Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  “She’s not ugly,” Bianca said. “She was probably a beautiful dancer at one time, the way she can arabesque like that.” The dancer was stunning, like the women in Gabe’s Maxim magazine or on his Budweiser posters, with pouty red lips and thick jet-black hair tumbling down her shoulders, the obsidian of her eyes glowing in the spotlight.

  “She’s haggish, if you ask me. Her skin pudgy in the middle, you can tell she’s had kids. I’ll bet if you look closely she’s all stretch-marked.”

  “What the hell?” The rope in Bianca’s stomach knotted. “I have stretch marks and a pudgy stomach, and I haven’t had kids. And anyway, so what? So what if she has stretch marks? Most women do. Cabrón. You’re such a chauvinist. What am I even doing here with you?”

  “Oooh, someone’s drunk. Getting feisty there with the cuss words. Getting all tough in Spanish.”

  She sipped her beer until it became tasteless in her mouth. “I was only pointing out they’re not all perfect. Sexy, yeah, but not perfect. Most of them have children at home.”

  My body never stretched with new life, though it bears the marks. My breasts never flowed with milk, though they hang like heads. Poem fragments swirled around her alcohol-fuzzed head. Aloud, she told him at least they were bringing home money for food. At least their children had clothes and shoes. At least they weren’t selling their children.

  He called her a spitfire drunk, ready to sting, ready to attack. He was laughing at her. She hated him like this. Hated his patronizing.

  Onstage, the woman with jet-black hair squatted at the edge of the platform to collect folded-up bills from the men crowding around cheering and whistling. English or Spanish, catcalls sounded the same. Bianca looked away.

  “I thought that wasn’t allowed,” she said, referring to what some of the men were paying to do one after the other to the woman with jet-black hair. “Like that rap song you explained, no sex in the champagne room?”

  “It’s not illegal to touch and tongue pussy here.” He wasn’t looking at Bianca.

  “It’s disgusting. They’re like deer at a salt lick.” Her head reeled again. “I don’t feel good. Can we leave now?”

  “Stop it, Bianca. My cousin’s barely having a good time. Close your eyes then and go to sleep if you’re sick. Stop being such a baby.”

  “I don’t want to be here.” She said it loud enough that the bartender looked up, motioned to the bouncer, who came over to the table.

  “¿Hay problema?” he asked.

  “No, lo siento. Mi novia está loca, es todo.” He was sorry she was crazy. Yeah, him and her both.

  The bouncer nodded approval but said in Spanish that he’d better keep her quiet or he’d kick them both out.

  Gabe apologized again in his broken kitchen Spanish, and when the bouncer walked away, he pinched Bianca’s thigh. She yelped, and Gabe said, “Shut the hell up, stupid. You want to get us in trouble? Look, if you don’t like it here, go wait in the car.”

  She told him to give her the fucking keys then.

  “Are you serious?” he asked, his eyebrows raised. His eyes were laughing at her, but she stared at him straight through her blurring vision.

  “Yes. Give them to me.”

  “Whatever. Suit yourself. You’d better not try going anywhere. You’re too drunk to drive. Just stay there and sleep it off.” She wanted to say she wished she could sleep him off, but instead she scooted out of the circular booth from underneath the table, almost tripping on the step, then stumbled out the door. He didn’t follow. Behind her, cheering and whistles.

  In the truck, she locked the doors, double-checking they’d all locked, then pulled off her strappy black platforms, letting them drop to the floor mat. She propped her nyloned feet beneath her and wrapped her silver sweater over her dress and lycra knees, curling them into her chest. She’d gotten all dressed up for fucking nothing. She was a useless Christmas tree the day after. She turned the key halfway in the ignition for the radio. All that came in were Spanish stations, and she was tired of loud music, but she found a Spanish love song station, leaned back against the headrest, crossed her arms as if hugging her own damn self, and blinked back the tears stinging her eyes. Outside on the curb, a man puked into the gutter, wiped his face with his sleeve, and staggered off with his brown paper-bagged bottle. Behind the truck, half a block down, a metal cart squatted beneath a tent strung with white Christmas lights and red-and-green plastic flags, selling little foil-wrapped tacos on doubled corn tortillas, trays of carnitas, carne asada, lengua, carne adovada, diced onions, cilantro, radish slices, pico de gallo, lime wedges, and salsa. No, she wasn’t a Christmas tree. She was a fucking taco cart.

  Her stomach lurched, head reeled. She was too scared for sleep. She wanted to call Mama like she’d done the night of the barbecue, raging drunk, dry heaving into Esme’s bathroom sink, still screaming to Esme, I lost the baby, Esme. Remember? I lost her, while Gabe hollered at her to shut the hell up, of course Esme knew and why open old wounds. She wanted to call Mama and scream at her, You lost Dad, remember? You lost him!, like it was her fault. But she didn’t get cell reception in Mexico. And she didn’t want to hurt Mama. Not again. Mama had driven down to bring Bianca home once. Bianca had said she couldn’t leave Gabe, but could Mama buy her a dog so she wouldn’t be so lonely at night? At the Desert Herald, she’d taken a classified’s call for boxer puppies, and could Mama get one for her? So Mama went back to Abuela’s and left her there in her empty house with a brown, floppy-eared boxer who sprawled on the carpet with Bianca, howling as she cried.

  Useless moon, too beautiful to waste—Sandra Cisneros was no help to Bianca tonight. Sometimes a woman needs a man who loves her ass. No. Sometimes a woman needs a man who won’t let her wait in the car alone, in the cold, in the dark, with the taco man and the puking drunk on the sidewalk. Sometimes a woman needs a man who won’t promise to take her dancing then drag her instead to a strip club because his cousin wasn’t having fun. Sometimes—a woman doesn’t know what she needs. Especially when she’s nineteen, drunk, and sad as a useless moon.

  Fifteen

  New York,

  Black Blossom

  With Jubilee

  New York City revealed a secret. In ice-breath and snowflakes, the smell of urine and garbage on the streets, mazes of high-rises and billboards and twinkle lights making pandemonium of Bianca, alone, without her family, time rewound itself.

  She’d never been on a plane. She ordered ginger ale and ate hard, brown gingerbread cookies. When the captain announced rough air, Bianca gripped the armrest and imagined herself on the Ferris wheel at the Midwinter County Fair. The plane wobbled as it turned over the dark Atlantic Ocean where white birds dotted the black water like a stippled painting. She forced herself to keep her eyes open and take everything in, despite the turbulence. When she deboarded, the wind was furious and cold as needles, colder than even at the beach in winter.

  Her first taste of NYC: a slice of pizza on a flimsy paper plate, slopped cheese and basil and grease she savored while following the signs toward the AirTrain. A mother and a little girl waited at the sliding doors. Bianca reached for Jubilee. She’d forgotten for a moment that Jubilee wasn’t with her.

  Her bones stung with cold. In the elevator, she pulled out the heaviest jacket she’d brought, a fuchsia peacoat with large black buttons down the front and a matching beret. Her reflection in the elevator glass appeared city chic, even if her teeth were chattering; the cold made her feverish as a girlchild again, refusing to take those pink chewable Tylenols she’d squirreled into her cheeks until Mama had left the room, then spit into the toilet bowl, watching them disappear in a swirl of rose-colored water.

  Adult Bianca hadn’t brought her meds to New York. She hadn’t taken them since Thanksgiving, despite Mama’s warning. Dr. Norris had advised her not to skip doses or risk brain shivers. Was that what she felt now? Her teeth cha
ttering? An electrical pulse running down her brain? It was nauseating.

  When the doors opened, the crowd corralled toward the AirTrain, where the doors were closing again. She watched the city whir past. Leafless trees praising the overcast sky; brownstone buildings and bundled children playing on the sidewalks; brick apartments so tall she wondered how people carried up their groceries.

  She managed to get herself onto the train at Jamaica Station, with Penn Station as her stop, although she’d nearly screwed up. All those trains and the confusing ticket kiosk; a throng of agitated people in line behind her, she panicked and put sixty dollars on her card though she only needed five for the tram since the train was a separate ticket. So when she left, two weeks later, she gave her Metro card to a woman bundled in newspaper in a stairwell.

  Bianca trudged up the stairs from Penn Station toward the street above, the sky shimmering silverfish, an ad for Kinky Boots flashing sapphire. She thought of her mama and Matty. She wanted to tell them, We made it. Her mama had always wanted to see a Broadway show.

  When Mama was a girl, she and her older brother had been dropped off at the movie theater with enough money to watch whatever marathon was playing, including the old-school musicals she probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise, glamorous and hopeful. The theaters had been a babysitter when Mama’s parents worked several jobs each to pay the bills, but those musicals had been a life raft. Anything was possible. Anyone could sing along. Some nights, when Dad was drunk-raging and breaking Mama’s things (her abuela’s dishes, her record player, her collection of model horses she’d scavenged from thrift stores and yard sales and displayed on shelves), Bianca would see Mama mouthing the words to the songs, and sometimes, softly, so softly, humming the tunes—“Don’t tell me not to fly, I’ve simply got to / If someone takes a spill, it’s me and not you / Who told you you’re allowed to rain on my parade.”

  For a moment, Bianca forgot to be resentful or annoyed with her mama, and only wished she were there, holding her hand.

  Up the subway-station stairs, amidst the crowds and garbage and glam (and snow! NYC was snowing!), she wanted to pause in awe in the stairwell, unmoving, unbreathing, but the crowd shoved her toward the wall and her luggage slipped from her hand. She pushed back against the other bodies and made her way toward the sidewalk.

  She had no idea how to get to the writers’ house though she’d printed out a map. The streets compressed like a miniature of a city. She couldn’t make out which way was south.

  Behind a roasted chestnut cart, a woman with a Caribbean accent and ruby-red braids stopped scooping the blackened nuts into a paper cone and smiled when Bianca asked her was south this way or that, and the woman pointed her arms perpendicular to Bianca’s to show she’d been pointing east and west. The woman’s warm smile widening at Bianca’s confusion, she handed her a crackling bag as she explained how to get to Greenwich Village. Her mixture of patois and standard English reminded Bianca of the Spanglish that Esme used, and she listened more to the lull of her voice than her actual words. As she thanked her and made her way down the street with her paper cone, all she could remember of the instructions were which direction to start and the taste of chestnut on her tongue.

  The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House stood three stories; leafless and flowerless branches of plants, no doubt green and lush in the spring, vined the bricks and porch rails, now covered in thin trails of ice. Bianca’s nose pinkened in the cold.

  At the buzzer, she introduced herself to the voice in the box, resisting the urge to tell the gatekeeper inside that she was Coatlicue, goddess who bore destruction, who bore death, that she was undone, she was girl-becoming-something-other.

  Instead she said, “I’m Bianca Vogelsang, here for the writers’ workshop.” And just like that, they let her in.

  Lining the brownstone’s walls were pictures of famous writers; some she recognized, like Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black woman poet to win a Pulitzer. (Bianca had looked up whether any Latinas ever won in poetry, but none had.)

  A youngish man in khakis and a billowy pastel scarf knotted around his neck and shoulders descended the narrow staircase and welcomed Bianca as she was leafing through a volume of thesis work from the previous year’s MFA graduates, struck by one poem about a homeless transgender poet on the street turning tricks for food money before being accepted into NYU’s writing program. A line described a teacher who’d given them (the transgender poet preferred this pronoun, a footnote said) money for groceries, but they went out and bought poetry books instead. She could relate and was grateful again for the public library that had kept her fed.

  The youngish man introduced himself as Chad, a recent graduate of the MFA program, in charge of the undergrad residency. He handed Bianca a canvas book bag emblemed NYU Creative Writing; nestled inside was a glossy pocket folder with the two-week workshop and lecture schedule, along with her room assignment and a brass key. She felt professional and empowered. She held the key in her palm as she made her way to her room, lugging her pink roller suitcase each step up.

  While Bee was away, Joshua did some detective work. He’d sat in the car, Jayden and Jubilee each in a car seat, while Bee dragged her suitcase into the airport terminal. Then he’d parked at the observation deck so Jayden could watch the planes take off. And for all the times it should have hit him before, it finally sank in. Without Bee in the car, all that was left was him and his boy watching her fly away. And a doll, buckled like an infant in the back seat. He had to know what was going on.

  He drove to Matty’s house, where Jayden pointed out the guys’ cat curled in the windowsill and once inside, he followed the cat toward a back room. Joshua tossed Jubilee onto the sofa like any regular doll and watched for how Matty would react.

  Matty saw but only said, “What’s up, Josh? Is Bee okay?”

  The back door opened, and Handro’s voice came through the kitchen, “We have company?” He appeared in the dining room doorway, holding a bottle of wine, a grocery bag, and a bouquet of flowers. “Oh, hey, Josh.” He kissed Matty on the lips. Joshua noticed Matty didn’t exactly kiss his partner back. “Look what I found at the farmer’s market on the way home.” Handro held the flowers up to Matty’s nose. “Delicious?”

  “They’re beautiful. I’ll get a vase.”

  While Matty was in the kitchen, Handro whispered, “You think our little bumblebee will be safe in New York?”

  Joshua began to ask what he meant, but Matty returned with the flowers in a vase.

  “Did something happen at the airport?” Matty asked.

  Joshua shook his head.

  “Come sit down.” Matty and Handro exchanged a glance. Matty said, “I’ve been worried about her all year, Josh. I’ve gotta tell you, I don’t know how good any of this is for her. Staying with you most nights, going so far away . . .” His tone blamed Joshua for his sister’s newfound independence.

  “She seems happy,” Joshua said, without the conviction he’d felt earlier. But it was true. Bee was happier with him. She was getting better. New York proved that. She’d left Jubilee with him and ventured out on her own.

  “She’s mentally unstable, Josh.”

  Joshua’s gut clenched. Handro cleared his throat and narrowed his eyes, as if he wanted to tell Joshua something but not in front of Matty.

  “Well, you go along with it,” Josh retorted. “We all do.”

  Matty picked at his raw cuticles. “I don’t want to push her away again.”

  Joshua clenched his jaw. “What actually happened to her? I mean, what is Jubilee?” He felt like a jerk asking, like he was betraying Bee. He thought of her on her little island, tending the shrubbery.

  Matty shrugged. “She’s a doll, Josh.” He looked hard at Joshua. “How long before you give up and break her heart, and she’s back here again, in my house?”

  Joshua pulled his inhaler from his pocket, puffed i
t twice. What was Matty’s problem? He wanted to help his sister. He loved her. “I won’t break her heart.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.” He sounded irritated, his cheeks and nose flushed, his forehead creased. “When I found out you had a son, you know what I mean . . .” He nodded toward the bedroom where Jayden had gone to play with the cat. “I couldn’t help worrying about you guys. Bee, yes. But, well . . .” He sighed. “I’ve been worried about you and Jayden.”

  “She’s not crazy.” It had become Joshua’s mantra. “I trust her. Don’t you?”

  “What, with Jayden? Yeah, of course. She wants to be a mom.”

  Handro said, “She is a mom.”

  Matty rolled his eyes. “It’s dangerous, okay? When someone’s been hurt as much as Bee. I don’t want anything bad to happen.”

  “I wouldn’t let anything happen.” He wasn’t getting anywhere with Matty, not when he mistrusted his intentions. What had happened to the guy who liked Joshua for Beast, who said he hadn’t seen his sister this excited in a long time? He thought back to Thanksgiving. He hadn’t seemed so angry then. What had Rosana said? Joshua is changing everything. Did Matty think Joshua was changing things between him and his sister, taking Bee away? This hadn’t gone well. He got up to leave, calling out to Jayden and grabbing Jubilee like a rag doll, tucking her between his arms. “I’ll see you later, guys.”

  Before he stepped out the door, Handro pulled him in for a hug. “My bar. Tonight.”

  Joshua nodded, and Matty closed the front door.

  At the car, Joshua debated strapping Jubilee into the car seat. For the first time he could remember, he felt angry at Jubilee. His hand hovered above the seatbelt as he debated pulling the strap, clicking it. You’re just gonna feel like shit if you don’t do it. He strapped her in.