Jubilee

1. When Dallas got depressed, she did not dwell. She was not the sort. Instead, she stretched herself into the tightest shirt she could find and walked up and down the aisles of the Home Depot. Men in search of power tools were bound to take notice. Men who could hold hammers were inclined to appreciate the pull of certain shirts. She never met their eyes, but could feel their blue, green, brown, and gray irises touching down here and there on her body, like flashes of tiny suns warming her. Dallas was not proud of these trips. She saw them as something of a vice and made small purchases to hide her indiscretion. Simple tools mainly. She had whole drawers full of wrenches, drill bits, and needle nose pliers. A ten minute walk through the home improvement store was usually enough to revive her.

Dallas Devine knew her name was more stripper than bookkeeper. When she was forced to recite it in its entirety, people smiled in ways that said they knew something dirty about her. She could see herself in their minds, rising whole like some white trash Aphrodite, stepping forth from the froth of an Alabama truck stop union. They were wrong. It was not an oily southern truck stop, but a tired northern motel room. Not Alabama, but Albany, from which she'd sprung. Though she may have been bred from a murky stew of frustration and longing, Dallas was nowhere close to being loose or wild herself. Minus the visual caresses gathered in the home improvement store like poppies from a field, she'd had no physical contact with men for thirteen months.

Her mother did not recall much of the man who had made her pregnant. Just the soft brown eyes and a voice that sounded like burning logs in winter. She’d spent only one afternoon with the man, but that didn’t stop her from comparing Dallas to him as she grew.

"Pull in that bottom lip young lady - you look just

like your father when you mess up your mouth that way." Dallas would groan, but was otherwise silent and folded her confusion away into the corners of her small body. She chose not to upset her mother with a reminder that her father’s face was a mystery to them both.

He had been passing through. Her mother was a girl of nineteen, a ticket taker on the New York State Thruway. She had lived in Albany her entire life, and explained to Dallas that, at nineteen, she felt like an orchid whose bloom had begun to fall in the heavy Albany air. Though she considered herself lucky to have the relatively high paying job, Dallas’ mother at nineteen had a longing that stretched far beyond the confines of her toll booth. She also had a bad case of poison ivy. What she remembered about Dallas' father was the way he took hold of her blistered arm as he reached for the pre-punched thruway ticket, how he had kissed her hand and offered to relieve her burning with a slow application of calamine lotion. They met two hours later in a West Coxsackie motel room that smelled of mildew, but was otherwise clean. Dallas imagined her mother lying with the faceless man, her arm covered with the pink powder of dried calamine, his worn levis and the used motel room sheets tangled at their feet. The two strangers had pushed their bodies together and created new life while listening to the Flatlander's 8 track, to Jimmie Dale Gilmore's lonesome voice singing about the steely Texas city as though it were a love. Dallas had been named for the song and listened to it over and over, searching the distant voice for clues.

Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC 9 at night?

2. Dallas turned thirty last Tuesday. Her friends threw a party which amounted to vats of overly sweetened margaritas, forced laughter, and a droopy cake. Something had changed. Dallas told herself this as she pressed chocolate crumbs into the side of her fork. She smiled. She thanked them for the cake, the cards, the hot pink sweatshirt with high-heeled chili peppers and glittered cacti embroidered on its left front pocket. Something inside her had shifted between the second margarita and the heartbroken cake. Things would be different from here on out. Dallas knew this for certain as she let the last of the salted drink coat her throat.

Dallas was divorced. Andrew, she could now see, was a prick. It had taken her two and a half years and forty seven partially reimbursed counseling sessions to come to that conclusion. She wondered now how she had ever believed otherwise. She sometimes saw him at the market with his long haired girlfriend. The girlfriend was kind. And pink. She looked fresher than Dallas had ever felt, and once, when they cornered her in the condiment aisle, Dallas was asked to join them for lunch. The offer seemed sincere. The girl was lonely. Her eyes begged. Andrew too seemed oddly eager. Dallas clutched a jar of Spanish olives and envied the security of the pimentos stuffed into their tight green blankets. She mumbled something about the overuse of preservatives in prepared foods, then pushed away.

At least there were no children. She’d heard this from other women, as though she'd been spared some sort of cancer. Dallas wasn't so sure that Andrew's low sperm count and the infrequency of their sex had spared her anything, but she'd nod in agreement just the same. She distrusted the legions of softly clucking women who crept forth as soon as she and Andrew split. She couldn’t stand the way they offered their shoulders and encouraged her to “let it all out honey.” Their solace was greedy. They elongated words for impact. They wanted her to leak. Her pain was a salve to them, one to rub on the cracks of their own lives. “Men are such asses,” they’d say, then check the clock and hurry home to bake pork and potatoes for their husbands.

The last man Dallas dated was gay. His name was Harry and he was small and thin with cola colored eyes that sat squarely behind fashion lenses. Harry announced his gayness on their fourth date, after an overpriced meal of chicken and greens. There had been no sex, and when she’d let her hand graze his knee, he shuddered, sighed, then spilled his secret. He said he was trying to "change things” and that he wanted her help. Dallas knew that she could not help Harry and that things would not change for him. His declaration did not surprise her though. Any man she had ever been with straddled the fine line between gay and straight and one day, she would not be surprised to find their thin bodies curled together in one giant sized bed. A pile of spectacled worms, they'd be reading the Sunday paper or eating Chinese, staring out at her with big pitying eyes. They’d say things about her, how cold she was, how she didn't try hard enough, never met anyone halfway. Though men disappointed her, the darkness of their differences kept Dallas wanting. Uncharted and beckoning, like the shadowed landing just beyond the ear, the place where whispers fall. This is the space in which Dallas wanted to travel. And the very same space in which she feared her heart would burst.

She'd been pregnant once, with a Noah. She didn't have strong feelings about the baby like her best friend who had miscarried at the same time. Val had somehow known her baby had been a boy. She had also known that he didn't like certain kinds of soft cheeses and wasn't able to tolerate prolonged exposure to country music. Dallas didn't know a thing about the tiny human unfolding inside of her, except that she’d have named the child Noah, no matter its sex.

When she and Val miscarried in the same month, Dallas found her own grief lackluster by comparison. Unlike Val, Dallas did not cry her way through ten boxes of Kleenex and did not schedule a loss ceremony. Nor did she attend a grief group after Noah's small beginnings slid out of her in a warm river of blood. Val said she wasn't dealing properly with her emotions and arranged an intervention with a few well intentioned friends.

They wore purple felt hearts pinned to their sweaters, made a human chain of held hands and moved toward her in a frightening circle of concern. Purple was the color of feminine pain, they said. They smiled earnest smiles and smelled far too sweet. To Dallas, the women were birds, their beaks sharp with pity - they’d have pecked her to death if she had not been so careful. In the end, she managed to distract them with leftover lemon cake and a box of almond paste cookies. Though it had been years, the fear of their return never left her.

3. Dallas did not call the office to say she wouldn’t be in, did not arrange for someone else to care for the columns of numbers awaiting calculation on her desk, did not contact her property manager about settling the terms of her lease. She did not stop the mail. She simply fell into the wide leather seat of a southbound truck at the gas station early yesterday morning. She'd been on her way to work when she noticed she was on empty. The man with hair so black it reminded her of baby seals stood at the inside door of the mobil mart. He stared. Hard. Dallas kept her eyes on the commercially-tiled floor and turned red as she passed. This was not the Home Depot, her shirt did not cling, she had not agreed to this. At first, his stare annoyed her. Thirty seconds later, she hated him. After one full minute of him eating her up with his eyes, she considered screaming. But Dallas was too nice or too tired and remained in line, face forward, waiting to pay for her gas.

The man fingered a bag of mixed nuts and kept an eye on her. She shifted her weight, looked out the window, tried to make out the faces behind the smoked glass of a large tour bus that had just pulled in. She considered buying a pine tree air freshener hanging from the counter for $.79. And when she could take it no longer, she looked over and into the eyes that pressed into her. They were neither cold nor warm, but ran deep.

Dallas paid and walked out the door. He followed. She knew without knowing which truck was his and lifted herself into the gleaming white pickup without a word. He had Alabama on his plates. He had the smear of desert longing in the lines of his face. That was enough for her. She removed the dove-gray scarf from her neck and slipped out of her shoes. He stretched into his seat, and turned the key. Country music seeped into her ears. She thought of Val, of her baby, and of soft cheeses. These thoughts, combined with the smug scent of the leather interior, made Dallas sleepy.

Miles later, he spoke. Miles later, she found out where they were headed. He was from Baldwin County   Daphne, specifically   just outside of Mobile. He said his people had been in that part of Alabama for generations. He was part Choctaw, part Italian. He said it wrong, she noticed, the way certain non-Italians do. “Lots of people in Daphne are Eye-Tail-Yawn,” he said. “And there are sugar sand beaches, and seafood restaurants outnumber churches.”

Then he told her about the Jubilee.

During a Jubilee, fish swim right into the lines of awaiting nets. Jubilees happen in summer, just before sunrise. The tone of his voice became reverent and Dallas strained to hear him over the twang of music. She slowed her breathing as the man spoke of water coming to life with blue crabs, catfish, and stingrays. He explained about the miracle of such deep-dwelling fish arriving at the shoreline in droves. He talked about scientists and university-types who try to explain away the phenomenon with their clean fingernails and sterile words. The people of Daphne pay no mind to scientists, he said, to them a Jubilee is a mystery of the best sort. They take their cues from the overcast sky, the glassy surface of the water. They wait on the beach with their lanterns and nets, shouting “Jubilee!" as fish fly from the water and offer themselves up for the taking. “Then,” he said - with eyes on her - “then, the fine people of Daphne catch themselves enough fish to last the year.”

Dallas listened to his talk. She thought of the warm salt water and of the sun and knew both would do her good. She felt free with the stranger who had allowed her to abandon her silver Honda to the gas station parking lot without the nonsense of questions. She looked at her hands, flipped down the visor, and checked her image in the passenger side mirror. She was bloated. And gray. A bottom dweller. She fell asleep with such thoughts playing upon her and dreamt of floating face up in water, making her way closer and closer to the shore, lights coming into her eyes, brilliant arms reaching out for her.

4. Dallas slept long and hard. When she woke, her mouth was dry but she was glad to feel the sun heating her skin. She pushed fingers through her hair, thought of babies and lemon cake and Home Depot trips - all miles away. The man was good. He allowed her the privacy of her thoughts. She felt him paying attention to her every move, knew he had noticed her waking   but to his credit, he tried not to show it. He kept his eyes on the road and continued driving south, through Virginia, the Carolinas, into Georgia.

Dallas turned onto her side and away from him. She looked out the window and watched trees, power lines, and sky fly by in one inconsequential blur.

"You hungry?" he asked as soon as her cheek settled against the cool glass, as though the change in her position allowed him a much longed for freedom. For her part, Dallas had forgotten he owned a voice and now found herself replaying it as she watched leaves and clouds whip by. It sounded soggy to her   as though its edges had been soaked in rum. She replayed the two words over and over until they loosened and fell apart in her ears:

You hungry?

Youuu huunngrreey?

Y uu u h h uuh h n n gah rrr re eey?

She followed the disintegrated voice to a place far beyond the reach of power-lines and trees, all the way to a tidy motel room that smelled tangy with mildew and sex. The Flatlanders played in the background.

Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC 9 at night?

Well Dallas is a jewel, oh yeah, Dallas is a beautiful sight

And Dallas is a jungle but Dallas gives a beautiful light...

Dallas moved to the bed and curled up beside her mother who lay tangled in a sheet. The sheet was so white it was blue and stung Dallas' eyes. The man had just gone. She could still feel the warmth of the place where he had lain. Her mother's skin glistened with a light spray of perspiration which made her look satin or plastic and laying there so still, she reminded Dallas of a waxed saint. She settled into bed next to her mother and together they listened to the high lonesome singing.

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye

A steel and concrete soul with a warmhearted love disguise

A rich man who tends to believe in his own lies ...

She touched a spot on her mother's hand where some calamine lotion had run and dried into a chalky pink line. She told her mother where she was headed. She described water made gold and blue with fish and told about lines of people on the shore with metal tubs and lanterns shouting praises, their voices clanging, tumbling into each other like cathedral bells, Jubilee on their tongues. She told her mother that she needed to find out what lies south. Then Dallas squeezed her mother's hand and turned back toward the man who seemed not to notice her shifting in the seat less than eighteen inches beside him.

"Yes." She said. "I'm hungry."

Dallas marveled at the clean lines of her own voice and wondered how long had lapsed between question and answer. The man smiled a smile that told her he was happy to have her return. How long had she visited with her mother? It could have been an hour, a minute, even a day. Dallas sat up in her seat. She took a good hard look at the man. She’d come to the shore and there he was with his wide open net, lantern in hand. She decided right then to let herself stay caught for as long as she could. She would come up from the deep, give herself over to the shore. She’d linger in shallow water, let the sun bake salt and sand onto her skin. And when she was ready, she'd shake herself off and find out what shows through when it's all sloughed away.

©Dallas lyrics by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, used with permission.

“Jubilee” first appeared in Whetstone, Fall 2004.