Jubilee

by Jennifer Givhan

  Later that evening, he dropped off Jayden at the Cal State Fullerton daycare and took Jubilee as far as the parking lot of the bar, but he couldn’t bring himself to take her inside. He walked back to the car, cursing himself and imagining her suffocating without the windows rolled down. Snap out of it, Joshy. She’s a doll.

  The bar was Orange County ritzy. He’d never gone to bars, much less gay bars. On the stage, a drag queen sang something he didn’t recognize. Handro stood beside a tall table of young men, slick-haired, thin, with tight-fitting clothes. He looked up from where he was leaning toward one of the men, chatting conspiratorially, and waved Joshua over. Walking toward the group of well-dressed men, Joshua felt clumsy and awkward in his baggy jeans, zipper sweater, and tennis shoes. He hadn’t combed his hair. It’d probably frizzed into an Afro.

  “Hola, Joshy.” Joshua liked Handro, the way he said hola with an affected h, a mixture of the Spanish and slang for holler. Handro kissed his cheek. “Meet my friends.” He pointed each man out. “Ernesto, Brian, Lolly, and Stefan.” Lolly wore makeup. “Well, my lovelies, I have some business to attend to with Joshy here.” He winked at Joshua, and Brian made a catcalling sound. “Not that kind of business, naughty man. You know I’m taken. Joshy’s Matty’s sister’s boyfriend.” The men exchanged a glance. “I’ll check with you all later. Enjoy the show.”

  They sat at a table in the corner, and Joshua asked if Handro would get in trouble for sitting with him while at work. “Hell no! They love me here. M’kay—look, Joshy. Let’s get serious. I know Matty can be hard to read. I’ve lived with him for years and still can’t tell what he’s thinking. But you need to know, he doesn’t hate you.”

  “Then why does he act like he doesn’t want me dating his sister?”

  “Honestly? Feels guilty.”

  “For what?”

  Handro uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “He feels like it’s his fault Bee’s the way she is. When he went to the Valley, he said cruel things about her dad. So insensitive. He thinks he pushed Bee toward Gabe. That she would’ve come home sooner, before she went all . . . well, you know.”

  “But what does that have to do with me?”

  He reached for Joshua’s hand. It was strangely comforting, holding another man’s hand. Joshua had never done that before. “He worries you’ll leave her worse than Gabe did.”

  He filled in the gaps Matty hadn’t told Joshua. Last Easter, when she showed up at their doorstep, Bianca had been bleeding and feverish, at times incoherent, at times nearly catatonic.

  “Bleeding where?”

  “A botched abortion, most likely.”

  Joshua thought back to the first time he’d met Jubilee on the beach. He’d thought she was a joke. With Bee gone, it was like the magic had faded away, and Jubilee returned to the lifeless object he’d first seen. She was a doll he’d left in the car. A doll who never cried, never got hurt.

  Handro squeezed Joshua’s hand. “Just promise us you won’t hurt her, and we’ll believe you.”

  Bianca wrote another poem in New York. It had nothing to do with New York.

  I Believed All Poets Were Dead

  & that I’d be the only poet in the world.

  I had no idea there were others

  besides the Frosts & Dickinsons, never

  heard of coffeehouses or spoken

  word. Where I grew up, we barreled

  bonfires & burst kegs. Ended in ERs

  for drunk-driving quads in the sand or trying

  to keep up with the boys, drink for drink—

  but I loved poetry, even if I didn’t know

  where it lived. Poetry tasted like the chile

  con limón on the rim of the plastic beer cup,

  smelled like alfalfa in the menudo pot.

  I ate it with a knife. Though I met Frida—

  she was a painter & she was dead.

  I want to be the first Latina poet

  to win the Pulitzer. I looked it up online.

  None ever has. Do they dare

  look us in the mouths? At my

  scholarshipped writers’ conference

  the one Latina editor lifts her pointed Jimmy

  Choos from beneath the speakers’ panel

  & says, I’m tired of reading about barefoot Latinas.

  All the Latinas I know wear shoes—

  & they’re fabulous shoes.

  Maybe it had everything to do with New York.

  Another poet at the Lillian Vernon House, Makayla, said she’d planned on attending since she was a sophomore in high school. She asked Bianca how long she’d been a writer, and Bianca said she’d been writing all her life but had taken only the one class with Elena. Makayla said her mother helped plan her future writing education as soon as she saw it was her daughter’s passion. She’d attended a prep school that taught her classical Latin. She’d studied with poets Bianca had to look up, though she nodded along while Makayla talked, faking the funk.

  Makayla had long hair the color of oatmeal and angular features. Her mother was Catholic and her father was Jewish, and they’d both strayed from their religions and married each other to stick it to their parents. She had athletic legs and a flat stomach she showed off in the bathroom by walking around in bikini underwear and bra. She said the heater made the house stuffy. Her mom had gone to Princeton; her mom’s parents had wanted her to go to the Catholic college that her sister went to, but she secretly applied to Princeton since it was 1969, the year the university first started allowing women to enroll. When accepted, she took the letter to her parents and told them, “Look, I got in. I have to go.” What a badass, her mom. How different Bianca’s life might have been if Mama had ever tried sticking it to her parents, applying to college when they’d told her she couldn’t go. Instead she’d married Matty’s dad. Then married Bianca’s dad.

  Over breakfast at a bagel shop the second morning, Makayla told Bianca that she attended Stanford, earning a degree in comparative literature. She was studying Spanish for Yaul (pronounced Shaw-ool like Saul in the bible), her Argentinean boyfriend. Makayla said she wanted to understand what his mother muttered under her breath. Bianca wanted to tell her about Esme but didn’t. Makayla’s experiences all seemed so sophisticated compared to Bianca’s.

  Makayla’s friends at school wanted her to go out for girls’ nights but she preferred staying home with Yaul. He was her first boyfriend. She told Bianca all the “gritty details” about their sexual escapades. It all sounded so carefree, so fun. Not gritty at all. Bianca said nothing.

  “What about you?” Makayla took a bite of her bagel and strawberry schmear. “Do you have a boyfriend or do you go out for girls’ nights?”

  It was such a strange question, posed like that, in its rigid binary.

  “I have a daughter.” The words stuck on Bianca’s tongue, like she’d been eating raspberries and the prickles had implanted themselves in her mouth.

  “Oh,” she said, her bagel hanging limply beside her. “Did you, like, want her?”

  Bianca nodded, tears stinging her eyes. She didn’t tell Makayla she’d wanted babies since she was a teenager, how when Makayla was in prep school, Bianca was planning life as a mother . . . because that’s what women in the Valley did, the brown women like her.

  She excused herself and beelined toward the restroom. Those goddamn brain shivers and nausea. She splashed water on her face and looked into the mirror, seeing Jubilee in the reflection. She tried calling Joshua to check on her, but he didn’t answer. She breathed in deeply for five, out for five, like Dr. Norris had coached her, and recited Emily: “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.” After she’d repeated the first stanza five times, she looked in the mirror. Bi
anca in the flesh. No ghost.

  At the table, Makayla apologized. “It’s just that you’re young,” she said. “I couldn’t freaking imagine having a kid right now. It’s hard enough with only myself to take care of.” Bianca sipped her tea. Makayla dropped the conversation and talked instead about how last year she’d met the US poet laureate, who’d complimented her poem.

  A few days later, before New Year’s Eve, she and Makayla took a cab to Times Square, which was chaotic and claustrophobic, then to Central Park, which was lovely—dusk, full moon over the trees. It reminded Bianca of girlhood, but with skyscrapers in the distance instead of bales of yellow hay. They went to the Met, open until nine p.m., later than any museum Bianca had ever been to. She paid the student price for admission (not just “any amount over a dollar,” though Makayla only gave a five) because Bianca believed in the arts, in their power to save people like her. Twelve dollars well spent, even if she couldn’t get a bag of chestnuts on the way home. She’d grown a taste for them, yellow-soft and meaty inside.

  Her favorite painting in the gallery was by a French artist Bianca had never heard of, Marie Denise Villers, called Young Woman Dreaming, the plaque claimed had mistakenly been attributed to a man named Jacques-Louis David. Bianca was grateful the art historians had gotten it right. The work might have been a self-portrait—the way the woman leaned protectively over her canvas as she sketched, the way the light emanated from the canvas itself, first illuminating the artist’s belly and chest, working toward her pale face and daffodil-colored hair. How could historians ever have believed it was painted by a man? All the companion paintings by men, of women drawing or sewing or playing the piano as high-society women did in the nineteenth century, the activities came across as hobbies, duties, ways to pass time. But in Villers’s work, Bianca sensed urgency and secrecy. She leaned in closer to listen.

  The young poets ran into a concert off Fifth Avenue as they left the Met. Bianca felt dizzy at the loud classic rock that reminded her of Dad and she searched for his reddish beard in the crowd, for his sparkling blue eyes and Grateful Dead T-shirt, with a bottle of beer in each hand: one for himself and one for her. Dad, come back. I need you.

  She couldn’t make out any faces except Makayla’s, pink from cold and laughing while pulling her hand and tugging her through the crowd yelling, We’re having an adventure, as they were corralled in tight lines down the sidewalk until they broke free. Bianca’s feet cramped from all the walking, and her skin was clammy, but they kept walking toward Times Square through the noise and ghosts. She had to cover her ears. Finally Makayla steered them into a corner café. Bianca’s face was numb; her stomach ached with hunger.

  She’d spent all her cash on the museum ticket, but Makayla offered to buy her a sandwich. They sat at a window bench, watching people hurry past, Makayla chatting about her boyfriend not knowing what he wanted to do when he graduated; they were all still kids figuring out their lives, Makayla said. Though it was freezing, a naked woman sauntered through Times Square with her body painted like an American flag, advertising God knows what. Bianca’s stomach turned. Inexplicably, the smell of citrus mixed with paint.

  When she came back from the restroom, Makayla said, “God, Bee, you keep going to the bathroom. Are you, like, pregnant or something?”

  Dad’s many-worlds hypothesis came to her again. In every moment, every decision we make, every possible outcome is happening somewhere—in dimensions we can’t reach with our limited senses but that must exist according to quantum data. How a particle can’t possibly be a wave and a particle at once, how it can’t be blurry and shapeless because we are clear, our world, it has a shape. Yet they are both at once. They are both fuzzy and concrete. They are both waves and particles.

  Bianca was pregnant.

  She hadn’t wanted to see it, so it hadn’t existed.

  Makayla spoke it into existence. Bianca could no longer ignore the proof of her body. Sore, sticky nipples, swollen all over, bloated, foggy brain, overwhelming smells everywhere.

  The next day was New Year’s Eve, which meant it had been over a month since Thanksgiving, since she and Joshua had first slept together. And her period had gone missing over Christmas. She hadn’t seen it because she’d been so focused on Jubilee.

  The next day in workshop, poet Rigoberto González read from his poems about Latina women in Black Blossoms, dangerous and fierce women, his mother, murderesses and the murdered, Frida and Lizzie Borden, the unsung invisible women.

  When he read “when the sun sets next it will // blossom with the blackest mushrooms and the moths / will lay their eggs on your leathery smiles,” Bianca thought of what blackness or beauty could be blossoming inside of her. When he read her poetry and told her it was a beautiful, aching work with a strong voice of authority, when he gave her recommendations of awards she should submit to along with his business card so she could email him revisions because he was eager to nurture a new Latina poet . . . she was still seeing the pink cross that bloomed so bright on the test in the writers’ house bathroom.

  In this world, in this hypothesis, Bianca was pregnant again.

  Sixteen

  Letter to Jubilee

  I’m another riddle, my daughter. I’ve done it again. Three times in six years. I’m an even equation; two by two we’re blue, two by two I lose you, only I refuse another bitter transformation. Tell Sylvia Plath the first time it happened it was an accident. I’d thought I could become Coatlicue, my daughter. What does that make you? I thought I was so tough. But for what?

  I was wrong.

  I was wrong to hold on.

  But I can’t let go.

  When the boys take you out to the country, though the moon may be full and the hay may smell sweet as painted earth and sweetened sky silhouette back seats . . . and the boys tell you that you don’t have a choice, and you think you don’t because all you want is respect, all you want is love, but not the kind that ends in a stale truck bed, not the kind that ends with your mouth screwed open in its little o—

  O please know that you don’t have to stay and sacrifice, you don’t have to yellow the mound of hay.

  I wanted to be revered. I wanted to be sacred.

  Cherished.

  A spiderwoman. A fat cow.

  And sometimes a girl shoves her ass onto a boy like a baboon if she thinks it’ll mean recognition, in the end.

  No. I’m hanging on to myself now, baby girl. I’m selfish as gold, and I can’t afford the past.

  Anyone else might see artifice or illness. But I see atonement. I see redemption.

  I need a way to keep on breathing. Tell Sylvia Plath to let me go—

  O let me keep on breathing.

  Seventeen

  The Graveyard

  Before Jubilee

  Not all ditches are deep enough for swimming. Especially in the desert. When the floodwaters come, they make rich, porous homes for the pupfish and minnows, make rapids that’ll carry them safely to more stable bodies. But when the waters recede, that small life must bore into the mudholes to wait, dredging pockets of wetness beneath the hard dirt until the sky opens its mouth again. Unless the ditches are cement and meant for enduring drought, meant for perennial irrigation. Then the fullness of their bellies or emptiness, their rushing into rivers or dribbling to spittle on the chin, belongs to the whims of farmers, of nature, of need. The opening of a gate. The running of the bull-waters.

  No, the ditches are not always full. Sometimes they are barely scum ponds. Foam at the maw of a dog.

  Even so. A body can drown in as shallow as an inch or two. All it takes is the stubborn lungs to keep gathering in what would dam them, ignorant lungs. All that evolution. All that breaking down at the gas-exchange chambers. All that flooding of the blood-gas barriers.

  A body can drown in such a dribble of water. The damage held in those traitor lungs, anxiously try
ing to diffuse all the wrong round molecules, puzzling together all those ill-fitting shapes in a child’s shape-sorter box. H2O in the O2 slot. The way a star will never squeeze through the triangle hole. Though a body may gasp.

  Dad had taught Bianca the periodic table. They’d memorized the elements set to Orpheus in the Underworld (With oxygen so you can breathe / And fluorine for your pretty teeth).

  The H in the topmost left, atomic number 1, the lightest element, most abundant chemical substance in the universe. The O in the top third column from the right, atomic number 8, highly reactive, like Bianca, readily bonds with most compounds.

  Readily bonds in ditches. In children’s wading pools. In bathtubs.

  The saddest part was, Bianca was a strong swimmer. Always had been.

  If only her father had asked for her help.

  “Hair of the dog, loca,” Gabe said, handing her a mug, his voice morning-husky, playful. He’d been too tired and drunk to drive the extra block back to Bee’s empty house after the strip club in Mexicali, so he’d let her crash with him.

  She still wore her party dress, though she’d left her nylons wadded up with her platform wedges on Gabe’s floor, beside the weight bench he still used but never with the same motivation as when she’d first met him in high school, when he still had hopes of a football scholarship. Why they’d convinced Bee to let her cactus flower go . . . Then he’d taken a hit to his back that he never recovered from. Not after surgery, not after physical therapy. He’d thrown away his football gear, and they’d never mentioned it again. Now he only used the bench in fits and starts. Bianca imagined it a saguaro cactus, tall and proud, with its goalpost arms reaching toward the sky. Spindled with long, needled thorns. And along the top, a crown of saguaro flowers, bright white and smelling of overripe melons.

  She reached out from under the bed sheet, took the mug from Gabe. She could smell the pungent tomato juice and spices before she brought the Bloody Mary to her mouth, but when she looked into the mug, a shock of thick red wafted a faint iron smell through her, so she had to close her eyes and chug to keep from gagging.