“Oh, yes,” Lollie said, laughing. Her laugh cracked her face open until she was more like a girl swinging from a tree over a creek than a regal circus star. “Marionetta. Men used to drop wedding rings outside her door. Movie stars sent her garlands of roses, which she’d dump in the trash bins outside. She was never interested in men like that. Mary had only two loves in her life, William and Juan Galindo. That was how she first came to the circus. She followed Juan here. ‘Who is she?’ we asked. ‘She is a like a dog,’ he said.”
“‘Like a dog.’” I laughed.
“That’s what love makes of us,” said José.
“Well, I took her in,” Lollie continued. “I never liked Juan. For ten years straight he was the star of the Flying Ramirez Brothers. Though his family’s name was Galindo, Juan used the name of my grandfathers to spread his own fame until he became the most sought-after, popular star here, even more so than Geraldo is now.”
“And women sell clay sculptures of Geraldo in the villages we pass through,” Carlos added.
I marveled at the idea of Mary going crazy for such a man, then remembered Lollie with Geraldo just that morning. If that was love, then I didn’t want any part of it.
“So I despised Juan, of course, and was ecstatic at the opportunity Mary presented to me. I could see past what Juan saw—and all he could see was the ice that had melted from Mary’s body as soon as he came near it. I saw it all pass before me: Mary, her waist pressed to the bar, her hands gripped around it, whirling and whirling until she was free and flying toward the ground.”
“You wouldn’t have known it to see her,” Carlos interrupted, looking across the table at me. “She seemed too wild, way too wild for the trapeze.”
“Even my own brothers didn’t believe it when I said she would be a great flyer,” Lollie continued, laughing. “But I took her in and tried everything to rid her of the smell of spices. I burned her clothes, and I ruined her hair with combs until it swept down her back like feathers. I scrubbed her face and rubbed it with lemon juice, but even the bathwater she soaked in became infused with the scents of clove and cinnamon, and we’d have to drain the water and spend hours rinsing and scrubbing the wooden tub.”
When I looked up, I saw the memories coloring all of their faces. Ana sat with her head craned toward Lollie, her face so rapt that she did not notice my gaze. Lollie was like Mary, I realized then: a storyteller. I would come to realize that all of them were.
“But the crowds of people who came to the circus did not seem to mind her scent at all. We heard stories of women who’d return home and brew up vats of hot cider steeped in cinnamon sticks, or put out bowls filled with oranges stuck through with cloves. Men stood outside our trailer for whole days, waiting to catch a glimpse of her. I became used to Mary’s scents more quickly than the others, probably because I loved her the most. We were able to laugh with each other and talk late into the night, and we would cook long dinners, wrapping every kind of vegetable in foil and roasting them in a bonfire out back. I listened to her stories on those nights, nights when we sat under the sky watching the moon and counting our wishes on the stars.”
“She told the most wonderful stories,” I said, quietly.
“Yes,” Lollie said, smiling over at me, “she did. Mary and I became as close as sisters during those long talks by the bonfire, until the rest of the circus came to accept her, eventually, the way I had. Her scent came to seem warm and rich, like a jar of honey standing in sunlight, so much so that my trailer became a gathering place where we all met for cups of tea or games of cards spread out over blankets and across mattresses—everyone, that is, except for Juan Galindo, who would call her a devil woman and murderer to his dying day. I never did learn what happened between Juan and Mary in that long walk back to the Velasquez Circus, through the snow and ice, but Juan would have allowed himself to grow old and loveless before he’d take a step in Mary’s direction of his own free will, and that was what he did. He faded so quickly that within five years of Mary coming he had left both the Flying Ramirez Brothers and the center ring, and he took to wandering the towns we passed through, staring into shop windows at young girls with yellow hair.”
Mauro laughed. “Sometimes a local would lead him back to us,” he interrupted, “dropping him off in their cars or trucks or leading him by the hand. Sometimes one of the yellow-haired girls would pull up near the tent, and we’d learn that Juan had been following her through town all afternoon, or that he’d been singing outside her window until she could no longer bear the sound of it.”
“It was pathetic,” José said to me over the table, in low tones, “for a man who had once been great.”
“He was always pathetic,” Carlos added. “Then he just shriveled up and went away. It was like all the life had gone straight out of him.”
“Oh, but in his day, Tessa,” Lollie said, smiling at me, “just watching Juan for a moment was enough to break the world apart. When he burst upon that haystack Mary was sleeping in, Juan Galindo must have seemed like a flame.”
Lollie stopped then, her eyes glowing and wet.
“It is strange how one moment can change a life,” she said softly, after a long pause, “one moment that rears up on its hind legs to knock you to your feet.”
Mauro reached over and clasped her hand. “We never understood when she left,” he whispered to me. “She just seemed to fall apart, and then she was gone.”
He looked up at me through his curving eyelashes, and I realized he was waiting for me to speak.
Her words echoed in my mind: I had visions of people following me, hunting me down. But I could not speak of her.
“We are sorry, Tessa,” he said, finally.
“Yes,” I said, and wondered if I had ever really known Mary at all.
Soon we could hear the talkers calling out that night’s ballies over the din of the clanging pots and pans, using every trick of voice and turn of phrase to lure the townies into the tents where the moss-haired girl flipped her head back for the thousandth time, the fat lady tilted back and forth, letting the ripples of her body spill out behind her, and the reptile boy removed his shirt and let the people sigh or swoon or spit in disgust. You could feel the difference in the air, the way the excitement rode through it like a giant wave, and soon everyone began scattering to prepare for that night’s show.
The same electricity crackled through the air as the night before: the groan of the Ferris wheel gearing up, townspeople meeting up with their friends and heading toward the field in groups, coins jangling in their pockets. But I was not part of it that night. I was silent as Lollie and I walked back to the train, and I do not think she minded, herself lost in memory and regret.
“I’m going to lie down and rest,” I said, when we reached the car.
“Yes,” she said. Then, after a pause, “I know you miss her, Tessa,” she said. “I can see her in you.”
“Thank you,” I said, feeling the tears beating against my heart.
Inside, I spread myself over the mattress. I tried to focus on Lollie’s creams and perfumes that lined the little dresser, but her voice curled around me, filling my vision with images of Mary roasting vegetables with Lollie or following Juan Galindo in the snow. She too must have felt comforted once, a long time before, knowing Lollie was close by. I shook the image off me. I saw the opal ring shimmering against Mary’s breast, with its thousands of colors. No! I thought quickly of Mauro’s curving eyelashes, his black eyes looking out at me through them, but then blinked the image away, furious.
It had been one year since I’d found Mary in the river, I realized then, and I had never, in all the time I’d been away, shared her with anyone else, never heard anyone else even speak her name.
Now stories of her colored the air, drifted across the camps that spread over the field, behind the midway and big top. She was part of the air we breathed. They had all held her name on their lips, had all whispered it in their sleep, just as I had.
Tea
rs slipped over my face. I gulped for air.
I had not spoken of Mary either, not to anyone. I had not spoken of her in the factory, or as I’d passed through the city streets, clamping my hands over my ears to muffle the clanging of the trucks and streetcars, or as I’d waited by the train tracks, dreaming of a new life. The times I’d tried with Geraldine had been miserable failures. To speak of her now, with people who had known her and people she herself had described for me, was too confusing, too strange, and I did not think I could do it, though I knew that the Ramirezes longed to hear of her, what her life had been like. They all did, all the people in the circus, and for the ones who hadn’t known her, like Ana, Mary was a legend that swirled through their lives and made them yearn for spice scents and coils of black hair and rivers filled with pink fish.
Even Lollie longed to hear about Mary, though she herself had felt Mary’s life throughout the years. I came to understand that Lollie had felt Mary’s life in bits, in slivers of images or scents or dreams, not in whole slices as if she’d been there. For Lollie, the world was not open and transparent, like a sheet of glass. Every seer has lapses and gaps, I would learn, moments when the world does not offer itself but lies as flat as a sketch before her. Lollie could feel Mary’s heart in moments, feel her leafing through books and shuffling through documents that she would drop into thick files, feel her staring out the library windows during all those long hours she was alone, remembering the feel of rain streaming down her skin, the tang of the river, the mud that sucked at her feet, the pattering and plinking that never stopped. Lollie had felt the pain that had pulsed through Mary’s veins, but I, who had been right there with her, hadn’t understood or seen it at all.
How could I put her into words? How could I describe the way she walked into a room, the way she boiled cabbage and ham for our lunches, the way she picked me out in front of the courthouse and told me about the star particles in my fingernails? Or the way the stale smell of books and papers and ink was part of what she had been for me, along with the thousands of words and phrases and stories we had shared, the spooky old ballads, the stories of unhappy peasant girls and of boys coming into the world for the first time, the long, meandering scenes set in meadows spotted with wildflowers. She had given me language that could describe feeling and beauty and love, but I could not use it to bring her back to me. And it would not make up for the fact that she was, like everything else, fading away—and no huddle of words could take her place.
When I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her, I saw a woman with ice-ravaged skin, soaking in a bath of cinnamon-scented water.
I could not remember her as I’d known her.
I stayed in bed as Lollie spread glitter through her hair and across her skin, and during her performance that night. I watched the lights bobbing up and down through my window.
Later, Lollie brought sandwiches to me that I let dry up on their plates. When she came in and out of my compartment, she did not make a sound.
“I think I am dying,” I whispered to Lollie as she moved through the room.
“Yes, I know,” she said. “But you aren’t. You are a strong girl, Tessa. You are stronger than she was, even.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The circus played in Kansas City for only three nights before moving on. On the third night, after the last show, the roustabouts swarmed around the tent and tore it down. From the train car, I watched the big top fall like a cake just out of the oven. I had my small sack of things with me in Lollie’s compartment, but everyone else seemed to become part of a military operation—tearing apart makeshift camps, pulling in lines of laundry stretching from the train windows to the trees outside, dismantling the tents and booths in the midway, compressing everything into the trucks the sideshow traveled in or onto the circus wagons that would be hoisted from the ground to the flatcars using ramps and rigging. They had it down to a science: when those trucks and wagons were packed tight, I’m not sure a penny could have traveled from one end of the car to another without getting stuck somewhere.
It would be the last time I would sit around on a night like that, not knowing what to do with myself. Everyone pitched in, even Lollie and her brothers and Flying Geraldo. I heard voices everywhere and watched, fascinated, as the whole miniature city outside my window folded itself up under the moonlight and disappeared. The Ferris wheel collapsed and the lights popped off and the train shifted and expanded like a living thing.
Less elaborate, the midway took half the time to tear down, and, one by one, the sideshow trucks—some of them plain, others draped in banners and painted with lurid advertisements for the performers inside—roared off into the darkness.
I was lured out of the train car into the night, despite myself, just as they were loading the menagerie back onto the flatbeds. The whole night was filled with voices and the scratching and squealing of wagons being pulled across metal planks. By then most of the cars had been loaded back onto the train—filled with the equipment, the tents and big top, the cookhouse, the seat wagons and stock cars, all stacked before the performers’ cars, which varied wildly in size and quality—and the only thing left was to drop the menagerie tent and roll the animal’s cages back onto the flatbeds, too. No one even seemed to see me as I slipped from the steps to the ground.
The roustabouts shouted and pulled while others scoured the lot for anything left behind or started piling into the cars. The menagerie was the most difficult part to load, out of everything, and other men stepped forward to help push and pull up the wagons with the big cats and then lead in the two elephants, who strained the ropes so badly I thought the cords would break. It was spooky, looking out over the empty, dark field, the autumn leaves scattered in patches over the grass. It gave me the feeling I was completely alone in the world. The roars and bellows of the animals seemed surreal, like something out of a dream.
“Tessa!” a voice called, and I looked over to see Lollie approaching the car. I was suddenly terrified: She’s going to ask me to leave now, I thought. I remembered what she’d said to Geraldo, and my heart stopped. Just for a day or two.
She wore working clothes that were smeared with dirt. “You’re up! We were loading the rigging; you can never trust these guys to do it right. Are you feeling better?”
I nodded and stared at her, afraid to speak.
“Well, we can settle in, then. You’re coming with us to the next place, no?”
“Yes,” I said, relieved. Yes.
I went back into the little room. Soon I could feel the train wheeze to a start, then lurch into a steady, chugging rhythm. I sat on my little bed and stared out the window at the fading lot and the branches that seemed to reach out toward the train and try to grab us. It was mesmerizing: the forests and fields, the little towns and cities, all of them blurring past on the outside, lit by the moon or streetlamps, while I sat snug on the bed, alone in the dark.
I heard a tapping on the door, and Lollie walked in. “Why don’t you turn a light on in here?” She laughed.
“I like it this way,” I said. “Looking out the window. It feels safe.”
She smiled, then came over and sat on the bed next to me. For a few minutes we sat in silence, staring out the window at the rushing branches, the looming trees. The train chugged and rumbled under us.
I knew I had to say something, stake my claim. “Lollie,” I said finally, “how can I be part of the circus? I want to stay here, to perform.”
“Perform?”
“Mary taught me a lot. I can do the trapeze and some rope stuff. I can twirl and do tricks, hang from my knees and ankles.”
She didn’t seem convinced. “Well, you know,” she said, after a long pause, “that may take time. Normally people don’t just start performing unless they were born to it. But there are plenty of ways to join the circus: cleaning the horses, selling candy, helping the roustabouts . . . though you might be a bit young for that, a bit small.”
The town outside seemed to whoosh by. T
he streetlamps blurred together and made me blink.
“But Mary did,” I said. “She joined the circus. From outside.”
“That’s true,” she said. “But not at first. She had to practice and learn, and she did menial work before she got up there in the ring.” She paused and pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “So you learned the trapeze, did you? From her?”
I nodded. I was dying to tell her about the space we’d made between the shelves, the magic of that trapeze gliding back and forth under the wooden ceiling beams, but I kept silent.
“Well, why don’t you show us what you can do, then? After we set up tomorrow, before the show? In the meantime, we can maybe talk to Mr. Velasquez about keeping you on for a bit, helping out. It’s a lot of hard work, though, Tessa, and we’re constantly moving.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind at all. I have nowhere else to go.”
She laughed and leaned into me. “Maybe you’re more of a circus girl than I thought.”
That night I barely slept, between the clanging and bumping and the nervousness that took hold in my gut. I knew that Lollie was humoring me, but I was determined to show her that I was good enough to perform—and determined to make myself as indispensable as possible. I stared out the window at the fleeting towns and countryside. As soon as the train screeched to a halt early the next morning, somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, I leapt out of bed, ready to work.
Oklahoma seemed like another world. Oakley and Kansas City were the only places I knew, and on the new lot the landscape seemed scrubbed dry, reddish in spots. The world seemed wider, sadder, but within minutes we put our stamp upon it, and then it was transformed.
We worked all morning. The wagons were rolled off the flatcars and the menagerie was reassembled outside the tent for townfolk to exclaim over for the price of a quarter. I heard the lions and elephants and shivered with excitement—nothing could make me feel farther away from Oakley than that sound.
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