Jubana! (23 page)

“It's the conflict between light and darkness,” he'd say, “between right and wrong. Imagine me sitting on your shoulder. If you ever give in to the bad, I'll slap you on the head and say. ‘What the shit's going on?'”

“Oh,” I'd say.
“That
sounds healthy.”

And Gramps would say, “Thank you. It is. Sound mental health isn't about achieving some abstract human perfection. It's about being on to yourself, knowing yourself. So that when you're in a situation and you start to fuck things up the way you always do, you stop and go, ‘Shit. I'm doing it again.' And then you can either stop it and self-correct or you can give in to it and knowingly, consciously, deliberately suffer the consequences. Now get the hell out of here. It's enough for me for one day already.”

 

Zeide died during that Thursday night in the summer of 1968. He was seventy-four, younger than Papi is now.

“When we lef' de hospeetal very early in de morneengh,” Mami recalls, “I felt like an orphan. I always felt notheengh really bad could ever happen to me as long as my father was alive. Den I look-ed at de sky an' saw a peenk cloud een de chape of an angel. I felt at peace.”

As is customary in Latin families, Baba moved in with us, staying on for the next few years. She helped Papi pay for the rest of the house and spent her days in her southern wing, watching
Days of Our Lives,
sewing, occasionally baking her famous butter-marmalade cookies, and criticizing Rebeca's cooking and cleaning. Though Baba could be difficult sometimes, I felt protective of her because she was widowed and an innocent. When Mami took
us out in the car—Baba always sat up front—I'd distract Baba from the backseat by leaning in between her and Mami and telling jokes and stories whenever we passed cemeteries. We were on Georgia Avenue in Northwest once, passing the Civil War–era Battleground National Cemetery. I saw granite soldiers and angels and I literally turned Baba's face away from them with my hands.

As we awaited completion of the new house, Ann “Nancy” Biester also came to live with us. There was nothing strange about or wrong with my Sidwell classmate, but we were friends anyway. Not soul friends, not a poor dead Cecilia-like sisterhood, but friends. Her Republican Congregationalist father, Edward G. Biester Jr., of Furlong, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, was up for reelection. In the fall of 1968 he went off to campaign for his seat as the U.S. Representative from Pennsylvania's Eighth District. So the blue-eyed dirty-blond Nancy moved in with us while her parents were away campaigning. I had twin beds in my room, and we'd stay up half the night talking, giggling, and fooling around. Rebeca was constantly barging in on us, checking to ensure we weren't turning into pubescent lesbians. After her father won the election, Nancy went back to her family, and our friendship ebbed. Edward Biester painted a watercolor of the Pennsylvania woods in winter and gave it to my parents as a thank-you for having sheltered, fed, and clothed his daughter for a semester. Mami hung the painting in the powder room of the new house, where it remains. We've never heard from the Biesters again.

 

The kids in my new neighborhood all went to Silver Spring public schools. The kids at Sidwell never set foot in Silver Spring, and really, rightly so. God knows I'd rather have been in the relative civilization of Friendship Heights or Chevy Chase or Bethesda myself. So that when Tiny pulled up at 3960 Thirty-seventh
Street, the Northwest middle school campus and, four years later for another four grueling years, at the upper school on 3825 Wisconsin Avenue, Northwest, she was taking me away from any after-school socializing and bonding possibilities, and delivering me back to an isolated cul-de-sac and a big house and Baba Dora sewing in the family room and Rebeca in the kitchen with her knives and cucumbers and Latina self-loathing.

“¡Usted siga con su tarea,”
Rebeca would tell me as I lowered a salted cucumber seed strip down into my mouth,
“y tal vez un día usted podra ser una secretaria importante!”
You keep up with your homework and perhaps one day you might become an important secretary!

Well, I
was
getting to be pretty good at typing on my Valerie Hermès typewriter with my lone right index finger.

The next morning was a Saturday. Rebeca always had the weekends off. Her daughter Beatriz would come pick her up and take her away to her crucifix-heavy Adams-Morgan apartment. I awoke in my bed in a pool of blood. My adorable lime-green-and-white-striped babydoll pj's were dripping, ruined. Thinking I must be dying, I screamed my head off like that Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with the horse's head in
The Godfather.
Mami and Papi rushed in. Papi took one look and rushed out. Mami said,
“¡Ay, gracias a Dios! Por tu madre,
joo can finally start dayteenth! Ees so great!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said, looking down at my blood-soaked thighs. “Start dating? Dating who? I'm DYING over here, hello!”

Mami said I had just gotten my
período.

“Das what de weemehns have to have een order to get to de nex' level, wheech ees de
tafetán color champán.”

I asked her why.

“Dey johs do,” she replied.

“And you get periods like this, too?” I said.

“I get dem,” she replied, shaking her head, “but not like dat. Das, like, an extrehmeety. Must be from Papi's side of de fahmeely.”

Mami put me in the shower, handed me a Kotex and an elastic belt with hooks, threw away my pretty pj's (this was all before they made Clorox Stain Out, my absolute favorite thing for such situations), changed my sheets, and called it a day.

Because I always had heavy and painful periods, periods of extrehmeety, especially Dreaded Day Two, I concluded that I was abnormal, since Mami's periods weren't at all like mine. Thus I was exceptionally moved one night in Baltimore years later, as another of my older men—in this case a Protestant—and I were getting ready for bed.

“I'm really sorry,” I told the Geezer, “but I have my period. Today's Dreaded Day Two and…”

“Why are you apologizing for something that's natural?” the Geezer asked.

I had no answer. Or rather, I did, but it would take too long to explain.

“I have plenty of towels,” the Geezer added. “And if you'd rather not make love, that's fine, too. I just want you to feel comfortable.”

Voilà:
The Geezer at his geeziest best. Gestures like those buy an otherwise impossible WASP man a whole lotta Jewish credit, a whole lotta Cubana time.

 

As worldly and precocious as I was in some ways, sexuality was still a mystery to me in the sixth grade, putting me at a huge disadvantage in the sex-crazed anomie of the sixties and to some extent the seventies. As for the eighties, well, I believe I was the only person
having
sex—with others, I mean—because Reagan was
in office for most of that decade. Plus, if you recall, it was just a really, really depressing time: AIDS, poor dead Princess Diana marrying that awful Charles, shoulder pads, C. Everett Koop denouncing cigarette smoking, aerobics, Natalie Wood drowning, nouvelle cuisine, gravity-defying hair, yuppies, Salman Rushdie's fatwa, Madonna, George Bush. How horrifying is all that? What got me through—besides outrageous coitus (with an older married cowboy poet from Wyoming whom I called the Poet Lariat) in various hotel rooms with great room service across the nation—was, what always gets me through: TaB, Parliaments, and American pop culture. Americans are so
good
at diet drinks, cigarettes, and grooviness! Do you all appreciate what you have? Does it take a foreign-born Jubana to show and tell you how lucky you are and how good you have it? Seriously. When people start criticizing this country I go krehsee for two key reasons: One, I just don't hear about people dying to get into, say, oh, I don't know, how about…CUBA! Really, when was the last time you heard about any illegal immigrant risking his or her life to go live in CUBA! And two, how can you criticize America, a country that (a) lets you criticize it (something no Cuban living in Cuba can do), (b) has TaB (something no Cuban living in Cuba can have), and (c) has had, even in the politically tacky eighties, the following (which no Cuban living in Cuba has probably ever even heard of, considering that Cuba's stuck in such a pathetic time warp that acid-washed jeans are cutting-edge): the TV shows
Hill Street Blues
and
Cheers;
the movies
The Accused; Amadeus; Atlantic City; Babette's Feast; Baby Boom; Blow Out; Blue Velvet; Body Heat; Casualties of War; Cat People; Children of a Lesser God; Dangerous Liaisons; Desperately Seeking Susan, Diner; Down and Out in Beverly Hills; The Elephant Man; E.T.; Fatal Attraction; Full Metal Jacket; Hannah and Her Sisters; Kiss of the Spider Woman; The Last Emperor; Married to the Mob; Mommie Dearest; My Beautiful
Laundrette; My Left Foot; New York Stories; 9 1/2 Weeks; Out of Africa; Prick Up Your Ears; Prizzi's Honor; Raging Bull; Raising Arizona; Reds; Risky Business; Roxanne; Scarface; sex, lies, and videotape; She's Gotta Have It; The Shining; Sophie's Choice; Steel Magnolias; Tequila Sunrise; Terms of Endearment; Tootsie; Trading Places; The Untouchables; Wall Street; The Witches of Eastwick,
and
Working Girl;
and the music of Anita Baker, Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson (prefreakdom, obviously), Rickie Lee Jones, the oft-overlooked Katrina & the Waves, John Cougar Mellencamp, the Police, the Pretenders, Bruce Springsteen, Steely Dan, U2, Suzanne Vega, and Stevie Wonder.

So let Mami call this nation
una mierda
and let that cheesy Puerto Rican Bernardo in
West Side Story
sing “Everywhere grime in America, organized crime in America, terrible time in America.” As his hot little Puerto Rican girlfriend Anita replies, “Joo forget I'M een Amehreeca!”

Thaaat's right. Okay. End of jingo jingle.

As I was saying, I don't know about other Hispanic parents, but mine certainly never discussed sex with me, nor did they ever exhibit the typical overprotection that most Hispanic parents—fathers, especially—do over their daughters. I really can't say why, and I doubt the 'rents could tell you, either. Though my father is a medical doctor and my mother is a psychiatric social worker, all their professional training was useless at home. Irrelevant, even. The only thing I ever heard either one say about sex was once when Papi said, “A woman should be a lady in the living room, a chef in the kitchen, and a whore in the bedroom.”

I asked what a woman should be in her home office, and Papi was, like,
“¿Qué?”
Say whuuut?

 

Poor Mr. Kevin J. Kinsella (S.B., MIT; M.S., Johns Hopkins University). The boyish brunette was assigned to teach us Sidwellian sixth graders about human reproduction. We were sitting at long tables in the biology lab as he calmly explained about sperm and semen and eggs. I couldn't help it, I just burst out laughing.

“WHAT?” I cried. “No way! My Cuban refugee parents do NOT do that!”

Everybody laughed. The petite cool girl sitting next to me, Theresa Rosenblatt, whispered, “Jesus, don't exaggerate so much. You want to pull his leg, fine. But you're overacting.”

I wanted to tell her that there was no way I could
over
act because I was a bona fide drama student and I knew the difference between drama and melodrama (although granted, that is a toughie for most Cubans to distinguish). I wanted to tell her that I had not been feigning sexual ignorance, that I actually
was
sexually ignorant, and that all of this information was coming as a real shock. I wanted to tell her how much I hated her and her mean little affluent cool white
gringa
girl gang clique. I wanted to tell her how much I wanted to be her or to be them or to be Twiggy or Nancy Sinatra or Mia Farrow or Ali MacGraw or Lauren Hutton or Julie Christie or Faye Dunaway or anybody but myself.

But I didn't.

I didn't utter a single word. ME. All I felt was the same sensation I'd had back in that awful guitar class when the teacher cut off my Knox-inspired nails. Blood rising up through my cheeks into my temples. Sweating in my armpits and under my breasts and on the bridge of my nose. My hideous eyeglasses sliding down (new but no less hideous ones: heavy dark un-ironic tortoiseshell cat-eyes):
Quando fiam uti chelidon/Ut tacere desinam.
When will I become like the swallow/That I may cease to be silent.

Sidwell Friends. Sidwell Enemies. The school, the people in it,
the entire atmosphere, was trying to silence me under a sea of embroidered whales and Lacoste crocodiles and their respective spawn. Silencing me slowly, gradually, like a piecemeal Jubana spirit kill.

As I left the lab, a fringe member of the Theresa group strode over to me: Peggy Loomis, a great big tall, strapping, swarthy, black-haired, black-eyed giantess with an equally gigantic and long face. She was into field hockey and non sequiturs.

“That was funny what you said in there,” Peggy said, looking down on me. “Your arms are really hairy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I mean they're blond, but still.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said.

“Ever seen
The Sound of Music
?”

I had no idea what this had to do with my hairy blond arms or what my hairy blond arms had to do with anything in the first place, but I went along with it. Jubanas can be too trusting of other people's actual motives. Isn't that what happened to us with Fidel Castro? Do we ever learn? Uh, no.

“I loved
The Sound of Music,
” I told Peggy. “And
Mad
magazine, they did a spoof of it that was so funny!
The Sound of Money.
‘The hills are alive with the sound of money…' Love
Mad.
But my mom really hated the movie. She said Hitler was born in Austria and the Austrians were some of the most vicious, virulent Jew haters. So we hate Austria. We love the nightgowns, though.”