Jubana! (9 page)

“Whah, you muss be Gigi!” said the woman. She had a really weird accent and smelled perfumey. He was very tall and looked like Abraham Lincoln. “Aren't you juss precious!”

“Hi,” I said, unsure of what to do next. They were all dressed up, but surely they weren't here for the party. It was only 8:05. So we just stood there for a couple of moments. Finally the man said, “Well, you think maybe we could come on in? Ahm Joe. This here's ma wahf, Josephine. Ahm a suhkahtris. Ah work at the hospital with your mama.”

“Where are you FROM?” I asked.

“Mississippi!” they chimed. See, I
knew
they were ferners. They couldn't have been from Mississippi
Avenue;
that was the road we lived on.

“Are you here to eat our foods?” I asked.

“Isn't she adorable?” Josephine said to Joe.

“She's a pistol,” he replied.

I of course had no idea what or whose vocabulary they were using—a “pistol”?—or what exactly to do. So I decided to let them in, but only because they weren't armed and dressed in guerrilla fatigues.

“Eat our nuts and chips!” I instructed them, and rushed off to Mami's room.

I found her in the bathroom, applying Maybelline liquid black eyeliner. The TV set was atop a rolling table that had been pulled over from the bedroom to the bathroom doorway so Mami could watch old movies while she was getting ready. A Kool cigarette burned in an ashtray on the countertop next to a glass of red wine.

“¿Quién fué?”
she asked abstractedly, concentrating on the outer edge of her upper eyelid. Who was it? She was barefoot and wearing one of her fifteen bathrobes. I gingerly stepped around the snaking extension cord and TV set—Mami had built a fortress around herself—and sat on the toilet seat. The black-and-white movie playing had a sumptuous smiling lady who was dancing with a man who was singing about queens' tiaras and dressing in sables. I picked up a tube of lipstick and looked in the mirror while I applied some Cherries in the Snow.

“Two people,” I answered. “What movie is that?”

“Cover Girl.
Ees from de forties. I saw eet een Cuba. I like
Geelda
better, doh. Because dat was de first time dat anybody had ever seen a ray-hayt wehreengh rayt.”

“But it's in black and white.”

“Only leetehrally. Feegurahteevehly, joo can tell Rita Hayworth ees een a rayt dress. ‘Put All de Blames on de Mames.' Das what chee sang. Dey joos to say dat rayt hair and rayt clothes don' match. Dat dey clash. But dat ees totally crap. Because Rita Hayworth, a Latina…See? De guy der, dat one ees Eugene Kelly.
Eugenio.”

Mami always Spanishified English words and names.

“Eugenio Kelly is the man dancer and singer?”

“Jes. Was der somebody at de door?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who?”

“Two people. Nothing like Rita or Eugenio, though. These ones are from another country.”

“Where?”

“Mississippi. Josephus and Joseph Steen.”

Mami dropped her powder brush.

“WHAT? Joe and Josephine? Dey are here? Oh, my God! Eet johs can't be! Ees only eight o'clock…”

“Eight-o-seven, actually,” I said, smacking my rouged lips together in the mirror. “Let me see some of that eyeliner.”

“What? No! Go out der NOW an' tell dem dat I'll be out een a second.
¡Coño!
Dees country ees reedeeculous! I hate eet!”

I slipped my bare feet into her emerald-green satin stilettos and shuffled off to the living room, still holding the eyeliner wand.

“My mommy isn't ready yet,” I announced. “But you can put on my eyeliner on my eyes for a while.” I handed it to Joseph Steen, shutting my eyes and extending my chin. “Anyway, don't worry. We have a lot of many foods.”

I kept my eyes closed to allow the eyeliner to dry, and began singing what I thought were the words I'd heard to “Put Me to the Test” from
Cover Girl:
“‘I wear no farmer but to my charmer I hereby pledge my wall. In other words, I'm at your ceck and ball.'”

I stopped and opened my Cleopatrified eyes. My audience appeared puzzled.

I beat on, a little boat against the current: “I'm pretty sure my mommy and daddy will talk about you very much after you leave here.”

 

I brushed my teeth, put on my yellow-and-white cotton gingham baby doll pajamas with the little red strawberries sewn around the neck and sleeves, and sat upon my small white bed. The Steens had given me a present. It was a book,
A Child's Guide to Freud.
It had an aggressively drawn series of black pen-and-ink sketches of a fiendish little boy and his family. I thought maybe it was about Freud Flintstone, written from the point of view of Pebbles or possibly even Bamm-Bamm. But instead, I found a story about a troubled child who gets taken to therapy by his parents:

“What Mommy and Daddy take you to is called a PSYCHIATRIC SESSION. The man in the chair…will call you a NEU
ROTIC…Arguing back is called EXPRESSING ANGER. The reason the psychiatrist does not mind this is called THE FEE…Now you've gained INSIGHT. Call yourself AWARE…[Your parents are] SICK. You alone are FREE. You ALONE.”

The last page had a drawing of the little boy with wings, flying above the earth, away from the sun. I wrote my name on the book in black Magic Marker and turned out the light. I pulled the blankets up to my chin and stroked my hair with my hair
tete,
wondering who writers were and how they wrote their books. I heard my mother's laughter from the living room. When we'd sat down to eat and cut into our
pollo,
blood had oozed out. Mami had never cooked before and she thought cooking
pollo
meant you basically warmed it up. Mrs. Steen kindly took over and made the blood stop by baking the breasts for another hour in a much hotter oven. Now I inhaled commingled perfumes, espresso, and cigarette smoke. There were no intellectuals or creative people in my family. Sure, they were well-trained professionals, but they were not
educated,
if you can see the difference. There was no one in my immediate circle who would encourage me to pursue writing, a fantasy profession I was envisioning. Writing was not considered a serious or even a heterosexual girl–appropriate endeavor. Even at this tender age, I was already well into my Latina programming: Don't achieve. You can be successful and intelligent—that way, your parents can bore the shit out of the neighbors at cocktail parties with all your many accomplishments—but you must always remember your place; if you're too competent and self-sufficient nobody will marry you or, God forbid, impregnate you afterward. This is really, really bad because marriage and motherhood are your raisons d'être. If nothing else, the Hispanic culture is traditional and hierarchical; the implicit rules stipulate that if you're a girl you can be smart
or
you can be beautiful. But you can never be both, so you better choose. I loved-loved-loved
Cherries in the Snow and eyeliner. I loved-loved-loved my books. In other words, I was emotionally my age but intellectually I was far older. This was a big problem for a four-year-old who already knew a lot about herself and what turned her on. Right now, that was okay. It would not be okay later, but later wasn't right now. So I kept my little writing fantasy a secret. Like masturbating, it was not something you did in public, and it was something that the more you did, the more you wanted to do.

Anyway, major (or even minor, for that matter) writing was really neither here nor there at age four! Soon I would be spending the summers with Mami on the air-conditioned ward in the mental hospital. At least they kept it cool in there. Jubanos may hate snow and ice, but we'd die without air-conditioning and cylindrical icebergs of compacted crushed cubes in our drinks. It makes us feel more sane and secure, reassured that everything's going to be all right, that we're in civilization. That we're
Kool.

At present, surveying our diminished surroundings and the fact that we and the housekeeper were the only Hispanics I knew, I, Anastasia Romanov, I ALONE—with my recurring bad dreams of expropriation and death by water, my pretty pink angora party dress and my strange new Freud book, my treasured
gindaleja
of holey rubber
tetes
—preferred exile in Siberia or even Las Casitas Verdes with day-old chocolate birthday cakes, gross-out green lizards, and “simple retailer” Jubanos to this foreign English-dominant wasteland.

Good peanut butter, though. Crunchy.

S
o why the hell was I, barely four years old, going every day from our squalid walk-up tenement in Southeast Washington, D.C., to a mental ward? God knows I asked. Mami explained that unlike Americans (bad), Cuban parents (good) don't desert their children in summertime by sending them off to camp (death).

“Cahm. Johs de word ees really really bad, joo know? What ees cahm?”

“It has a P at the end, Mami. You say it with a P. Cam-
p.
You have to say the ‘puh.'”

“Right. What ees cahm?”

“You get on a big yellow
guagua
[bus] and they take you to a place where it's got grass and a lake and little bunk bed houses and there's crafts called papier-mâché…”

“Hold eet right der. Papier-mâché notheengh. WHAT kind of houses?”

“With bunk beds.”

“Right. An' what kind of place has houses like dat?”

“Is this, like, a riddle?”

“¡Coño, qué bruta!”
Dammit, what a dunce!

“Are there any pens in here so I can draw?”

It's very boring for a young Jubanique child to be locked in a mental institution for eight hours a day, five days a week, even a mental institution that has housed such famous residents as Ezra Pound and, many notorious years later, John Hinckley. I felt as employed there as Mami was, except
one
of us was, how shall we say, involuntarily volunteering her services and the pleasure of her company to the medicated masses. It seemed as though all three hundred sprawling acres of the federal hospital grounds were just-kill-me-now beige and gray and brown. Mami's building, the Dorothea Dix Pavilion, smelled of Pine-Sol. It was all dim hallways and black and gray metal desks and cabinets in there, and no carpets so the linoleum floor was bare and cold. The in-patients, the majority of whom were heavily sedated, mostly sat around in loose clothes or bathrobes and defeated slippers on orange and turquoise vinyl furniture and watched TV in the “day room.” Some tried over and over to relight long ago extinguished cigarette butts piled in smelly stale peaks in huge round purple aluminum ashtrays. The patients constantly hit up the staff for fresh cigarettes. At first Mami shared hers to be nice and to bond, but after a while she got hip to their tricks and began announcing, “Sorry, Meestehr/Mees [whatever their last name was], I only have enough for myself.”

There were several other female social workers in Mami's wing, really nice American women who made a big fuss over me between seeing patients (and thank God they did, because I'd have died of psychiatric cabin fever otherwise). These were Mami's first real women friends in this country, and many of those friendships have endured. I'd bounce from one to another of their offices, providing comic relief and evaluating each lady's
fitness as a potential surrogate mother to me. “Gigi's so
entertaining!”
they'd say. Hello, what choice did I have?
I'm four years old and stuck in a locked mental institution, for God's sake.
Throwing a tantrum will only…
get me locked in a mental institution!
It just doesn't get much more diminished than this for a Russian-Lithuanian-Polish-Cuban-Jewish
princesa.
What was I supposed to do? The revolution had put me—Gigi La Yiya Yiyi Yiyita Rebeca Beatriz Anastasia Lula Mae Luli Gorda China Muma Mumita Mamita Bruta Bobita Benes Andursky Anders—here. And my parents, too. Fidel Castro had put us all here, that
cabrón comemierda H.P.
[shit-eating bastard
hijo de puta,
son of a whore]. And my Juban culture—which stipulates that children never leave their parents, never never never never EVER, not even after they're married with kids (especially after they're married with kids)—had put me here. Shit! Unlike the patients, I seriously had better things to do. I could be bathing with my mother in Varadero beach right now, I could be picking tropical flowers in a beautiful park with my
abuelos
or eating my daily lunch—
bistec a la palomilla
(pounded, fried steak),
arroz blanco
(white rice),
frijoles negros
(black beans), and
platanitos maduros
(fried ripe plantains)—which could be followed by a delightful nap chaser in a hand-painted yellow-and-white imported crib and dreams of heiress-hood.

But nooo.

So. I could either have hourly heart attacks, like my Miami Cuban exile brethren have had for more than 406,888 hours of the last four-plus Castro decades, or I could make the best of things. That made me be resourceful, adaptable, imaginative, and self-reliant, whether I felt like it or not. What do they say?
Children are resilient.
Yeah. Right. If you're the tiniest one with the least power, you have to obey the bigger, stronger ones feeding, clothing, and housing you, even if they're completely flipped
out. My parents were way too engrossed in daily survival and the effects of compounded transatlantic losses to be a Juban version of Norman Rockwell parents. (Actually, Rockwell, with his idealized, un-Hispanic, syrupy visions of Americana, is Papi's favorite painter. When he got into a shared private practice in 1963, Papi hung schmaltzy Rockwell prints of doctors and patients along the office hallways.)

Whenever my parents did pay attention and those magical, ephemeral, singular moments presented themselves, I grabbed on tight and savored those rations.
Give me love.
At night Mami sat on the side of my bed and in the lamplight read or talked to me—briefly. She'd start to rise and I'd grab her freckled arm and pull her back down to me.
I need more from you. Are we together? Are you my loving mother? Are we a family? Or not? I wonder why you won't be closer and more giving.
I thought I had articulated those things by my actions, but it didn't seem to register in Mami, or in Papi, for that matter, and it never would. Nor would it with the four Epic-Epochal lovers of my future romantic life.

Even now, my mother sounds a thousand times brighter, happier, and more excited to hear from me on the telephone or in E-mails than in person. Why is this? I was learning the ropes, the ropes of people's love limitations, and settling for what little I could scramble to get. My deduction:
I may have to steal the love I crave. Where can I go to shoplift love? Maybe I'm just not interesting enough to linger over, so I'd better work on that. I must be burdensome and not worth putting time and effort into. My needs must be too big and unwieldy, for meeting them takes too long and takes too much out of others, who have more important things to do with their time. My feelings about the state of my needs don't count or matter. I will always be alone in the world. Castro said if you need a friend, get a dog. Maybe I'll ask Mami and Papi for a dog for my birthday. A puppy could help me.

A weird fatalism was taking hold within me. It wasn't logical. Could it be a chemical or genetic hand-me-down from my great-grandparents, who died anonymously in the death camps, piled high in pits like the extinguished cigarette butts in the day room on the ward? Zeide Boris, my father (though he's always denied it), and Tío Bernardo—each has had a predisposition to depression. How well you tolerate frustration—some of us break sooner than others—is an element of that predisposition. The messages I was picking up day-to-day seemed to trigger that fatalism, and converge into a submissive, sometimes self-destructive, melancholy: inevitability and those recurring dreams of death by water and of being ripped off. My Juban family had secrets, hidden agendas, unfinished business. What were those things? It was all very subtle and therefore hard to identify and to resolve. We certainly never talked about it at home, but I knew I had it, whatever “it” was. A masochistic malaise, perhaps? I was much too young to articulate it to anyone at the time, but I knew I had a certain…syndrome. It was Jewish and it was Cuban. Though it appeared to be at odds with the cheerful, lively, sparkly Cuban spirit called
el echar pa' 'lante
—which literally means the throwing forward, or the ability to push ahead—all Cuban exiles are sad underneath the skin. I was like Papi in the Jewish syndrome sense, Papi who metaphorically hid under the bed his whole life: ill-at-ease with anyone but family and intimate friends, resigned, sweet, mistrustful of strangers and yet too trusting of others' real motives, a little sad, always picking up the tab and not letting others do for him, perceiving the world as a dangerous, inhospitable place.

I once asked Mami why most of the Jews seemed so passively to submit to the Nazis. She said, “Because dey couldn't believe dat what was happeneengh to dem was
really
happeneengh to dem.”

Dr. Raymond Band, my pre-Gramps psychiatrist, the one
who said I was conflicted about my own
individuation
and who regarded me as though I were an alien, once called me “a driven leaf”; I had no moorings. “I lived on air that crossed me from sweet things,” wrote Robert Frost in his poem “To Earthward.” Imagine, a New England Yankee farmer-poet-philosopher-anti-Semite who read at Jackie Kennedy's husband's inauguration, speaking to me. “I craved strong sweets, but those/seemed strong when I was young: The petal of the rose/It was that stung.”

Dr. Band couldn't see that generations of displacement—first my great-grandparents, from their shtetls to the camps; then my grandparents, from Europe and Russia to Cuba; then my whole family, from Cuba to the United States—take their toll, and how. What little morsels my parents could offer me, and I don't mean materially, weren't sufficient. I remained hungry. So I looked for my mother and my father in other people. “A driven leaf.” I wish. “I crave the stain / Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love / The sweet of bitter bark / And burning clove.”

Oh, if only I
could
live on air, like a leaf…

There were bright spots. There was a trip to the National Zoo on a wonderfully moody autumn day, my favorite time of year: Mami's deep gray cropped angora sweater (worn with a sleek pair of black ski-type slacks, black leather gloves, black ballet flats, diamond stud earrings, and a silver charm bracelet) matched the color of the sky. Her hair and painted lips were remarkably red. Papi bought me a paper bag of unshelled peanuts, much to Mami's gastronomic dismay, and we ate some and fed the rest to the elephants, whose skin matched Mami's sweater and the Washington, D.C., sky. We took pictures. Mami looked like a model.

Another time Mami rented a stroller and rolled me through the ample, quiet corridors of the National Gallery of Art. It was cool and dim, and Mami showed me the paintings she favored; most were of ballerinas.
“Míra,”
she told me. Look. There was Au
guste Renoir's
Dancer
and Edgar Degas's beautiful ballerinas. I loved to see those graceful figures, especially from the back, where green, yellow, blue, or pink satin sashes were tied in bows around the waists of their white tutus. We passed some Monet landscapes. Mami liked them, too. Her tastes, such as they were, were definitely eclectic. At the gift shop, she bought two small Monet prints and a Degas called
Dance Class.
Mami had the three framed and hung the Monets in the bathroom and the Degas in her bedroom. She said that one reminded her of her ballet school in Havana.

More than a decade later, when I was in college in Paris studying literature, poetry, and art history, I saw similar paintings at the Louvre. The Degas dancers resonated more than even Leonardo's Mona Lisa, probably because M.L. is encased in a bulletproof box and is always surrounded by hundreds of tourist gawkers. At five-two, I could barely get a glimpse of anything but her mysterious, long, eyebrow-less almond eyes. Besides, Degas's ballerinas had always been Mami's picks; how could anything else dare to compete?

 

Even when life was no longer about fighting off the threat of starvation or eviction, my parents usually left me to my own devices. Maybe I'd gotten too good at playing the independent, happy-go-lucky, assimilated child. Maybe my interests (books, magazines) and strengths (writing) were too isolating and foreign to them. Maybe I was just really good at entertaining myself. Maybe the 'rents, as I refer to them with my friends, didn't get me because I was so different from them. Maybe my presence made them miss Cecilia and Cuba too much. Maybe I had the wrong anatomy. Maybe Papi only had enough tunnel vision energy to love one girl. Maybe Mami was competing with me and would never let me win.
At any rate, I thought I could overcome and rise above any and all of those possibilities, and outwardly mask my blue inner feelings, by embracing the
Gypsy
attitude: “Let me entertain you, let me make you smile, let me do a few tricks, some old and then some new tricks, I'm very versatile.”

In Mami's office I found a yellow legal pad and government-issue pens. Since I could never go to cahm, where they have cool crafts like papier-mâché, I settled for sketching flowers resembling the ones I used to pick for Mami in El Jardín Botánico and El Parque Central. Living where we did in D.C., there wasn't much nature. Behind our crummy apartment building, though, there was a shallow running creek. My Tía Elisa, Tío Julio's wife, used to take me back there to wade when she and Tío Julio came to visit us from Miami. Tía Elisa was a Big Mama who loved to eat EVERYTHING, and I could easily coax her into taking me to the Safeway supermarket where she'd buy me all the exotic delicacies that Mami wouldn't: Wahndehr Brayt, Welch's grape juice, Swee-Tarts, and Skippy crunchy peanut butter.

Later, we'd sit by the creek (after Tía Elisa cleared away the empty beer cans and broken glass pint bottles, the cigarette butts and used condoms), and I'd extend one leg and then the other so she could roll up the bottoms of my pants. I loved the slippery smoothness of the hard rocks on the soles of my feet under the dirty water. Mami regarded my soiled feet after these immersions and shook her head, grumbling,
“Este país es una mierda.”
This country is a piece of shit.