Jubana! (19 page)

One day while I was Mia-fixated, I bought a magazine with her angelic face on the front. The feature story was about how Frank Sinatra had abruptly divorced the refined waif for having shorn her locks, allegedly yelling, “I married a girl and woke up with a boy!” It was raining lightly out and I was standing in front of the supermarket with our bagged groceries, waiting for Mami to pull up the car. I was completely engrossed in Mia's marital and beauty travails, thinking how Frank could be a Latino with that Neanderthal short-hair-makes-you-a-dyke attitude. I heard a loud quintuple honk, forgot there was an elevated curb, approached the car—I was still reading the article—and promptly fell on the slippery pavement. Poor Mia's face was a dirty mess. I immediately wiped it off with my arm, over and over.

“What are joo DOOEENGH down der?” Mami screamed. “Joor knee ees bleedeengh to de deaths an' joor cleaneengh Mia?
¿Tu 'tas loca? ¿Qué RAYO 'tas haciendo?”
Are you crazy? What the HELL are you doing?

“I'm prioritizing!” I cried. “That's what Americans DO!”

Mami would never have screamed like that had I been holding an
Hola!
instead of a
Rona Barrett's Hollywood. Hola!
is Mami's and our family priest Máximo's favorite Spanish-language glossy. The oversize magazine obsesses less over Tinsel Town and more over Actual Royalty of the European kind. Had, for example, La Princesa Carolina de Monaco's extraordinarily beautiful face been soiled in front of Giant Foods instead of Frank Sinatra's soon-to-be ex, Mami would have been the first to wipe off now-poor-dead Grace Kelly's daughter
tout de suite.
Unlike me, Mami was never influenced much by American pop culture or the evolution of American fashion and style. She's had the same three-feet-long square-tipped fingernails painted bloodred or opaque white since she was a girl in Cuba (must have been the height—or depth—of chic in 1955 Havana), and nothing will ever make her
change that. If you tell her that that look is beyond disco passé, her stock replies are, “What ees joor poin'?” or “I don' geev a fohk. I lohvee.”

I, however,
deed
geev a fohk. At four I'd been seduced forever by
Seventeen.
And now at nine years old I'd long outgrown my
Archie
comic books and had moved on to fashion and celebrity 'zines. So much so that I'd actually begun purchasing annual subscriptions with my allowance because it was cheaper than buying them all full-price at the store. These days I'm down to a mere twenty-four subscriptions; it used to be twenty-seven.
Mademoiselle
—sob!—folded. I didn't renew
Condé Nast Traveler
—I only leave my apartment by force—and
Rolling Stone
hasn't been my thing since I began shaving my armpits and legs. When I see all my new magazines in their plastic covers, heavy and rolled up and layered and smushed inside my mailbox, I feel euphoric. Little did I know back then that this fascination would be the perfect preparation for becoming a features reporter at the
Washington Post
and later, a freelance magazine writer. The fiancé and I had this joke: I'd be telling him something about
Sex and the City
or Narciso Rodriguez or Sephora or glittery lip gloss or the latest hair removal or defrizzing techniques or chandelier earrings or anything else of crucial import that I'd 'zine-gleaned, and he'd go, “Whuuut?” And then we'd both say, “Hard news, Dinosaurio,” because Paul'd spent his entire professional life as a hard news reporter and editor—the newsroom chasm between hard news and features people is cosmic—and because my nickname for him is Dino(saur) or El Dinosaurio or E.D. for short. Paul's Mesozoically big and basic and, as Mami puts it, “sohleed.” There was an obscure girls' song in the late seventies whose refrain was, “I like 'em big and stu-pid, I like 'em big and REAL dumb.” Works for me. As Chanukah stocking stuffers, I once got Paul two refrigerator magnets. One says “I ? My Penis” and another one has a picture of a
huge sliced bologna that says “You're not too smart. I like that in a Man.” Paul cherishes them. He's so smart. He's so stu-pid.

 

To my complete confusion, my impudence during the Sidwell Frenzy interview backfired and I was accepted. Maybe WASPs have an ironic sense of humor? Maybe they view impertinence as gumption? What did I miss? I quickly discovered I was profoundly ill-equipped and tragically unprepared to navigate this bizarre late sixties sea of a Quaker private school, in the midst of Vietnam and with Watergate soon to come. Nothing computed: Turtlenecks had to be from Talbots and have embroidered whales on them; espadrilles came from Pappagallo in Georgetown; Ivy-grad teachers who looked like robust, predissolute Ernest Hemingways and Martha Gellhorns taught Ivy-bound kids who looked like Ralph Lauren models of Ivy-grad parents who looked like Donald Rumsfeld, H. R. Haldeman, and Jeane Kirkpatrick (all of whom actually did have kids there), and everybody would look like John Cheever and Lilly Pulitzer when they were old; if you lived in D.C. you lived in Georgetown, Woodley Park, Spring Valley, Foxhall, Friendship Heights, Wesley Heights, Palisades, Glover Park, Tenleytown, or Cleveland Park; in Maryland, you lived in Kenwood, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, or Potomac; if your parents were alcoholic anti-Semitic Republicans, you lived in McLean, Virginia; you were into lacrosse, archery, tennis, soccer, basketball, cross country, crew, squash, football, softball, track and field, swimming and diving, field hockey, and wrestling; you had beautiful hair, perfect skin, a trust fund, and serious drug and alcohol issues.

By contrast, I felt like Edvard Munch's screamer.

Then I thought of Chet Baker. Beautiful, brilliant, doomed, drug-addicted Chet Baker. Except for the drugs, I could relate. I
specifically thought of the way the jazz trumpeter played and sang “Let's Get Lost”: “Let's get lost, let them send out alarms…/Let's get crossed off everybody's list…/And though they'll think us rather rude, /We'll tell the world we're in that crazy mood.”

I'd heard it for the first time at Rhoda Simpson's house. She was one of my Amidon classmates whose parents I'd tried in vain to seduce into adopting me during a birthday party. The Simpsons said Chet Baker was so good he could be a Negro like them. Except for Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, Chet Baker was the only cracker in their entire vast music collection. (“Let's Get Lost” was a top contender for the fiancé's and my First Dance as husband and wife. The other was Etta James's “At Last.” Both are wonderful; the latter is a slower song and therefore easier for E.D. to dance to, what with his big paws or toes or whatever it is that dinosaurs plod on.)

 

“Gigi's goheengh to Seedwells Frien'!” Mami announced.

It was a Sunday in late summer. Dozens of neighbors and other friends had come over to celebrate her and Papi's August birthdays. Mami prepared her signature Sunday afternoon meal:
huevos a la Malagueña,
baked Eggs Málaga. It's a traditional Spanish casserole of whole eggs baked in a bed of
sofrito
—chopped onion, bell pepper, and garlic sautéed till tender in olive oil, the holy foundation of all savory Cuban cooking—mixed with sherry, tomatoes, and pimientos. You sprinkle early sweet peas on top (Cubans only use LeSueur) and lay on canned asparagus tips (Cubans prefer canned, according to Mami, because when canned produce was first introduced in Cuba, it was considered technologically advanced and more sophisticated than the raw stuff). Now the classic way to make this dish, which I've heard is
actually quite tasty if you bother making it correctly (which, God forbid, requires more dan three eh-stehps), is to drizzle each egg with melted butter, fortify the rest of the casserole with chopped ham and boiled shrimp, and then bake it
lightly,
just until the egg whites are set but the yolks are still soft.

But no.

It's not that Mami excluded the pork and shellfish because they're
trayf.
(Rebeca fried us bacon every day of our lives, Baba Dora's specialty was ham sandwiches, and Mami took me to go sit on Santa Claus's lap every Christmas. Until I got my period at age twelve, that is, after which I had to stop going because continuing to sit on Santa's lap would be, as Mami said, “eefee.” Not because I was physically blossoming and turning voluptuous. Not because Cuban parents, like all Latin parents, are so conservative and overprotective of their children, especially their vulnerable, virginal daughters. Not because—here's a rad' concept—we're a
Jewish
family who respects the
goyish
tradition of but does not actively engage with Santa. Not because the shmuck at the mall wearing a rented Santa costume might actually be an alcoholic kiddie pre-vert with a rap sheet longer than his gift list. No. It's because, “Joo might eh-stain Santy Clohs—joo bleed like krehsee, wheech I can never understan' because I never had dat, but joo are so exaggerated een everytheengh—an' den dat would be horeebl! Because eef Santy ees not wearing rayt pants, less say hees wearing, like, white pants or sometheengh like dat, den eet would be, like, a total contrast! Das a no-no.”)

So.

What it is, is that Mami would have had to go out to an actual
grocery store
and actually
purchase
ham and shrimp, which are not only more expensive than a carton of Kool kings but require actual
preparation.

It's not that the
huevos a la Malagueña
got no butter on their
respective tops because we ran out of butter or we don't believe in butter. It's that the butter has to be
melted,
and why would you stand there melting butter and then have to deal with yet another item to wash when you can simply…not?

It's not that Mami overcooked the dish to the point of
huevo
fossilization because she liked her
huevos
hard. It's that when you insist on having a TV set in every room of your house (why else go on living?), you're bound to WATCH TV AND NOT THE OVEN.

Guests are always too polite or too ignorant or too hungry to say anything negative about Mami's
huevos a la Malagueña.
Papi had bought several dozen assorted bagels and a nineteen-pound slab of cream cheese. Mami made tuna salad and egg salad (both actually fit for human consumption) and there was a huge hunk o' Jarlsburg cheese and a bowl of green grapes. There were cheese blintzes and
empanadas de picadillo
(turnovers stuffed with ground meat). Papi made a pitcher of sangria and there were the usual twenty-nine pots of Cuban coffee with the requisite three thousand pounds of sugar mixed in.

I grabbed a TaB out of the refrigerator, spread some cream cheese on half a bagel, and sat down with the company as Eric made the shoe shine rounds in his squeaky Pampers.

“So, Gigilah,” Neil Greene said, “you must be happy about your new school.” He was a good-looking architect who lived a few doors from our town house

“My new school?” I said, stalling. I slowed down my chewing and pretended the thickly spread cream cheese was sticking to the roof of my mouth, making it impossible to talk.

“Sidwell Friends,” Neil said. “That's a big accomplishment, bubbeleh. How many new kids do they accept every year? What is it, David, something like seventeen percent of all applicants? Eleven?”

“I really don't know,” Papi answered, refilling Neil's sangria glass. “But for the tuition those ganefs charge, it had better be…”

“Seedwells ees de BEST,” Mami snapped. “Gigi ees threel-ed to go der. THREEL-ED. Right,
mumita?”
She cupped my bagel and cream cheese–stuffed cheek in her cool hand. “Nex' weekend we're goheengh choppeengh for new fall outfeets. Ees so much fun, ees eencrehdeebl!”

“I have to go now,” I said, stepping over Eric, who was on his hands and knees, digging in the brick-colored shag carpeting for an errant quarter. I ran upstairs to the aqua sanctuary of my bedroom. I was breathless and a little dizzy. My heart was racing. I had a terrible presentiment about Seedwells. But the fact of me going there was inexorable. I lay on my bed and curled up into myself like a fetus, hugging my second pillow (Mami's always believed in more than nineteen of everything, hence many pillows on every bed at all times). I wished I still had my
gindaleja,
I really needed it now. But to commemorate my fourth or fifth birthday—God, what was I
thinking?
—I announced to Mami that
gindalejas
are kid stuff and I was a big girl now. She asked me if I was absolutely sure and I said yes and we threw it away. In the middle of the night I ran to my parents' bed and jumped on Mami, screaming for her to get it back.

“What?” she said. “De
gindaleja?
Das gone, honey. I ask-ed joo are joo choor an' joo said jes.”

“I changed my mind!” I cried.

“Sorry,
mamita.
Ees a goner. Go back to joor bayt, okay? Jool be fine. Nighty-nighty.”

“Oh my God. I want it back!”

“Nighty-nighty!”

“It was a moment of weakness!”

“Das great, honey. Nighty—”

“Well, can you at least make me some
leche evaporada caliente con azúcar
[warm evaporated milk with sugar]?”

“Dahveed,” Mami said, poking Papi's shoulder. “Wake OHP.
La niña quiere leche. ¡Despiertate, coño!”
The girl wants milk. Wake up, dammit!

Papi dutifully arose, and while he heated a can of evaporated milk, poured in the requisite fifteen cups of sugar, and stirred, I inspected all the garbage cans in the apartment—we had many; Jubans are incredibly trashy—to make sure Mami wasn't lying. She wasn't.
Coño!
I told Papi that I was fully prepared to slide down the garbage chute down the hall to exhume the
gindaleja
from the Dumpster. Papi said,
“Tu 'tas loca? Esa cosa 'sta llena de microbios. Olvídate.”
Are you crazy? That thing's full of germs. Forget it.