Jubana! by Gigi Anders

Romanov herself couldn’t have had a better one.
    Because Zeide Boris was Russian-born, I cultivated a fantasy that I was Anastasia, cruelly banished from my homeland, wandering the earth, misunderstood and ravaged, English a little rusty, a haunted princess. Yet I still bore that unmistakableRussian refinement, wreathed in my sole pathetic surviving possessions: tiny pearl earrings and a custom-made pink party dress. I was poignant. Of course, my royal parents had made it out of the Revolution with me, and that certainly was a consolation. But everything we knew and loved—our riches, our whole old world, the lovely cushioned and cosseted way of life—had been wrenched from us by disgusting, illiterate revolutionary brutes. As our real-life family priest Máximo says, it’s much worse to have had everything and lose it than to have never had anything at all. Máximo is a fellow Cuban exile whose fabulously wealthy family left Cuba almost exactly when we did. He is a Catholic priest in Washington, D.C., with a weakness for Neiman Marcus. Ergo, Mami Dearest considers him her brother. He gave her a medallion of St. Joseph of Cupertino (patron saint of air travelers, who levitated while praying), which she keeps in the coin compartment of her Coach wallet. Mami suffers from acute fear of flying—triggered when we flew out of Cuba forever—and unfortunately I inherited that phobia in my late twenties and still have it.
    Though I got to keep my lamb and tricycle and we flew safely over an ocean and landed just fine, somewhere a trauma clicked and got locked into place. Maybe it was because someone at the Miami airport managed to steal my beloved little red birthday tricycle while we were being interviewed by immigration officers. Whatever it is, ever since I can remember, I’ve had the same two recurring nightmares. One is that someone is stealing something from me and I see them doing it and I accuse them and they always get away with the theft, no matter how much I yell and scream about the injustice. I awake hoarse and frustrated and humiliated. The second one—this one scares the bejesus out of me—is that I’m in cinquecento Venice, sightseeing. The permeating light is that ancient, thin, transparent yellow light seen in oil paintings from that period. I’m with an older man on a suspension bridge, about a mile above the city, only there are no towers supporting the bridge. It’s almost like a bridge made of vines, like from Tarzan movies. The bridge sways and feels very flimsy underfoot. The man and I are crossing it to reach the other side of intricate canals, moldering palaces, and secret Leonardo grottos. The dirty water below is silent but portentous. It’s a hazy, murky green-gray, like a lagoon or a swamp, but deep enough to drown in. A black crow shoots across the sky like an arrow, and my companion turns abruptly to look at it, agitating the bridge. I grasp the rails and they’re rope. I look down and I’m losing my balance and already feel asphyxiated because I know I’m going to fall into fathoms of mysterious water. I wake up to not drown.
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    But when I was a fearless teenager, I just loved traveling by plane. The more takeoffs and landings, the better. I was sixteen when my parents and I flew to Mexico for a holiday. We stayed with friends in Mexico City. Our hostess, the gorgeous bohemian wife, Nedda, was one of my mother’s best friends in Cuba. With her thick blond hair (the kind that could break a hairbrush), green-blue eyes, tawny skin, and perfect figure, Nedda was considered possibly the most beautiful girl on the entire island in the 1950s. Papi dated Nedda when Mami broke up with him during their courtship. Early on in their relationship, my father had come to pick my mother up for a date one night. Mami was seventeen, Papi was twenty-one. Remember, he was a relatively poor boy going out with one of the wealthiest girls in the