by Gigi Anders
“They’re pretty but they hurt,” I said, looking down as my medium-width feet created a bulge where there shouldn’t be, thereby ruining both the line of the shoes as well as my God-given right to have shoes that fit properly.
“Hurt?” Mami said. “Hurt where?”
“Everywhere,” I told her. “They’re too tight.”
“No. Deyr not. Deyr great! Ees de right size.”
“Bitch, too tight here,” I said, touching the bone that protruded just below my big toe.
“What ees joor point?” Mami said, taking out her wallet. “Joo have de same feet as me. Narrow. All the Jubanas mas finas [most refined] have dos same feet. Jackie Fohkeengh Kennedy has dos feet, okay? An’ her husband ees dead!”
“I may have to kill myself,” I said. “Or you.”
“Chee looohvs dem,” Mami told her former patient. “We’ll take eet! An’ also dees an’ dees an’ dees, too. Thank joo SO much.”
There were stacks of open shoe boxes all around us. No way any self-respecting Jubana exerts the quaint Anglo concepts of “self-control” or “restraint” when confronted with more than one pair of beautiful shoes—or beautiful anything else, for that matter. In our world, mas es mas. More is more.
“Somehow,” I said, picking up a gray suede Hush Puppy loafer with black crepe soles and swirling black tooling on top, “I just don’t hear these calling my name.”
“Dos are for de school days,” Mami said, signing the receipt with her distinctive signature small, round, fat script and hollow circles for dotting I’s and making periods. This style used to drive her Cuban professors crazy, the way being left-handed used to be considered bad or wrong in the old days. But as usual Mami persisted, and I learned to punctuate the same way myself.
“I’d rather have black leather riding boots than these gray things. When am I ever ever ever ever EVER going to get those? I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“Joo know when? When joo get joor own leetl horsee.”
“And when will that be, exactly?”
“When joo get joor own leetl job to pay for joor own leetl horsee an’ eets own leetl barn an’ de leetl black rideengh boots.”
“I’m in elementary school,” I reminded her. She evidently required a reminder of my world status. “It’s illegal for me to work!”
“Das joor eemeegration problem, honey, not mine.”
“So glad we cleared that up.”
“Me too. Now ees time to go an’ smoke an’ have a leetl drinkee. I need to relax. Chohpeengh ees exhausteengh. Motherhood ees a beech.”
“‘Shopping is exhausting.’ Please. It’s your favorite thing in life.”
“Dat ees so wrong. My favoreet theengh een de life is chohpeengh…a LOT.”
On the day of the given birthday party we’d get me all dressed up—I initially played along to divert Mami—and there I’d be in my tafetán color champán dress, opaque ivory tights, patent leather maroon flats, horrendous baby-blue cat-eyes, and long hair pulled back into a fragrant Agua de Violetas–infused ponytail, with a strip of ivory satin ribbon tied in a bow to cover the band. Mami would have the girl’s gift all nicely wrapped—and I’d dive straight under the bed. Every time. Then we’d commence the same routine: Mami cursing and grabbing a stray foot or arm and dragging me into the car, the two of us yelling at each other all the way to the kid’s house, Mami slamming on the breaks for pissed-off emphasis (nearly hurling us both straight into the windshield), walking up to the door, plastering abrupt fake smiles on our faces, Mami ramming me inside the house and saying buh-bye.
It would take me a few awkward minutes to acclimate to the social environs. And then I’d be fine. More than fine. After the obligatory time with the kiddies, I’d go find the more (for me) socially suitable parents, and proceed to endear myself to them.
“I looove your house!” I’d commence. “You must be really happy and proud that you live here.”
And they’d say in an aw-shucks kind of way, “Well, yes. Thank you!”
Then depending on the size and looks of the place, there’d be two alternate responses. Either (1) “You are so welcome. And I notice that there’s a lot of room. So lucky. We live four to a room because of our Cuban immigration problems. It’s kind of hard. Black Americans have had to face so many similar things.” Or (2) “You are so welcome. And I notice how COZY it is here. Sooo cozy. It reminds me—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to cry but it’s so hard when I think back to this—of our beautiful tiny little home back in Cuba. You know, it wasn’t much, but just having the family all together was so wonderful. And now…”
Either way I’d be smothered in parental hugs and kisses and given extra helpings of coconut cake and lemonade, two American items I adored and never had at home. As with any ice cream flavors but coffee and pistachio, whatever taste didn’t compute for Mami, we simply never ate. Lemonade? Mami looked down on it. Cubans do limes, gracias, never lemons. Coconut cake? The closest I ever got to that at home was flan de coco, coconut caramel custard, which Mami made the hard-core Cuban way, with canned coco rallado en almíbar (grated coconut in heavy syrup), three hundred egg yolks, and a can each of condensed and evaporated milk. Hey, we started with the café con leche laced with eighty-seven tablespoons of azúcar at birth; this is nothing for us. Dulces, pasteles, and postres—sweets, pastries, and desserts—are not our island’s most subtle or airy delicacies, not that Cubans have much subtlety to offer the world. As poor dead Pauline Kael said of movies, “It’s got to be too much or it’s not enough.” She could have been Cuban, actually. Consider our beloved tres leches, three-milk cake, which we co-opted from the Nicaraguans. God forbid our cakes should have just one milk, that’s for anorexic amateurs or crybabies. Our sweet shortcake is soaked and layered in evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream. (The latest Miami version is cuatro leches, a tres leches with the addition of dulce de leche, a caramel sauce made of sugar, cream, and butter.) Or try some turrón. Calling the traditional holiday treat “a nutty Spanish nougat candy” is like calling Middle East politics “untidy.” Either way, this decadent imported goodie, whose heavy reliance on ground almonds is a Moorish-Arab influence, is not for the faint of heart or diabetes-prone. The two main kinds of turrón, and both come in rectangular seven-ounce bars or bricks, are jijona (smoothly textured, hyper-rich, mega-sweet, oily, with a gritty trace of ground nuts) and alicante (like a stone wall of almond-studded nougat, less sweet than jijona, it requires a hammer and Phillips screwdriver to break into edible pieces). Cubans are really passionate about their favorite turrón; I myself am partial to the jijona. One time I bit into a jaggedly hacked alicante chunk and it fractured a molar.
So there I sat on the birthday girl’s mom’s or dad’s lap, happily consuming my lovely light coconut cake and lemonade, with the damn party shoes kicked off the now aching, throbbing cutlets. Hey, no birthday girl ever minded that I hogged her parents. She was grateful I got them off her back so she could go off and play and do whatever she wanted. But I, an alienated and deprived political refugee child in search of Other Parents, obviously had much more important work to do than these immature, monolingual American kiddies did. So I got to it. After all, the parental grass is always greener on the other side, no matter what skin colors are involved. (I’d have glommed on to Valerie, my first choice naturally, but she lived much farther away from us than these here parents, so she wasn’t as accessible. As for Latino families, there weren’t any around, besides mine. You have to be realistic when you’re trying to switch parents.)
“I love you so much,” I’d say. “I love you so much that I have a dream. Yes, I have a dream today. Want me to tell you what it is?”
Naturally they’d say yes.
“‘The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,’” I’d begin, reciting key portions of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, the one he gave on August 28, the hot summer day before Eric, my business prodigy brother
, was born to shine shoes and eventually make a fortune in pigdom. We’d talked about King in school, and my teacher had handed out mimeographed copies of his entire address, certain portions of which I’d memorized, as I felt they spoke directly to me, an honorary Negro love child. Besides, in acting all you do is memorize other people’s words. This was a cinch. “‘The Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile…And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.’”
I’d wait for a reaction. Usually it was wordless wonder. Then laughter.
Same thing happened when I walked into that drama class for the first time. Holly’s mother, Louise, introduced me to the class. She was a no-nonsense dame, with pockmarked skin, a cigarette hack, and a tough demeanor. She was nice to me. She felt sorry for me and my refugee straits. I scanned the faces scanning me. Not another prepubescent in sight. (Holly never took drama, and Louise felt I’d be better suited to being placed in an adult class due to my “precocious social maturity.”) Then, just as I’d predicted to Mami, they all laughed at my ballet clothes and ballet hair and heinous baby-blue cat-eyes. Louise told them to knock it off, that I was a Cuban ballerina as well as an aspiring actress. Truly, I didn’t see myself as either. The dancing and the drama were more for Mami, a vicarious way for her to overcompensate for my tragic deficits. I just wanted to get back to my room and to my beautiful new diary to fill it all up and to call Valerie like she told me to and see what would happen next.
In class we began with the basics—sense memory, action, beat, business, character, improvisation, objective, obstacle—and eventually I got my first real part, that of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, a play that allows mostly white people in it. The role was beyond perfect for me, as in it I could remove the glasses and use my acute myopia to my advantage. Plus there’s a scene or two where Helen gets to act out—another term I’d picked up back at St. Elizabeths—by physically attacking Annie, her teacher. This was one of my fave moments because being loud and theatrical is so utterly Cuban.
Armed with my newly acquired theatrical skills, I would soon realize my covert agenda to get black parents. Back on the parents’ laps at the birthday party, I pressed on. Action, beat, business, character, improvisation, objective, obstacle.
“Well, I’m like a Negro because I come from a lonely island, too,” I continued. “Only it didn’t used to be lonely but now it is lonely and so are we, lonely like homesick, because of Fidel Castro, Hitler’s cruel demon spawn. And Cubans, now we’re in el exílio. Like our own poor little island right inside the richest ocean, that’s the United States. All because of that wicked spawn. I’m gonna stick needles and pins into him. Long sharp ones for when he’s dead. And then we’re gonna get our house back and our country back and my air-conditioning with the painted baby bears on my dresser and then we’ll be very happy again and I know we’ll go swimming in the sea every day with the caracoles. Seashells. You can come, too. I’ll show you it. We can even have a little siesta after lunch.”
I’d catch my breath for a beat and dive back in.
“So then recently, on my seventh birthday, December 10, I saw and my mommy showed me how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he got the Nobel Peace Prize, you know? It was on a Thursday, I’ll never forget it because that was my birthday! Dr. Rey—that means king—he said that peace costs more than diamonds or silver or gold. Well, my mommy just drives me crazy! That’s not peace! So anyway I was wondering about if you could think about adopting me maybe. Just until the evil asesino croaks and then it’s time to go back home.”
My audience of two would crack up and hug me and kiss me and tell me all sorts of nice things about myself. That was the good part. But then they always added that my parents loved me and I belonged with them. Now, another Jubana might have felt defeated at that point and given up. But another Jubana might not have anticipated this. I didn’t fall off the turrón truck yesterday! I could out-manipulate. I’d learned that at the scrawny neck of my gringa school principal and even more so by playing Helen Keller, a master manipulator if there ever was one (until she got the tuf luv and the gift of self-expression). So. I was not prepared to give up that easily. The resistant black parents, in other words, had forced me to resort to playing the race card.
“Excuse me, but are you saying that you can’t adopt me because…I’m…white? Is this, like, a racial thing? Because I know I could belong here. I couldn’t be in A Raisin in the Sun, Alfie Brown said so, because it’s a black folks’ play. I have to be a white blind girl whose family doesn’t understand her. It takes an outsider to. The Miracle Worker.”
Then for my finale, I’d launch into my MLK–Langston Hughes combo patois platter.
“I told you, I have a dream today. ‘What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?’”
By the time Mami arrived to pick me up, my potentially adoptive black parents regarded her exactly the way I wanted them to: monster child molester.
My dream of adoptive black parents never did come true, parents I imagined would give me infinite love, affection, understanding, warmth, protection, support, limits, and time, not to mention coconut cake and lemonade. Yes, it’s true that I ultimately failed to get black parents. But I feel I came close, and the effort was in itself rewarding.
That’s something, I think.
Some dreams do not die, especially when they involve Valerie.
When I had filled up my diary, I called Valerie like she said to, and the next thing I knew I had an Hermès typewriter, all green, with a hard dark green lizard cover with a brass snap on it. The typewriter wasn’t just beautiful; it was a real workhorse made for pounding. I’d begun teaching myself how to type. Since I’m right-handed and my strongest finger is my right index finger, I used it exclusively. I was gradually working my way up to big speed. If all you did was listen, you’d swear it sounded as though I was using all ten fingers. Valerie had also given me two ribbon refills—with double black and red ink bands—and a bottle of Liquid Paper, a whole box of white typing paper, a stack of file folders with labels, and a pack of brightly colored indelible Magic Markers. I was apprehending a crucial North American lesson: You can’t just dream dreams. You need the tools. This is why there’s Home Depot. Staples, too. But they didn’t have those back then. As Mami always told me, “Allí tú.”
Joor on joor own.
CHAPTER SIX
Always Wear Waterproof Mascara
Searching for new parents as a Cuban refugee child is a bitch. I am not jooneek. You know it, you saw it, as I did that lazy Sunday in mid-April of 2000. The fiancé, who was my then-boyfriend, and I, both journalists, were eating bagels with cream cheese and drinking café con leche as we read the New York Times. Normally we’d be listening to American jazz or a Cachao son—a lively, sinuous, romantic, rhythmic style of Cuban music—with the TV turned off. But this was not a normal day or a normal spring. Elián González, an adorable six-year-old Cuban refugee, was obsessing me and, so it seemed, the rest of the world. By now his story has entered into Myth Land, but at the time, it was a compelling myth-in-the-making, a heartbreaking political and emotional saga, and a daily breaking news event with no clear-cut outcome that could ever satisfy everybody except, ultimately and as usual, El Caballo, Fidel Castro, Hitler’s demon spawn.
To quickly recap the facts: Elián, whose parents were divorced, lived with his mother and stepfather in Cárdenas, a port city two hours east of Havana on Cuba’s northern coast. On November 22, 1999, the three Cubans joined ten others in a sixteen-foot motorboat heading for the United States. The next day, the vessel capsized, drowning ten of its passengers, including Elián’s mother and stepfather. After clinging to an inner tube by himself for some seventy-two hours in the Gulf Stream in the Straits of Florida, Elián was rescued near Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day by two American fishermen, who delivered him to some distant relatives living in L
ittle Havana, a conservative working-class Miami neighborhood of Cuban exiles. (The two other shipwreck survivors, both adults not related to Elián, separately got ashore, but nobody cared about them.) Elián enjoyed a tearful, joyful union with his extended family, who intended to keep him.
Then the proverbial mierda hit the fan.
Castro and Elián’s father, Juan Miguel González, demanded Elián be returned. Predictably, the Miami relatives refused. Juan Miguel, a member of Castro’s Communist Party, arrived in Miami to reclaim his son and return him to Cuba. Cuban Miami exploded in a collective frenzy, turning an innocent child into a political pawn in an international custodial tug-of-war, a Christ-like symbol of the miraculous and the preordained, and a poster child for all Cubans.
