Jubana! (10 page)

Bernardo—the Puerto Rican immigrant gang leader of the Sharks in
West Side Story,
not my uncle—would concur with that assessment. Mami had taken me to see the musical, my first movie in this country, and in the song “America,” Bernardo is disparaging of the United States: “Everywhere grime in America, organized crime in America, terrible time in America.” But Nardo's
spitfiery girlfriend and fellow Puerto Rican, Anita, considers her native land ugly, diseased, and backward: “Puerto Rico, my heart's devotion, let it sink back in the ocean.”

“Dat Rita Moreno ees
so
not Cuban, by de way,” Mami said as we left the theater. “Not even close. So I cannot blame her. Puerto Rico ees a peet compar-ed to Cuba. Actually, eets a peet compar-ed to anytheengh.”

“Maria is so beautiful!” I said, reaching for Mami's hand. “She looked pretty in the white dress with the red sash, like a Degas ballerina. ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty…'”

“Natalie Wood, jes,” Mami replied, digging in her purse with her free hand for the car keys. “But lemme tell joo, honey, chees about as Latina as Jackie Kennedy, okay? Dat accent, what was dat? Mexican?”

“‘I feel stunning and entrancing, feel like running and dancing for joy…'”

“Watch eet. Joor about to run an' dance for joy eento de car.”

I was. My visual world was out of focus unless I got right up close to it. I assumed everybody saw this way.

“‘For I'm loved,'” I continued, “‘by a pretty wonderful goy!'”

“Speakeengh of goys,” Mami said, “who ees Jackie Kennedy?”

“What? Oh. President Juan's chic wife.”

“Right,” Mami said, handing me two sticks of Juicy Fruit.
“Abre 'l chicle.”
Open the gum. Just as Cubans generically call any chocolate bar a “peter” (pronounced PEH-tehr, probably from
Peter
Paul Mounds, introduced in 1921), they refer to any brand of chewing gum as “chicle,” from Chiclets. Mami never smoked a cigarette without having something else in her mouth, be it a drink or a mint or chewing gum. People who smoke any other way are “hard-core ahdeects an' deesgohsteengh.” I unwrapped the powdery beige rectangles and neatly rolled each one up tight, the
way Mami preferred. It's the only way a lady chews gum. I handed Mami one roll and put the other in my mouth.

“Dat Jackie has class,” Mami continued, reaching for the lighter for her Kool. “Not as much as us, but eet's right up der. Joo can't be
fina
[refined] eef joor fat. Jackie knows dat. Chee can't take a bad peecture. Chee always looks perfect. Plus, I hear chee smokes behind clos-ed doors. We could be like seestehrs, practeecally.”

The gum's sugary sweetness slid down my throat. It was so intense that I started tearing and nearly choked. We were southeast-bound from Pennsylvania Avenue, heading toward the Potomac waterfront. When we passed the Arena Stage on Sixth Street, Mami said, “Das where I want to leev.”

“You want to live in a theater? Like, on the stage?”

“No,
bobita,”
Mami said. No, silly girl. “I want to leev
near
eet. Because ees theater an' because ees near de water. Das a great combo. Drama an' a reevehr. I lohvee.”

 

At the Varadero beach in Cuba, where Mami took me swimming from the time I was a baby, there was only powdery-soft white sand underfoot, like talc, and the salty sea water was translucent and pristine. A thousand incandescent
caracoles,
seashells, and iridescent
concha de perla,
mother-of-pearl shells, studded the strand. Inside them I could hear the waves' voices; they murmured, moaned, and rushed.

“Mi sirena,”
Mami said, dipping me into the supple waves and back up. My mermaid.
“¡Cómo te gusta el mar y la playa, mamita!”
How you love the sea and the beach, little mama!

“Méteme, Mami,”
I always replied. Put me in, Mommy. I wanted never to get out of the water. Inside my tiny body some
thing vibrated with gorgeous animation. It was the life force. Since life began in the sea, I was in my element in
el mar.
Four decades later, the fiancé called me
la canaria,
canary bird; that's what Stanley Kowalski called Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Stanley said, “Hey, canary bird! Toots! Get OUT of the BATHROOM!” Blanche stayed in the bath for hours, singing and soaking. She said that after a long bath she felt so good and cool, so rested and refreshed.

“A hot bath and a long, cold drink always give me a brand-new outlook on life!”

Moi aussi,
Blanche. I've never made an important life decision before I've taken a long bath or shower. Of course,
all
my baths and showers are long. (I mean, they're normal for me but they're long for non-Jubanas.) Maybe it's that religious cleansing motif, or maybe it's the return to the womb. Maybe it's because I, a sea girl at heart, was born on an island. Whatever it is, I need it to come alive.

“Méteme, Mami.”

 

“So?” I suddenly heard Mami's voice say. “What kind of place has dos bohnk bayt houses?”

“What? Oh. Camp.”

“Das right. An' what kind of cahm ees dat?”

“¡Ay!”
I cried, impatient with her game. I got up from the hospital's antiseptic cold floor to stretch. “I don't
know
what camp is that.”

“A
concentration
cahm!”

“Mami, I need to
interact
with children my own age,” I said, repeating a new word I'd overheard one of the staff psychiatrists use to a colleague. “I do. I see them on TV and these American children are friends with other
children.
Do you like the flowers I drew?”

“Look,” she replied, barely glancing at my artistry. “We are poor refugees because Castro made us dat an' he stole everytheengh johs like Heetlehr. I never knew my gran' parents because Heetlehr took dem an' he keel-ed dem. Who ees Heetlehr?”

“Castro's late father,” I said, batting her exhaled plumes of Kool cigarette smoke away from my face. As the smoke was clearing I noticed a tape dispenser on Mami's desk. I rolled off some strips of tape and pressed my remembered Cuban flowers on her wall.

“Das right, das right,” Mami said. “An' how deed Heetlehr get de poor Jews like joor poor dead great-gran'parents over to de concentration cahms?”

“In trains.”

“Exactly! Wheech ees so seemeelahr to a BUS. Wheech ees how dey sen' de leetl keedees to go to de
cahm!
Now please. Go back een de day room an' play weeth de patients, okay? Ees fun for dem to have a leetl keedee hangeengh aroun'. Eet breaks up de monotony of being so krehsee. An' let me tell joo, honey, dees people are krehsee as hell.”

Skippy, slavery. Papier-mâché, six million dead.

 

Mami forced me into school a year early. A refugee child, scarcely four, I was nowhere near ready. I could read pretty well, but my English was Spanglish at best, still a bit wobbly, and I had acute separation anxiety. Mami felt school was the only option. To her, I was becoming a total pill, whining about having to accompany her day after day to the mental ward.

But I had my reasons. It wasn't just the boredom and the fact that I was at least thirty-five years younger than everyone else and the grindingly gray, crushed cigarettey ennui of it all. The breaking point came when I spent a period of time on the chil
dren's ward. It was in a separate building—St. Elizabeths being a vast complex, almost like a little city unto itself on a hill, surrounded by high wraparound stone walls and guards at all exits. Mami figured sending me there would be a good idea since (1) it would give
her
a break and (2) hadn't
I
been the one whining about needing to interact more with people my own age? After all, she reminded me, I'd never specified that I had to
interact
with
unhospitalized
children.

Mami dropped me off, and a big orderly—all the orderlies there looked like black bouncers in white uniforms—locked the door behind her. The staff introduced me to their charges. The only differences between these children and the adult patients were that the children weren't allowed to smoke, they were
slightly
more animated, and they were considerably shorter. Otherwise, they were all the same: krehsee patients. This realization came as a blow, as I had (wrongly) assumed that children, krehsee or otherwise, just had to be less nuts than their elders. They hadn't lived as long and therefore hadn't had enough time to get really nuts.

¿Verdad?

Uh, no.

From my four-year-old point of view, mental illness was mental illness was mental illness. I played cards with the kids who could, and we'd read and watch TV and eat lunch, and it was fun whenever we got to go to art therapy because that department had great supplies compared to Mami's black and blue ink pens (but sadly, no papier-mâché). We also got to go to drama therapy, which I loved. They were working on a production of
A Raisin in the Sun,
and the director, a great big lady named Alfie Brown, who was a good friend of Mami's, gathered me up in her warm lap and let me stay there as she bossed everybody around. It was great. She even made an assistant go get me a Coke and a Snickers. I'd never had a Snickers.

“Does this have the peanut butter in it?” I asked Alfie hopefully, as I unwrapped the candy bar and sniffed it.

“No, sugar,” she said. “But it has nuts. Whole lotta nuts.”

“Some people call the patients ‘nuts.' My mommy calls patients Mr. or Miss or Mrs. It's the respect sign.”

“Your mama is right on.”

“Are these PEAnuts?” I asked, pulling off a sticky piece of the caramelly candy.

“Mm-hm.”

“My mommy says peanuts are from the slaveries, down in the South? That's why I have to wait for my Tía Elisa to come visit and then she gets me the Skippy. Cubans don't eat it if it's the crunchy peanut butter because Cuba's an island and we have to import and we didn't get the peanuts like the pigs in the American farms.”

“You and your mama are somethin' else,” Alfie said, clearly enjoying but also clearly having no idea what I was talking about—not that she could have.

I thought this was just about as good as being in Varadero with Mami. In this darkened, air-conditioned theater, safe in Alfie's ample lap, with my Coke and my chocolate bar, I watched patients of all different ages, races, and sizes, people who could barely connect with the real world—totally click by becoming other people in a play. It was astonishing. Like magic.

“Maybe
I
could be in your play one day,” I told Alfie.

“Sure you could, sugar, and I bet you'd be real good. But this play here, see, this is about black folks.”

Huh? I wasn't expecting that one. It confused me. I never differentiated race before. My Cuban godmother Nisia was black and my new Southwest D.C. neighborhood was mostly black (we'd recently moved into a high-rise overlooking the Arena Stage—“drama an' a reevehr”—and the dome of the U.S. Capitol)
and my director Alfie here was black and many of the staff and the patients were, too. What did Alfie mean, “This play is about
black
folks”? I had never once heard Mami describe anyone by their skin color, except as a Cuban term of affection,
negrita, negrito.
The only thing I'd ever heard her say about blacks was that she wished she could be one because black women have the best skin and therefore age the best, and because she wanted to get soul.

“So I can't be in your play?” I asked Alfie.

“There's no part in the script for a little white girl, sugar. But that's only in this play. There's lots of other plays out there.”

“Out
where?”
She sounded just like Mami. Joo have to get out DER.

“Lots and lots,” Alfie continued. “You'll see.”

Satisfied, I wrapped my arms around her and kissed her big cheek, feeling a surge of happiness splash up through me like a fountain.

It was either that or the sugar.

 

The artist Carroll Sockwell was one of Mami's patients. His family had had him committed as a young man because he was homosexual, or so he claimed. He liked to embroider and embellish things, just like Cubans. I met him a few times, and he left a lasting impression. Years later, Carroll would remind me of Richard Cory, a personage the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a eulogy for: “He was a gentleman from sole to crown, / Clean favored, and imperially slim. / And he was always quietly arrayed, / And he was always human when he talked.”

None of Carroll's clothes or bathrobes was ever wrinkled or disheveled like so many of the other patients'. His hair and fingernails were perfectly groomed. He adored Mami and she adored
him back. (All gay black men adore Mami. Actually, all gay men adore Mami. It must be the diva self-recognition.) Carroll was the only patient Mami ever gladly gave away her Kool cigarettes to. I guess therapists can have pet patients. He made amazing oil paintings and charcoal and pastel and pencil drawings in art therapy. The representational ones of faces that looked so sad and still and spiritually broken (I always imagined they were self-portraits) were in angular midnight blacks and blues. The paintings without people in them could be rounder, looser; voluptuous brown and mauve-gray horses' butts—or so I saw—with a very, very little bit of icy white and a sort of pinky ivory hovering in the bare trees around them. Later on, Carroll's work got abstracted and looked fully liberated. It was wildly colorful and geometric, and sometimes included torn pieces of paper, scraps of tinfoil, and tissue. Those canvases burst with bright turquoise blue, orange, yellow, green, and red—happy colors. They reminded me of piñatas and confetti, so naturally I preferred them.