The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (18 page)

“Well . . .” I hesitated, feeling too transparent. “I guess I’m just confused.” “
Ai,
you’re too young to be so verklempt. What about?” she asked, trying to tease the words out of me. I wanted
to ask her where she was
really
from and confess to her that I didn’t know where I belonged, but instead I replied, “I don’t know.” “Well, if you don’t know, Yetta can’t help you,” she said, and then changed the subject. “I have an appointment at the beauty parlor. Look at this, what a mess this hair. Come on, come with Yetta.” I almost said no, but then I thought,
Why not?,
no one would notice me gone for an hour or so. I helped her up on her feet, though it didn’t feel as if she really needed my arm at all. If it hadn’t been for her bouffant, I would’ve been almost as tall as her, which meant she was under five feet. She put her glasses in her pocketbook and took out a pair of movie-star sunglasses that covered half her face.

It seemed as if Yetta knew at least one person sitting on the veranda of each hotel we passed. “Yetta! Are you going to the discount?” a woman in a housecoat and rollers called out from the Tiffany. “No, I’m going to Sylvia’s for my hair. You should try it sometime,” Yetta joked. At the Cardozo, a woman in a one-piece raspberry swimsuit hailed us: “And just who is that handsome boy with you?” There was that word again,
handsome
. “Who else? My new boyfriend,” Yetta said, and left it at that. And from the Sea Winds, a shirtless man with hair covering his shoulders flirted: “There goes the Queen of the Copa. What, no hat today, gorgeous?”

“Oh,
bubbeleh,
don’t pay that fool no mind,” Yetta said coyly. “
Bubbeleh
? What does
bubbeleh
mean, Yetta? Is that French?” I asked her. “French?” she roared. “You have no idea, do you? I’m Jewish. It’s a Yiddish word for someone you like—the way your parents call you
mi’jo
or
mi cielo,
in Spanish. Yetta’s not French, dahling, I’m from Poland.” All I knew of Poland was that it was somewhere in Europe; and all the dumb Polack jokes that the boorish Ernesto Suarez said in class all the time. Of course, Yetta was nothing like those jokes. Still, all Sister Maritza ever taught us about Jews was that they wrote the Old Testament and they didn’t believe in Jesus, and that’s why they killed him, but not to hold it against them because Jesus came here to die for our sins anyway. What would Sister Maritza think of my palling around with Yetta? Why wasn’t Yetta from Israel if she was Jewish; how could she be a Jew and be from Poland? What was Yiddish? Was there a country named Yidd? And how did she end up here in Miami Beach? Is this what she had meant by
I’m a little from everywhere
?

Before I knew it, we were outside a storefront, standing before a window decorated with a hand-painted rainbow and stenciled gold letters that simply read
SYLVIA’S
across the glass. In the window there was a display of mannequin busts with dead eyes and frozen expressions like guillotined heads, a wig pinned to each one, the sale price written out by hand on a three-by-five index card. Was Yetta’s bouffant really a wig? I wondered. As we stepped inside, the wind chime hanging from the door handle announced our arrival.

A woman wearing gold lamé pants and a zebra-print blouse greeted us. “Yetta! I thought you weren’t going to make it today. Come give your Sylvia a kiss,” she said referring to herself. So that was Sylvia, I figured; she looked about half as young as Yetta, with a bouffant twice as big, and her hair was reddish instead of silver. “When have I ever missed an appointment? Never,” Yetta answered her own question. She turned to the rest of the ladies in the salon who had the same hair as she did, a gathering of tiny gray clouds floating in the room. All the ladies’ eyes were on us. They looked like turtles peeking out from underneath the shells of their dryers.

One of the ladies finally asked what they were all itching to ask: “So, is Yetta going to introduce us to this nice young man?” “He’s my grandson, David,” Yetta lied. I tried not to flinch, somehow trusting there was a reason why she’d said what she’d said. “What! I thought you didn’t have any grandchildren, Yetta. How’s this?” another lady asked, inching her hair dryer above her ears to get a good listen to Yetta’s answer. “Well,” Yetta began, and fabricated a whole story about me,
saying that her husband had had a long-lost illegitimate daughter in Cuba, Reyna, who was my mother. After a collective gasp by the ladies, Yetta concluded, “Anyway, this is Reyna’s son, David. Except it’s Dah-veed in Spanish—he’s three-quarters Cuban, you know. But Reyna is Jewish too. Cuban Jews, can you imagine? Jewbans they call themselves. Who knew?” Turning her face away from the ladies, she winked at me and whispered in my ear, “If it’s gossip they want, gossip they’ll get.” I understood she was just having a little fun, like my own Abuela.

Sylvia called Yetta over to her chair, next to which stood a cart heaped with rollers in all shapes and colors like toy blocks. She parted Yetta’s hair, wrapping small locks one by one with a square piece of white paper into an itty-bitty roller while holding a comb in her mouth. The process seemed so delicate and artful, and yet equally painful: all the pinning and yanking and binding of her hair. When all the rollers were set, Sylvia doused Yetta’s head with a stinky liquid. The fumes permeated the room and irritated my nostrils. None of the ladies seemed bothered by it, but the noxious smell and the heat from the hair dryers made me dizzy and I dozed off in my seat.

I woke up to Yetta standing over me, her hair exactly the same height, shape, and color as when we had entered the salon. She gave a few dollars’ tip to Sylvia, who promptly tucked the money inside her brassiere. “Muah—muah—muah,” Yetta sounded out her kisses good-bye to Sylvia and all the ladies as we exited through the chiming door out onto Lincoln Road again. “What was that all about? Why did you make up that story?” I questioned Yetta. “Oh, dahling,” she said, “I love telling a good story. That’s all I got—stories, even if they are lies. So today you are my Jewban grandson.” I wondered if that was made-up too. “Is there really such a thing as Jewbans?” I asked. “Yes of course, there are Jews spread out all over the world—just like you Cubans. We get around.”

As we continued walking, she explained that Lincoln Road was a “people mall,” a street for shopping, eating, and “whatnot.” The place to see and be seen when Harry and her were a young couple. “But now look at it—oy—it’s a real dump, isn’t it?” she said. And she was right, everything looked as run-down as the Copa: the storefront awnings faded and tattered from years of sun and rain, the concrete walks crumbling like chalk, and weeds growing taller than the unkempt shrubs in the landscape islands. All the store windows looked grimy, filled with old mannequins with broken fingers and dressed in fuddy-duddy clothes. They seemed as out-of-date as the Woolworth’s we passed by with its chrome-edged lunch counter and row of apple-red stools stretching all the way to the back of the store.

There was an eerie sensation of emptiness all through Lincoln Road, a loneliness I couldn’t explain, only felt in the conspicuous silence. But as Yetta filled in the blanks with her memories, I caught glimpses of just how glamorous it must have been back in her time: the coral stone fountain still trickling in front of the glass doors of the former Saks Fifth Avenue where Yetta used to shop
when things were good;
the empty corner storefront of the former Cadillac dealership where she and Harry had bought their first fancy car; and everywhere the timeless royal palms like indestructible columns standing as straight as ever.

“Let’s get lunch at Wolfie’s. We’re hungry,” she said, speaking for both of us, and we turned off Lincoln Road at the next corner. From a couple of blocks away I could see the giant marquee:
Wolfie’s
spelled out in cursive letters made of strands of neon, lit up even during the day. We took a seat at the counter, which looked as ancient as the one at Woolworth’s. But unlike Woolworth’s,
Wolfie’s was teeming with people mostly Yetta’s age—or older. She handed me one of the menus pinched between the napkin holder and the ketchup bottle on the counter. “The liverwurst is to die for,” she said. Liver was gross enough, but what was liverwurst? The worst part of the liver? I scanned the menu: pastrami, gefilte fish, lox, blintzes, and a slew of other foods I’d never heard of, finally finding something I could pronounce and loved: grilled cheese sandwich.

The waitress in white nurse-like shoes was slim with graying hair cut short and close so that you could make out the shape of her head. Of course, she and Yetta knew each other. “The usual, Yetta?” she asked, moistening her index finger with her tongue to turn the page in her order pad. A Reuben and a bowl of borscht, Yetta confirmed and then turned to me. “What are you going to have? Try the borscht—you’ll love it,” Yetta insisted. After she explained (to my horror) that borsht was beet soup—served cold—I declined and asked for a grilled cheese sandwich, no tomatoes. “Okay, then,” Yetta said to the waitress, “a Reuben, a grilled cheese, two Cokes, and two bowls of borscht.” Before I could protest, she assured me, “Trust me—it’s to die for.”

As we waited for our food, Yetta explained that all the celebrities used to eat at Wolfie’s. It was hard to believe Yetta’s claim, but there was proof on the walls, which were covered with framed photos of ladies in strapless cocktail dresses with diamond hair combs and men in double-breasted jackets, smoking and having fancy cocktails in the very same booths that surrounded us. “So why don’t the stars come here anymore?” I asked. Yetta sighed and then explained, “Oh, that was in the fifties. Miami Beach is kaput now, what with all the drugs and the mafia. It’s a shame, I tell you. People go to the fancy new resorts nowadays. Everything changes—and not for the better so much. Look at me. One day I’m twenty-four with a twenty-four-inch waist, hobnobbing with celebrities, and the next day I’m an old meshuggener sitting here telling you dumb stories. Like you care. Remember this much,
bubbeleh:
change can’t be changed. One day, when you’re old like me and look at the world not like it is, but like it was, you’ll know what this means.”

I couldn’t grasp what she meant, but I felt it: it was the same emptiness I felt on Lincoln Road; the same loneliness I saw in the eyes of the old folks sitting at the Copa, lost in time; the same undertow of sadness pulling at my parents whenever they spoke about their lives back in Cuba. Like Cuba, like New York City, Miami Beach—Yetta’s Miami Beach—suddenly became a place I had never been to either. “I like your stories, Yetta,” I assured her. “You can tell me all the stories you want.”

The waitress set down the two bowls of borscht. Yetta filled her spoon and savored it with her eyes closed, and then urged me to try it. I stared at my bowl awhile, swirling my spoon around, trying to get over the thought of it being blood instead of soup, and finally tasted it. Blood might have tasted better, but I didn’t have the heart to tell Yetta. “Mmm, delicious,” I lied, and she nodded her head. “You see, I told you you’d like it. You gotta try everything once—that’s Yetta’s rule.”

At last my grilled cheese came and I was able to cleanse my mouth of the muddy taste of beets. I ate slowly, hoping Yetta would finish before I did so then I could just say I was full and we could leave. Yetta did finish before me, but she excused herself to the restroom, telling me to finish up before she got back. In a panic, I dropped a couple of spoonfuls of borscht into her bowl, a few under the counter, and mixed the rest into my half-empty glass of Coke, just before Yetta returned wearing a fresh coat of lipstick. “Now, finish up your soda,” she insisted. I had no choice. Taking a deep breath and holding it in, I stuck the straw way back in my mouth and drank my Coke and borscht. “Good. Now let’s shimmy back to the Taj Mahal; it’s getting late.”

Riding up the elevator at the Copa, Yetta insisted I visit her for lunch the next day for pierogi, which sounded just as weird as borscht and liverwurst, but I wanted to hang out with her again, so I agreed. “It’s number six-oh-three.
¡Hasta mañana!
” she said as the elevator doors closed. When they opened seconds later on my floor, it was to the terrifying sight of Abuela sitting on a bench by the elevator, arms and legs crossed, waiting for me with her Godzilla face on. I knew I was in trouble for being gone all day without telling anyone, but the question was: How
much
trouble?

Abuela scolded me all the way down the hall to Mamá’s room. “
Caramba,
where have you been?!
Ay, Dios mío,
we almost called
la policía
.” Mamá, relieved at first, kissed me and pulled me to her, but then she reprimanded me too: “What you thinking?
¡Te voy a entrar a palo!
” I began pleading my case. “I wasn’t doing nothing bad—I swear. I was with this cool lady who lives here; her name is Yetta.” “Yetta?” Abuela questioned. “That’s a strange name. Is she Cuban?” “She’s not strange, Abuela,” I explained, “she’s just Jewish. What’s the big deal anyway? All we did was eat at some place named Wolfie’s. That’s all—
te lo juro
!” “
Bueno,
it no matter,” Mamá continued. “I don’t want you with crazy strangers. Who knows what could happen to you with a Jew! Anyway, you lied to me,
cabrón
.”

Mamá grabbed the back of my shirt collar and plopped me down in a seat at the dinette table. Somehow she had managed to get her hands on a pencil and a stack of loose-leaf paper. On the topmost sheet, Mamá had written out one line:
Nunca me desapareceré otra vez como hice hoy,
meaning, “I shall never disappear again as I did today.” Pointing to the paper and pen, she commanded, “Five hundred times.” Mamá had been a grade school teacher in Cuba and she still punished Caco and me by making us write lines—but in Spanish, so we wouldn’t forget our mother tongue. I hoped that was all the punishment I was going to get, but before closing the door behind her she added, “Tonight you sleep in our room. Tomorrow no beach, no pool, no
nada
.”

I shall never disappear again as I did today . . . I shall never disappear again as I did today
. . . I began mindlessly scribbling, taking a break every fifty or so lines to ease the cramps in my hand and gaze out the window overlooking the pool. Squinting my eyes to blur out the cracks in the deck, the battered lounge chairs, and the burned-out pool lights, I pictured the Copa in the fifties: Yetta in a white tulle dress, pretty as Marilyn Monroe, dancing a slow song with Harry, the palms swaying like their bodies to the music, the pool sparkling as bright as the aquamarine ring on her hand resting on Harry’s shoulder, and the stars like a thousand tiny eyes fixed on them. I could even imagine a young Yetta in a polka-dot bikini, leaping off the diving board, bouffant-first into the pool.