Jubana! by Gigi Anders

cigarette butts piled in smelly stale peaks in huge round purple aluminum ashtrays. The patients constantly hit up the staff for fresh cigarettes. At first Mami shared hers to be nice and to bond, but after a while she got hip to their tricks and began announcing, “Sorry, Meestehr/Mees [whatever their last name was], I only have enough for myself.”
    There were several other female social workers in Mami’s wing, really nice American women who made a big fuss over me between seeing patients (and thank God they did, because I’d have died of psychiatric cabin fever otherwise). These were Mami’s first real women friends in this country, and many of those friendships have endured. I’d bounce from one to another of their offices, providing comic relief and evaluating each lady’sfitness as a potential surrogate mother to me. “Gigi’s so entertaining!” they’d say. Hello, what choice did I have? I’m four years old and stuck in a locked mental institution, for God’s sake. Throwing a tantrum will only… get me locked in a mental institution! It just doesn’t get much more diminished than this for a Russian-Lithuanian-Polish-Cuban-Jewish princesa. What was I supposed to do? The revolution had put me—Gigi La Yiya Yiyi Yiyita Rebeca Beatriz Anastasia Lula Mae Luli Gorda China Muma Mumita Mamita Bruta Bobita Benes Andursky Anders—here. And my parents, too. Fidel Castro had put us all here, that cabrón comemierda H.P. [shit-eating bastard hijo de puta, son of a whore]. And my Juban culture—which stipulates that children never leave their parents, never never never never EVER, not even after they’re married with kids (especially after they’re married with kids)—had put me here. Shit! Unlike the patients, I seriously had better things to do. I could be bathing with my mother in Varadero beach right now, I could be picking tropical flowers in a beautiful park with my abuelos or eating my daily lunch— bistec a la palomilla (pounded, fried steak), arroz blanco (white rice), frijoles negros (black beans), and platanitos maduros (fried ripe plantains)—which could be followed by a delightful nap chaser in a hand-painted yellow-and-white imported crib and dreams of heiress-hood.
    But nooo.
    So. I could either have hourly heart attacks, like my Miami Cuban exile brethren have had for more than 406,888 hours of the last four-plus Castro decades, or I could make the best of things. That made me be resourceful, adaptable, imaginative, and self-reliant, whether I felt like it or not. What do they say? Children are resilient. Yeah. Right. If you’re the tiniest one with the least power, you have to obey the bigger, stronger ones feeding, clothing, and housing you, even if they’re completely flippedout. My parents were way too engrossed in daily survival and the effects of compounded transatlantic losses to be a Juban version of Norman Rockwell parents. (Actually, Rockwell, with his idealized, un-Hispanic, syrupy visions of Americana, is Papi’s favorite painter. When he got into a shared private practice in 1963, Papi hung schmaltzy Rockwell prints of doctors and patients along the office hallways.)
    Whenever my parents did pay attention and those magical, ephemeral, singular moments presented themselves, I grabbed on tight and savored those rations. Give me love. At night Mami sat on the side of my bed and in the lamplight read or talked to me—briefly. She’d start to rise and I’d grab her freckled arm and pull her back down to me. I need more from you. Are we together? Are you my loving mother? Are we a family? Or not? I wonder why you won’t be closer and more giving. I thought I had articulated those things by my actions, but it didn’t seem to register in Mami, or in Papi, for that matter, and it never would. Nor would it with the four Epic-Epochal lovers of my future romantic life.
    Even now, my mother