Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  “But what about Jubilee? Matty has meetings. He’s getting ready for Comic-Con. I can’t expect him to watch her the whole time.”

  “I’ll watch Jubilee for you,” Joshua told her. “You’re a writer. You need to write.”

  Bianca stood and leaned her whole body toward him. “You’re right. I am a writer. I’ll go.”

  Rosana didn’t want Bianca to go to New York. She was afraid it would shock her worse. She reminded her to take her meds, take them every day and not forget because she didn’t want her having a crazy episode like an addicted starlet she’d heard about in the big city (as if they were not living right outside Los Angeles, but Mama lived like anywhere she went was a small town). Anyway, Bianca wasn’t an addict, she told Mama. She didn’t want to take those meds in the first place. They made her fuzzy.

  Mama asked if Dr. Norris approved, but Bianca only shrugged and promised her she wouldn’t go all Zelda Fitzgerald on her. When Mama looked at Bianca with a blank face, she told her how Zelda wrote her only novel in six weeks in a psychiatric hospital. She was a ballerina. A mother. A gifted writer whose gift had been squelched and stolen by her husband.

  Mama said, “Just take your meds.”

  But Bianca would’ve liked to go all Zelda. Imagine? Just letting go . . .

  She’d read that critics considered Zelda’s prose “unpolished” for its excessive use of “flowery” metaphor.

  Bianca liked Zelda’s prose.

  She needed flowers against the concrete, dandelion weeds growing out of the cracks and turning into pinwheels for wishing.

  She thought about the restaurant with Gabe. How it had all evaporated, a dream she’d only half wanted anyway, but colorful nevertheless. And this was New York. This was the girlhood dream. The big one. The postcard from her high school English teacher that said Follow your dreams.

  Bianca was falling in love with a man who loved her back. No, Josh hadn’t said those exact words in that exact shape, but before, in the Valley, Gabe’s I love yous had been empty. When Josh told her to go to New York, it was as if he were saying, Your dreams are beautiful. When he believed with her, it was easier to believe in herself.

  The weeks leading up to finals, Bianca was spending most of her time at Josh’s. Her brother looked hurt each time she left, but he didn’t say anything. He had Handro. He should have understood.

  Between finals and New York, she only had a week’s break for Christmas. The wires coiled in her gut kept raveling and unraveling whenever she thought about leaving. Jubilee slept in the bassinet beside the couch. Bianca had helped Jayden to bed in his dinosaur footie pajamas, and she could hear him snoring from his room. He reminded her of Lana and that scared her. Why was she playing house with another family? She’d gone right from Gabe’s to Josh’s.

  They sat on the floor in Josh’s living room, studying. The words on the page of her novel blurred. She stood and stretched. “I need a break from madwomen in attics.”

  “You still writing about that Hitchcock movie you showed me, the one with the obsessive, controlling housekeeper who burns the house down like Bertha?”

  “I’d prefer to call her Antoinette.”

  “Yeah, from that other novel you like. What’s it called?”

  “Wide Sargasso Sea.” She loved that even if Josh couldn’t remember the names of all her novels, he remembered what she’d told him about them. The Brontë sisters had enchanted her when she’d discovered them in high school. At Holy Cross she’d encountered Jean Rhys’s novel and fallen in love, the way her narrative was nonlinear and broken, like life, like memory. And although Rhys had written it as a biting response to its Romantic predecessor, Bianca couldn’t help believing it had always come first, her white Creole sister Antoinette with her colorful bird and patois, her magical nanny Christophine, from whom she would’ve learned the ways of obeah. She’d told Josh this, how she was living in a stream-of-consciousness novel, only writing it herself.

  Romantic literature set off a hankering for chamomile tea. She offered to make Josh a mug too; he nodded but didn’t follow her into the kitchen. She set Jubilee in the high chair Josh had bought from the Goodwill along with other baby items. She hadn’t asked for all those things, and it felt like luck or fate she’d found a man like him. She was dizzy, as if dehydrated. She wanted to tell Josh about Dr. Norris, tell him everything. But he’d think she was crazy. Like Gabe had.

  She wasn’t legally required to see Dr. Norris. No one threatened to check her into a hospital, and no one knew what destruction she was capable of.

  The knot in her stomach snaked. She was Coatlicue, the serpent woman. Snakes-her-skirts. Snakes-her-love.

  She leaned over a trash can beside Josh’s kitchen sink and threw up.

  “Bee?” Josh came into the kitchen as she wiped her mouth with a napkin, still gripping the trash. “You have a bug?”

  She nodded.

  He felt her forehead. “You’re cool and clammy. Here, sit down. I’ll take this out.” He took the garbage and led her to the dining table.

  “Probably nerves.”

  “About finals?”

  “I was thinking about New York, about flying.”

  “You’ll knock them dead with your poems. They’ll ask you to stay, offer you a residency.”

  “I couldn’t stay.”

  He kissed her forehead, gently. “I wouldn’t want you to stay.”

  He left to take out the trash.

  Her head throbbed. She decided to tell him what she was afraid of.

  “I started a short story a while back but never finished it,” she said when he came back into the kitchen and began pulling two mugs from the cabinet.

  “You should finish it.”

  “It brings up so many memories I’d rather forget.”

  “Could be cathartic.”

  It was time to talk about therapy. She knew it was. She’d alluded to it many times but hadn’t straight out told Josh she was seeing a shrink. “Dr. Norris says the same thing,” she ventured. She felt nauseated again, and pulled away. She watched the tea kettle; soon it would start whistling.

  Josh closed the gap between their bodies. “Dr. Norris is wise.”

  She turned around, Josh’s arms still clasping her waist like they were dancing. He didn’t seem jarred by her admission.

  “He’s kooky and has this Scottish accent I adore.” Josh’s smile crinkled his slick brown skin, dimples like small eyelets in his cheeks. “He tells me I’m a ‘different lamp than I think I am.’ That I only wear the shade I think I’m supposed to, and that going to New York is a step toward a new lamp shade. He says I should write a book about my life. Well, my lamp. He says I’ll shine brighter if I take the shade off.” She motioned her hands above her head like taking off a hat, lifting her arms high in the air, twirling around in Josh’s arms like a ballerina. “Do I shine?”

  “Always.”

  She stopped twirling, steeled her nerves. “He says I’m not crazy.”

  His eyebrows furrowed for a moment. He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. As if she was a surprise. She liked the way she felt about herself when he looked at her.

  “I never thought you were.”

  Fourteen

  Useless Moon

  Before Jubilee

  Fantasies. Maybe that’s all Bianca and Gabe had. They’d shifted their dream to the restaurant, as if what they fixed in the kitchen could heal them too. But they couldn’t work together much less live together if all their conversations ended in arguments. They hadn’t talked about the fight since he’d shown her the abandoned restaurant. Now they were going to a club in Mexicali with his cousin from Los Angeles, forgetting their troubles the way they always did: chasing tequila with beer.

  Bianca had mixed feelings about Mexicali. It was only a forty-minute drive from Gabe’s house, and they�
�d often crossed the border to party since the drinking age in Mexico was eighteen. But the children selling chicle on the side of the street made her sad. The women holding out the empty baskets of their hands. Her mama had told her stories of the pregnant mothers crossing the Colorado Desert through the Mexicali Valley. Same as her bisabuela’s pregnant mother: by foot and, sometimes, hands and knees. She’d crossed the Chihuahuan Desert at the Jornada del Muerto, which could be called the Journey of the Dead. Before she’d died in childbirth, Bisabuela’s mother had heard her girlchild’s vibrant cry. That girlchild’s cry delivered life to the rest of Bianca’s family.

  Mama had delivered the babies of the crossing mothers en el otro lado. Mama had nursed them at the hospitals, dehydrated from weeks through the hundred-degree heat, bursting at the seams with the new life they’d given their hijos. She’d nursed their wounds too. From climbing the fence. Jumping. Or falling. One woman had fractured both legs. When Mama had recounted her experiences in the hospital, Bianca had thought of the date trees she’d climbed in the back lots and how painful it had been to fall from just a few branches high. Her own bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges up and down the orchards of California from the time she was a small girl, climbing into the trees and dropping fruits and nuts to her family—the aunts and uncles who’d taken her in, all migrant field workers who’d picked their way across New Mexico, Arizona, and into California—until she ran off to marry a blue-eyed Spanish man and began sewing in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles on Alameda Street. Since then, none of Bianca’s family had accrued any wealth, but their lives were far less precarious than those here, on the Mexicali streets.

  Bianca pressed her face to the glass, watching the children weaving through traffic with their boxes of hard, bright gum. Gabe said he felt like a spoiled jerk, driving his fancy truck while mothers and their kids sat on the curb with nothing. When he said things like that, Bianca believed they still had something in common.

  In the club, cumbia rock blared on the speakers. Bianca leaned her body into Gabe’s as he propped against a stool at the bar chugging another beer while she gulped down a second tequila shot, scrunching her face and clenching her eyes tight from the warmth stinging her throat. His breath hot and acrid against her neck, she loved him best when he was a little buzzed. He treated her nicest that way. How quickly it could turn. How quickly she’d be upside-down, stomach aching, calling out for Mama. Mama whose bedroom in the empty house-for-sale she’d return to, drunk, like Dad of her girlhood. Was Mama praying her rosary now? Hail Mary, full of grace, keep my daughter safe. Keep my daughter sound and safe. If so, Bianca couldn’t hear her.

  “It sucks you couldn’t find a friend to keep my cousin company,” Gabe said close to her ear, his hands on the slight lonjas at her hips, a mini muffin at the top of her jeans. She tried not to care that she was gaining weight, getting rounder.

  “Yeah, sorry. Can’t he meet someone here?”

  “Nah, he’s not like that. Look at him, he’s miserable.” He nodded toward his cousin, alone at a table at the edge of the dance floor.

  She let the buzz enhance her confidence, put on a pouty face she knew he found sexy and told him she wanted to dance.

  He kissed her mouth and squeezed her ass. “Let me go check on him real quick.”

  Bianca swayed with the music, allowing it to fill her with the cumbias she’d learned at quinceañeras and high school dances. Her own mama didn’t dance anymore, hadn’t since she’d married Dad, except for the exercise videos she’d done to lose weight so he’d stop calling her lard ass.

  Suavamente, bésame. No one had taught her the steps, but she’d caught on from the girls dancing around her. The washing machine meant shake her hips as if polishing wood. Some moves were like the pony Mama had taught her from Richard Simmons videos: balance on the pads of her feet, heels up high, even in high heels. One two three, one two three. Like the waltzes she’d performed in recitals, only more shaking. Her favorite was when she and Gabe would crisscross bodies together, forming scissors with their hips and legs, hips locked together, one arm each extended, elbow bent, hands clasped together, opposite arm hung around each other’s waist, feet apart, his knee between her crotch, and they’d swing, back and forth, round and round, fast and bouncing. ¡La quebradita!

  In his arms, she felt sexy, felt he was sexy. With Gabe it was all show. With a muscular frame bulked up by his intermittent lifting and a flippant, borderline cocky (in that friendly playful way) attitude toward others, he radiated macho masculinity. Still, in bed, Bianca could tell he felt he had something to prove. He’d told her once after making love how much his dad’s expectations hurt him. How he couldn’t get anything right. The summer in high school he’d hurt his back and couldn’t play football anymore, he went to live with Nana, deflated by his dad’s reaction. All those years of training down the drain. Isn’t that how Bianca and he felt with each other? Why they clung?

  He sauntered back across the bar, pulled her tight toward his body, dancing her in time, his pelvis tipped toward her hips, his head close to hers. For a moment, they were an elderly couple dancing at the Chili Cook-Off fiesta, outside the rodeo arena. They were his parents dancing in the backyard or at a wedding. For a moment, his hair grayed, covered by a wide-brimmed Stetson, his DC skater shoes replaced by shuffling cowboy boots. Her strappy platforms transformed into closed-toed pumps, nylons thickened into stockings.

  “Sorry, Bee. My cousin wants to leave,” he said, still holding her close. “We’re going to Miau-Miau instead.” The strip club. Bianca’s pulse quickened, gut lurched. She told him no.

  “We came out here for him. He came all the way from LA, and I promised him a fun time. Besides, it won’t be bad.”

  “Gabe, I hate those places. You know that. Can’t we hang out here? Please?”

  He pulled away from her. “You should’ve brought a friend for him, then we could’ve danced like you wanted. We’re leaving. Let’s go.” He signaled his cousin to head toward the exit doors then tugged her arm, steering her away from the cramped dance floor beside the bar.

  At the door of the strip club, a fat baseball-capped bouncer checked her driver’s license and nodded. This club was dark and smelled dankly of vinegar and even stronger of cigarettes. Gabe draped his arm around Bianca’s shoulders. “It’s fine, Bee. We’ll order some drinks and stay here a few minutes so my primo can get his kicks, then we’ll leave. I promise.”

  Thick frays of yarn pulled inside her stomach. In high school, a bunch of them had gotten together to watch American Beauty at Eloisa’s. Despite its critical acclaim, she’d hated it. It felt perverse to her, that dad. She guessed that was the point. Everyone had a twisted side. Everyone had alligators in the swamp. In a book about being a writer, she’d read Stephen King’s essay. All you need in this world is love, he’d quoted Lennon. Then added, as long as you kept the gators fed. In this world, some men fantasize about teenage girls. For all Bianca knew, most men did. Dads jacked off in the shower. For all she knew. What did she know about dads? Some dads killed themselves in the bathtub. But she wouldn’t want to watch a movie about that. It was enough to know it existed.

  She’d stopped reading Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things for a month when she’d frozen on the scene in which the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man in the theater lobby puts his warm, hard flesh into the little boy’s hand. Estha, the little boy who’d been kicked out of the talkies theater for singing Maria’s parts in The Sound of Music, the way Mama and Matty and she sang to all the musicals (“Before the parade passes by . . .”), who couldn’t stop singing even in the lobby, who went back to his Ammu and had to be rushed out of the theater to the bathroom and held over the dirty toilet to vomit. She froze because she was there with him, in the lobby. She wanted to scream out Don’t go behind the drink man’s cart. Don’t take the sweets he’s offering you. Go back to your mama. Turn around, little Estha. Or at Ammu, Look
what he’s done to your boy. Slice his neck, Ammu. Call the police. Take it back. Take it back into you. Take Estha back to where he’ll be safe. She’d wondered for a long time what art was for. To show us what we needed to see, dim and dirty in this world, or to imagine something other, some Pan’s Labyrinth where little boys aren’t sexually abused and little girls aren’t killed by stepfathers, and women don’t dance nude for drunken men out of economic necessity.

  Which version of reality? Frida impaled with a bus rail. Frida sprawled on a blood-soaked Detroit hospital bed, her little Diguelito pink and perfectly formed but dead. Snail and machine and wilting purple orchid strung in the sky like balloons, held in her hand on the bed by veins deeply red. Frida, a broken column—

  Or Remedios Varos’s long, strange figures sailing the Orinoco River in giant goldfish teacups, women gliding along passageways on their hair, hovering above the checkered tile on tiny pointed toes. Labyrinths in smoke. Séances and floating objects.

  Neither, Gabe would tell her. Both, she wanted to shout.

  He ordered them each a beer, and she sat, mouthwashing hers, watching. She didn’t even like beer. He leaned over and clutched her waist, whispering, “They’ve got nothing on you, babe.” He’d misread her as usual.

  “It’s not that. It seems sad.”

  “Most of them are ugly anyway.” He pointed out a woman with jet-black hair sweeping the small of her back, her red lingerie already splayed on the platform, one black stiletto high in the air, one wrapped around a pole. She didn’t have any other body hair. Did she shave every day or wax? Bianca could never wax her pubic hair. She’d tried once. It tugged at the soft, stretchy skin where thigh met pelvis, ripping off a strip of skin, leaving her chafed and limping for days. When she’d shaved, she’d itched like crazy, her chonies become a torture device. As a girlchild, each time she’d showered with Mama, she’d seen the fuzzy dark patch and assumed that’s what women have. Dark splotches on their privates and wide, dark-brown stains on their chichis called nipples.