Jubana!

by Gigi Anders

  Valerie always reminded me of the kind of gal you’d have seen dancing and drinking it up and laughing the night away (with her head thrown back) at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. Only if Valerie had been invited, she probably would have skipped it. Society types, poseurs, and society-type poseurs weren’t her bag. She preferred giving sumptuous yet casual and very intimate dinner parties at her palatial apartment by the Shoreham Hotel, where the drinks were strong and the entrées never varied. Valerie’s signature dish (she did all the cooking) was a big fat juicy hamburger. Sirloin only, chopped special by her Chevy Chase butcher, served bunless, like steak. French fries. Caesar salad, tossed by a designated guest. All served on individual trays and consumed in the living, never dining, room. Frank Sinatra crooned in the background about city girls who lived up the stair, with all that perfumed hair that came undone…And about blue-blooded girls of independent means who’d ride in limousines, their chauffeurs would drive…

  “I was always plaster-ed—an’ how—whenever I was der,” Mami recalls. “Eet was a meestehry to me as to why.”

  Eventually Papi figured it out. He explained it was from mixing highballs with vino. Mami wanted to do what Zeide Boris did, which was to have un wiski, or Scotch in Cubanese. So Mami would start with cocktails, usually Scotch on the rocks. Then she’d drink red wine with dinner. By the time coffee was being served, Mami was smash-ed. In keeping with certain WASP predilections, Valerie served dessert—usually high-quality vanilla bean ice cream lightly topped with an insouciant toss of ground espresso beans or grated bittersweet chocolate—only when my parents, with their Cuban sweet teeth, were present. Heavily sugared joo-name-eet is to Cubans as hard liquor is to WASPs. As for coffee, Valerie liked hers black and unsweetened, whereas we Jubans enjoy a splash of foamy black espresso in our demitasses overflowing with sugar—Cuba’s best export after Jubanas.

  “Valerie brought out de choogahr johs for us,” Mami says. “Because I told her from day one dat dat wasn’t ohpshonal. Eet was, like, ‘Here come de Cubans!’—an’ reach for de choogahr, honey.”

  The sugar and the closet. Mami was the best-dressed refugee around, courtesy of the exquisite castoffs from Valerie’s perfectly and ongoingly edited yet significant haute couture wardrobe. One dress was more kill-me-now beautiful and luxurious than the next. The flawlessly tailored and lined little black day dress in silk and wool crepe that Mami wore with pearls and killer heels to her mental hospital job interviews? Valerie’s old Jackie Kennedy–worthy Nina Ricci. It was like the rhyme I sang with my Baptist divas when we played patty-cake, only taken to a finer level: “Miss Mary Mack-Mack-Mack, all dressed in black-black-black, with silver buttons-buttons-buttons, all down her back-back-back…” The orgasmic sleeveless hand-beaded satin and silk brocade ball gown in a pattern of swirling big tomato-red and black and gold bejeweled paisley on an ivory background with the triangle peekaboo cutout between the bosom and the waist, the dreamy confection that trailed along the floor in a rustle like a happy woman’s sigh? The festeev dress Mami hardly ever wore because she was a ceeveel servant? Valerie’s old Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute–worthy Ben Reig.

  Bliss for me to be there inside Valerie’s dressing room, luxuriating and lingering in the lushness of superb fabrics—shantung, organza, chiffon, satin, Italian cotton pique, scalloped lace, cashmere, crepe de chine—that embraced me in their fullness from their hangers as I sank into them like a vertical hammock, breathing in my ladies’ smoke. T. S. Eliot, it was perfume from a dress that made me so digress, digress right into a little girl’s projected dreamland of what being a real lady would be like someday. Colorful rows of strappy sandals, mules, slides, and sling-back and pump stilettos (lots of spectator styles in there), each pair light as meringues; impossibly thin ivory and black silken slips and half slips that smelled of Joy; sell your firstborn to the Gypsies for the sapphire, pearl, diamond, gold, and platinum pieces of estate jewelry. It was all like being inside a more compact El Encanto. You’d have to be etherized or expired not to lohvee.

  To imagine having all this taken away, wrested from your clutches by some illiterate asshole hick guerrilla reeking of B.O.—Gahd! Valerie lived the way we did before Castro. To never have to think about money or comfort or well-being or peace of mind or miss what used to belong to you…Feeling so close to everything we lost…

  I burst into tears.

  “¿Qué pasó?” Mami shrieked, abruptly turning to me, bare-foot and only half zipped into a fitted sleeveless poufy-skirted black silk Dior cocktail dress with a plunging neckline and a rhinestone buckle on the matching belt encircling the tiny waist.

  “Gigi?” Valerie said, her nicotine and alcohol-marinated voice a beacon of eternal reassurance.

  “I’m too happy!” I said, standing up. Something hard was digging into my naked archless cutlet. It was the heel of a pointy black silk velvet stiletto with an ornamental rhinestone accent on the vamp, meant to be worn with the dress Mami was trying on. I picked up the shoe and held it in my hand tenderly, as you would do for a delicate baby bird fallen out of its nest or a holy relic from a lost realm.

  “I’m too happy,” I repeated, sniffling and steaming up my horrendous baby-blue cat-eyes. “God must have sent you to rescue us.”

  Valerie hoisted me in her long, tanned arms and squeezed me tight to her, kissing my nape. She smelled like expensive flowers. Roses, maybe, with a touch of…was it freesia? Lily? Hyacinth? Peony? Lilac? All of those, none of those?

  “This child,” Valerie said. “I’m wild about this goddamn child!”

  My brother Eric’s diaper might’ve needed changing, but that didn’t deter him from his crawling rounds at the forty feet of our twenty dinner guests. We could now accommodate more visitors in our home at one time because we’d moved from our “drama an’ a reevehr” apartment into a little town house nearby in a development called River Park. Our new place had central air and heat and a sliding glass door leading to a small enclosed backyard with grass in it. Eric and I each had our own room. Mine was upstairs, overlooking the street and directly above the front door. My bedroom ceiling was sloped, which I liked because it lent the room an attic-y feel, and the walls were painted deep, bright aqua, which I loved, green being my favorite color. And the furniture may have been inexpensive—most of the pieces were wicker that had been painted white—but at least it was comfortable and pretty and we’d bought it ourselves. No more of that horrible rented junk.

  “He’s adooorable,” said Josephine from Mississippi, her eyes on Eric. Fiercely entrepreneurial from birth, my little brother had a shoe shine kit and he was going around the room with his wooden box containing brushes, buffing cloths, and cans of black and brown shoe polish. His asking price for a shine was a quarter but people usually tipped him a dollar.

  “Tha-yutts just precious!” Josephine added, extending her leg to Eric’s ministrations and exhaling her Salem cigarette smoke. “This boy is somethin’ else. Go ahead, sugar, have at mah shoes.”

  Had his forte been, say, sketching quick caricatures, Eric would’ve done it. The disciplined, driven way he worked rooms was just amazing. His knack for money-making would “take him far,” Josephine’s husband, Joe Abraham Lincoln, noted. My nice third grade teacher, Mrs. Scott, and her husband thought so, too. (Mami always invited my teachers and their husbands over for dinner.) I’m so sorry, did I miss something? Did somebody have a secret how-to-get-ahead-in-the-world meeting while I was busy poring over my Seventeens and writing my little poems and stories on scraps of paper and playing with my redheaded Barbie in her hot-pink patent leather wardrobe case?

  “I want to talk to you,” Valerie told me, putting down her cocktail and extinguishing her cigarette in an ashtray Mami had stolen from La Omega, a Cuban restaurant in Adams-Morgan. I climbed into her lap, facing her and careful not to show the other guests my floral calzoncillos, panties, under my sleeveless turquoise, violet, and lime faux Pucci cotton micro-mini-dress. (Unlike Mami, I al
ways gravitated toward happy colors. Life was tough enough living with former mental patients’ suicidal black-and-blue self-portraits hanging on every wall, thank you.) On that summer night I also had on a stretchy turquoise hair band that matched my shift. I liked being coordinated. All Jubanas must be. I had accumulated a vast collection of assorted hair bands, barrettes, ponytail holders, and clips; by then my hair was down to my waist. I wrapped my legs around Valerie’s hips, tucking the naked cutlets underneath. I lived for nights and weekends, when I could liberate the cutlets from their cookie confinement and be barefoot. Valerie took a good look at me, smoothing the little soft short wisps hovering above my forehead.

  “What do you want most in the world?” she asked. To memorize everything you wear so I can look like you do. I did have a seemingly useless knack for acute fashion memory. Regarding beautiful women dressed beautifully was instructive and inspirational, not to say natural. I’d done that since I was a baby. Valerie was wearing a navy boat-neck pullover with white stripes and three-quarter sleeves, yellow gold and iridescent white pearl Chanel button earrings, a gold watch with a red alligator strap, white capri slacks, and quilted red satin ballet flats. Very Lulamae–Holly Golightly. Thanks to Valerie, I was learning the lexicon of fashion. She said, “God is in the details.”

  “What do I want the most?” I said. “No brother.”

  I rolled my eyes as Eric industriously shined his fifth pair of shoes. It was as if he had on invisible blinders and could see only what was right in front of him. Mami and Papi regarded their son with awe and infinite admiration. You know, Judaic-Latino parentals, firstborn male, etc. I’d been dethroned by a towheaded toddler in wet diapers who shined shoes for money. But! If your parents insist on having sex (whatever that was) without using protection (whatever that was) and refuse to consult you so you can, like, weigh in, there’s really nothing you can do about it. I knew one thing for sure, though, and nobody had to articulate it to me in words: This was about princesa dethronement, Hispanic style, by the arrival of brothers. This isn’t a simple sibling rivalry thing—that’s kid stuff. This is having to confront the profound Hispanic reality and dirty not-so-little secret that no matter how much your parents love you, they will always prefer their sons. You have eggs. Your brothers have penises. It’s as simple as that. It’s a general worldview, boys and girls are not equally valued. Hence, not equally treated. No matter how enlightened you may believe you are as a Mundo Latino member, penises beat eggs. Every time. There’s no contest in a Latin home. Egg girl, joo lose. Really. We Latinas can’t even keep our own eggs as eggs; the noun’s been co-opted by LatinOs as slang for their testicles. THEIR testicles. Yep. Machismo’s not fair, it’s not right, but it is what it is. Consider the breast. Seno. It’s masculine, for God’s sake: El seno. The butt? Both forms, polite (fondillo, or seat) or vulgar (culo, or ass)—are also masculine. Okay, so now we’ve forfeited our eggs, breasts, and butts to hombres. What do we have left, anatomically speaking? La cabeza, the head (and, accordingly, la mente, the mind). As Mami Dearest would say, joos eet or loos eet.

  “Besides no brother,” Valerie said. “What else do you really want?”

  “Normal parents?”

  “Besides that.”

  “I want…I want to write,” I heard myself say. It was a startling self-discovery. I’d never said it aloud. Giving it a voice made it not just real, but really real. For the first time, I’d let someone in on my deepest un-Latina secret. Un-Latina because we’re supposed to feel that just loving a man is enough for us. It felt scary to tell Valerie, but I knew that she, a Benign WASP, was the right person to entrust it to. “I have been writing,” I added, “but it’s all over the place, everywhere.”

  “What do you mean?” Valerie asked.

  I slid off Valerie’s lap and tugged her hand to come follow me.

  My mother glanced up at us from her conversation.

  “We’re goin’ places,” Valerie told her.

  Upstairs in my bedroom, with Valerie sitting on my bed, I scrambled around collecting all the scraps I’d used to write on. Mostly they were little sheets from Papi’s prescription pads. It had never occurred to me to use my black-and-white speckled school notebooks—purchased, along with all my other school supplies, at Peoples Drug Store or Drug Fair—for anything other than homework. I needed a clear division: personal writing/school-work.

  “Oh God,” Valerie said, taken aback at the sight of the colony of swarming wasps who’d built a comb in the corner outside my window. They were huge, like monster yellow jackets. Periodically they’d fling themselves with a ping on the glass pane, thinking it wasn’t there and that they could get me. Sohkehrz. I found the wasps creepily captivating. I’d tap on the window and they’d go loco.

  “I know,” I said, delighted. “They’re so gross!”

  “But you need to get rid of them,” Valerie said. “Wasps are destructive little bastards.”

  “They don’t destroy me,” I said, sitting next to her and placing all the Rx’s on her lap. “I don’t wanna hold their hand, though. You like that Beatles song? ‘Oh yeah I’ll tell you something, doodoodoodoodoo, I think you’ll understand…’”

  “‘I wanna hold your hand!’” we sang in unison.

  “‘And when I touch you I feel happy inside,” I continued. “‘It’s such a feeling that my love I can’t hide, I can’t hide…’”

  “‘I can’t hiii-de!’” we sang together loudly, laughing at ourselves. This was so much more fun than the stupid shoe shine party going on downstairs.

  “You know what?” she said. “I think what you need is a diary.”

  “A diary?”

  “A place to keep all these in,” she said, meaning the paper pile on her lap. There was a poem about wishing for a puppy I’d name Martini (after Valerie’s favorite drink), and a map I’d drawn of Cuba with tear-shaped raindrops falling down on it and stick people with upside-down U’s for mad, sad frowns. I’d labeled my picture “Castro Cuntri,” with a swastika on either side of the title.

  “A diary is just what’s needed here,” Valerie said. “You can put it all in one safe place. Then you won’t lose anything precious.”

  “Anne Frank! Like in the secret annex up in this room. And the wasps can be like the Nazi bullies outside, the S.S.”

  “Yeah,” Valerie said. “Only you, señorita in a Pucci…”

  “Faux Pucci.”

  “You will have a happy ending.”

  “Dios,” I said, “is in the details.”

  “Right.”

  I jumped on Valerie so hard to hug her in my jubilation that I knocked both of us back on the bed. I hadn’t felt this good since that moment in the Varadero sea when something beautiful in my body vibrated, awakening me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Finding My Black Parents

  My Jewish friend Holly was pale and slender and quiet, with very dark straight hair and thick bangs, dark eyes, and full lips. Holly’s chain-smoking, deep-throated, redheaded New York City mom was Louise. Louise ran a drama school called Stage Studio on Connecticut Avenue at Dupont Circle in Northwest Washington. Sharing Red Hots, Smarties, and Lemonheads after school, Holly would tell me stories about her mom’s rip-roaring days in New York, when she was an actress and something called “a hoofer.” I liked the sound of it. New York, I imagined, was an island as openminded and exotic and sophisticated as Cuba. Mami talked to Louise, and soon I was enrolled in Saturday afternoon drama class, right after my morning ballet.

  But liking the sound of another’s life and wanting to get into it yourself are two different things. The only reason I couldn’t go into hiding under my bed for drama, a new experience and therefore terrifying, was logistical. I’d finish my two hours of ballet, Mami would pick me up, and we’d drive straight to Dupont Circle.

  “Don’ worry,” said Mami, aggressively tailgating the sohkehr going too slow for her taste in front of us. “Jool lohvee.”

  “Like I have a choice,” I said.
“Couldn’t we at least have gone home to change? I’m in a leotard and ballet slippers, for God’s sake. My hair’s in a chignon. They’ll think I’m retarded.”

  “Joo know what? Eef dey do, deyr de retardeds, honey. Tell dem, ‘Fohk joo! I am a bailarina as well as an actress an’ JOO are johs a notheengh one-deemehnshohn zero weeth notheengh else to offer een all de life.’”

  “I’ll quote you.”

  “Please do.”

  I didn’t mean to the students. I meant in my diary. Valerie had given me a dreamy one (which, if it wasn’t lost when we later moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, is probably tucked away somewhere in my parents’ house): a stiff-backed journal covered in silk cloth in a plaid pattern of predominantly pink with black, turquoise-blue, green, yellow, violet, and red on a white background. The heavy vellum pages were all lined, and there was a brass lock on the strap, with its very own tiny old-fashioned brass key. Though I always wanted to keep some kind of record of my life, I initially hesitated defacing this treasure with my little scribbles. But Valerie said, “Oh hell, mess it up. All you want. That’s what it’s there for. Writing is a messy business! All the greatest writers throughout history have been messy people, everybody knows that.”

  “What happens when I fill it up?”

  “Call me.”

  To my Baptist divas’ parents, however, I would quote not Mami but Martin Luther King Jr. or Langston Hughes, figuring the latter’s patois would be more appropriate for that given audience. (I’d memorized Hughes’s famous poem, printed on the first page of A Raisin in the Sun, a copy of which Alfie Brown had given me.) Here’s why: The tradition at Amidon Elementary was that whenever there were birthdays, the birthday child’s parents would provide cupcakes for the entire class. When it was my turn, Mami and I would go to the Safeway or Giant grocery store bakery and order a couple dozen to bring in. But kids had birthday parties at home, too; it’s important to keep the sugar going and the presents flowing. So I’d be invited to my little friends’ galas, and Mami and I would go out to buy me birthday clothes at Best & Co. on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest, across the street from Sidwell Friends’ upper school campus. Mami picked out a dress with a dropped waist, fitted elbow-length sleeves, and a full skirt—tafetán color champán, of course. (Never too early to get your Jubana child into the ultimate, aka marital, groove.) We’d go to Rich’s Shoes, farther up Wisconsin Avenue in Chevy Chase, over by Saks Fifth Avenue, where one of Mami’s former patients was a salesman. I tried on thin-soled maroon patent leather Mary Janes with squared-off toes and a single pearl button clasp on the outer end of the thin straps that traversed the cutlets. The shoes were sleek and slim, obviously meant for a narrow-footed princesa, which I was not.