned down Bette, who was in the process of having a fabulous fight with Gladys Cooper, her mother. It was a shame, too, because I love Bette Davis in that movie, even if Pauline Kael did think Charlotte Vale, Bette's character, was masochistic. Okay, maybe she was, but so what? Bette's clothes were great after her ugly duckling–to–swan metamorphosis, inspired by an expander and later on by a married man, especially that scandalous plunging black number she wore with a fresh gardenia to host her first postmetamorphosis dinner party. Not to mention everybody smoked constantly.

“Mom. What is your problem? The doctor YOUR HUSBAND recommended SAID my poor feet—”

“I don' HAVE a problem,” Mami said. “OKAY? What I resent ees joor sahrkahsteek TONE an' de BADGEREENGH. Because I DON' DESERVE EET. I theenk JOO save up all JOOR bad feeleenghs johs for ME. An' I don't LIKE eet.”

“Okay, then cough up the Nordstrom card,” I said.

“¿El que QUÉ?”
Say WHAT?

“Expunge your guilt. Dollars for pain. Tit for tat. Quid pro quo. Eye for an eye. You get the gist.”

“No, I won'!” Mami said.

“You ‘won'? You won what? You didn't win anything.”

“I SAID I WON'T. T-T-T.”

Wow. English as a second language self-correction. First time in…ever. The woman who refused to say camp and kind all the way because life ees too damn chort for dos final consonan's? This was progress. Well, lingually.

“In that case I'll just hobble back to the
arroz
paddy on my hands and knees like a crippled
Cheenah
from the tenth century,” I told her. “It's right up there with clitorectomies and bride burning. Advanced.”

“Das Japan,” Mami said, turning Bette back up. Bette was saying, in a wonderful moment of abrupt self-discovery, “I'm not afraid, Mother, I'm not afraid!” I love that line. It's like in
The Moor's Last Sigh,
when Salman Rushdie writes, “I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist…Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid, blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke…I stopped being afraid because, if my time on earth was limited, I didn't have seconds to spare for funk…
I must live until I die.
”

“No,” I told Mami. “That's not Japan. That's China. Geishas are Japanese. They don't have those bound feet.” (Pounded feet maybe, but not bound.)

“But de 'rectomies?” Mami said. “Ahfreecahn. Dehfeeneetly. An' dos fire brides, deyr een Eendeeah weeth de dowries. Well, weethout dem. Das, like, Feefth World mehntahleetees. Now get out der an' make eet a good damn day! Lohv joo more!”

M
y sex letters to Woody Allen, which I foolishly hoped would lead me to the
tafetán color champán,
were always Jubanically
caliente.
But it was the envelopes that got him. They were killers. They took hours and hours to do, these intricate interconnecting, overlapping, intersecting collages of glued-on curvaceous thighs in black fishnets from Victoria's Secret catalogues, dried and silk flower petals plucked from Mami's infinite array, and fragments of poems and fiction from the
New Yorker
(unless it was irresistible copy, I avoided using newsprint; doesn't hold up). These inspired
chef-d'oeuvres
were my insignia, so Woody—or as I called him, my leetl Voody—would know it was from La Gigi—or as I called myself to him, Madame Emma B. Ovary. The correspondence from Voody to
moi
was never decorated in kind. But then, he's Voody. Voody doesn't have to do these things. He just used his courier new font letterhead brown-paper-bag-like stationery and dashed back sexy, funny, flirtatious notes in his thick black pen, often punctuating his bouncy prose the Emily Dickinson way, with more dashes than periods
between the lines. Exchanging lust letters with Woody Allen was much better than phone sex. Less cheese, more filling.

But I'm getting ahead of myself,
n'est-ce pas?
You're wondering exactly
how
did Woody Allen, my prospective husband, and I hook up? Well, the
New Yorker.
No wait, Beaver. Yep. Beaver. Beaver conjoined
nosotros.
It's romantic. So contain your gonads and I'll explain.

 

Everett Lloyd Kayhart (B.S., United States Merchant Marine Academy; B.S.F.S., Georgetown University) was hacking.
Hackhackhack.
He was coughing his way through my Frenzy academic career and my life. The ever supportive chain-smoker Sidwell Frenzy guidance counselor was shaking his head as he looked at my SAT scores and my GPA. He exhaled a manly-man billow of smoke in my eleventh grade face.

“You'd be lucky to
(hackhackhack)
get into Maryland,” he said gruffly, interspersing every few words with his customary hack. It was like Berkeley Breathed's Bill the Cat upchucking a hairball. “What a waste. Think your parents sent you
(hackhackhack)
here so you could wind up at a goddamn public school?”

Since we both knew this was a rhetorical question, Kayhart just shook his head, exhaled disdainfully, and
hackhackhacked,
this time into a monogrammed handkerchief. Was there anything these goyim didn't monogram? It was terrifying. The real question was how I would save myself from this hacking, snorting, merchant marine, Marlboro man, murderous
gringo
bitch who never knew windows opened. His teeth and his nails and every other surface were covered with a stain the color of curry and cured tobacco.

“At this point,” Kayhart said, now snorting instead of hacking, “I'd urge Beaver.”

“You'd
what?
”

“College, dammit. Beaver
(hackhackhaaack)
College.”

Hello, did I
look
like a rodent? First I'm a
gusana
for leaving Cuba. Then I'm a tropical termite for being Cuban. Now I'm a semiaquatic herbivorous pudenda for sucking at Frenzy? Nice.

“Beaver?” I asked. “What is that, like, Beaver A&M? Agricultural and Mechanical?”

“What?” Kayhart sputtered, shrouding the EKL monogram on his handkerchief with a blob of pea-green phlegm. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Or Beaver Ancient and Modern?”

“Anders, are you HIGH?” he yelled. The effort triggered a multiple hack attack.

“Would that I were,” I said with a sigh.

“You're applying to Beaver early admission,” Kayhart said, wiping the side of his thin mouth. “Risk reduction. Containment.”

I'd been looking at smallish private liberal arts schools like Swarthmore, Barnard, Georgetown. When I told this to Kayhart he couldn't stop guffawing. He wiped his soggy eyes with his now soggy handkerchief.

“Oh man, you're killing me,” Kayhart said, reaching for a fresh Marlboro.

“Would that I were,” I muttered.

“You go look at Beaver. And you keep
(hackhacksnooort)
looking at it until it lets you in. Beaver's the only private college in the Northern Hemisphere that'll accept you.”

In other words, I was Beaver bound. At the student bookstore they sold T-shirts that said “Save a Tree / Eat a Beaver.” I really should have sent one to Kayhart to express my gratitude. Located in Glenside, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, Beaver had, by my 1975 matriculation, just recently gone coed. (Non-Beaver people would ask, “Beaver? What is that, an all-girls school? Haaa.”)
By 2001, however, too many Internet porn hits made the school change its name to bland-but-safe Arcadia University, decades too late to save me from the obvious snickers.

 

It was the spring of 1977 and we'd just read Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
in my Beaver College European lit class. I was completely infatuated with the novel. To that end, my professor brought in a recent issue of the
New Yorker.

“Check it out,” she told me. “There's a short story in there by Woody Allen that you'll appreciate.”

It was called “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a Jewish New York City professor goes back in a literary time machine and has an (ultimately disillusioning) affair with Emma Bovary, his favorite fictional heroine. Everybody's heard of Woody Allen, but I never knew he could write so well. I flipped over the story.

When the semester ended, I went home to prepare for a semester in New York University's program in Paree. An old Sidwellemy friend, Nicole, suggested we take in Woody's
Annie Hall,
which was just out. I fell in love. Diane Keaton was so funny and fresh and Woody was so smart and endearingly neurotic. I decided I had to reach that crazy Jew who could, it seemed, do anything well. And when you're a teen you think you can do anything, too. Inexperience informs impertinence.

I took out the Crane's, the heavy 100 percent cotton pale blue filigreed stationery, and my Waterman fountain pen, and began writing: “My leetl Voody, Yonville [where Madame Bovary lived as a married woman] sucks weethout you…” I told him how much I missed him, missed his keesees, his “fohnny leetl
je ne sais quoi
-ness.” I told him I'd had a change of heart, that I wanted him back. I signed it, “Love and amour, Emma B. Ovary.”

I attacked the matching envelope with my quintessential col
lage, leaving room only for stamps and my and Woody's addresses, and collapsed. The next day, a family friend called. He happened to know someone at United Artists in New York and suggested I send my letter up there and request it be forwarded. I thought, what the hell, and I mailed that sohkehr.

A week passed, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was just getting in, my arms full of drugstore shopping bags stuffed with items for my trip to Paris. I remember I was pulling out a plastic bag of cotton puffs when the phone rang. The voice on the line was unmistakable. I dropped my puffs.

Voody and I talked for a long time, possibly two hours, possibly fifteen minutes. Impossible to know. He was sweet, friendly, warm. He told me he usually didn't go through his fan mail himself, and that his secretary brought him my letter because the envelope caught her eye. He said he found my letter original and witty, and he said a lot of other very kind things. He wanted to be my correspondent. Mine! So I gave him my address in Paris at the Cité Universitaire, a complex for international students in the 14th arrondissement. Woody gave me his home address on Fifth Avenue and implored me to “make all your letters as hairy as this one.”

“‘Hairy'?” I asked. I had no idea what he meant.

“Yeah, tell me about your first orgasm in Paris,” he said.

“Um, okay.”

When we hung up I screamed to the 'rents what had just happened.

“Were joo JOO weeth heem?” Mami asked. “Because joo have to be joo.”

“I don't think Woody Allen would make a very good son-in-law,” Papi remarked.

And so over the summer (and the following couple of years) I sent my leetl Voody postcards, letters, French versions of Woody
Woodpecker comic books, and yes, I informed him about my first orgasm in Paris. I described the room, the ambiance, the weather, and closed with this: “Would that there had been someone else there to enjoy it with me.”

To my Parisian and domestic friends, I became a kind of unfamous celebrity. My delight over Voody was infectious, and I cherished what he and I had so intimately created. A fantasy. My fantasy was that Woody Allen and I were
affiancé.
His fantasy was…well, obviously, I don't know what his fantasy was. In all, I wrote dozens of times, sometimes as
moi
self, but usually in the persona of “Emma,” because as Emma I was much less restrained. (When the Soon-Yi thing hit the fan back in 1992, I wrote about Voody's and my romance for the
Washington Post.
It was called “Woody and Me: A Love Story. Sort Of.”) One of Voody's letters included a casual suggestion that I drop by and see him the next time I was in the city. Mental note to self:
If ever you leave Paris, you'll always have Voody.

 

North American reentry
après
France was tough.
How're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?
Hey, how're you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen the FARM? I wrapped up my final English and art history credits at the University of Maryland in College Park (which, after Paris, was like being in Bombay), and emerged in 1980 with a bachelor's degree and scant possibilities for employment. I hadn't taken a single class in journalism, though I had written a regular column for the
Beaver News
called “Anders Ganders.” And while my regalia may have been a pair of webbed feet, it was a start. After a brief waitressing apprenticeship at Angelo's Wayside Inn in Silver Spring, Maryland, I decided to go work at the
Washington Post.
I could probably write some stuff there. It never once occurred to
me that most people didn't just one day decide to go do that and then go do that.

So I did that.

A year later, I went to New York to visit Mary Lou, my platonic Frenzy boyfriend Rob's older sister. She knew the whole Woody story, and on a cold, cold Manhattan night, we impulsively decided to go see him in the flesh at Michael's Pub. Woody used to play jazz there on Monday nights. The club, on East Fifty-fifth, wasn't far from Mary Lou's place. While we were walking the few blocks, Mary Lou put on a pair of sunglasses. To me she was the epitome of common sense and cool, so I put my shades on, too. The city looked dark.

“Why are we wearing our sunglasses again, Lou?”

“Because the wind hurts our eyes,” she replied.

Michael's Pub made my heart pound with apprehension. I was abruptly ambivalent about this whole thing. Laughing girls and the clatter of dishes and Woody there with his clarinet and his hair looking so red under the hot lights—it all made me feel like a Jubanique interloper.

It was suddenly too real.

After the set, I shakily got in line to greet Woody, as did almost everyone there. From her chair, Mary Lou signaled a thumbs-up to me and smiled encouragingly. I looked back at her as though it was the end of something. I noticed a pale, skinny brunette sitting next to Woody, smoking a cigarette and aloofly sipping Perrier. She looked about fifteen. I smoothed down my long nubby gray-and-white tweed wraparound sweater. It was my turn and there he was, glancing up at me from behind his imposing, silly glasses. I felt nauseated.

“Hi,” Woody said. “Who should I make this out to?”

“No, nobody,” I said. “Nobody. This isn't…I don't want…not an autograph.”

“Okay,” he said, composed.

“Wait,” I said. I felt myself sinking. I took a collaged envelope I had prepared out of my cardigan pocket and proffered it. I would have recognized one of Voody's envelopes instantly. Surely Voody would recognize one of mine.

But Woody Allen just stared at it, blankly. His pubescent date exhaled languidly and looked away, bored out of her mind.

“It's from Emma,” I said. “Emma B. Ovary?”

“Emma,” he said. It wasn't a question. He looked baffled.

“Yeah,” I whispered to the floor. “Emma. You know.”

He acted like he didn't know. The man in line behind me was snorting his impatience. The skin under my 'zoomies was soaked, as were my armpits and my face. No amount of concealer or powder, not even industrial strength, could've quelled it.

“What am I supposed to do?” Woody asked me, holding the moist envelope.

“I don't know!” I cried. “'Bye!”

I pulled away, full of shame and tears in that blurry room. As Mami Dearest would've said, “Joo blew eet.” Yes, I had tendered enough information for a man who'd been nursing a transcontinental love affair with a woman he found fascinating. But probably not for a celebrity who'd scribbled a few playful notes to a besotted college student.

Was Woody being coy? Was he embarrassed I'd shown up unannounced while he was out on a date? Did he even remember who I was? Was it that he just didn't like my sweater? My curvaceous Cuban ass? My abnormally large head?

“I want to go home now, Lou. Okay? Please?”

Mary Lou understood. We put our coats and scarves and gloves on.

“Did you tell him who you were?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

“Weird. Oh well. You tried.”

“I know,” I told her. “I don't know what happened. I felt closer to him when I didn't meet him. Woody'll never be my husband now.”