Orphans of the Carnival

by Carol Birch

  “But I want all my things.”

  “Don’t raise your voice.”

  “I will if I want to.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s just old crap off the streets. Where does it end? You’ll be bringing home snotty hankies next. Used condoms.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “It’s no different! You bring home bits of paper and empty lighters, it’s just a matter of degree. Haven’t you ever thought there might be something just a tad unhealthy about all this?”

  He checked his pockets. When he looked ’round, he saw that she was crying.

  “What’s the matter?” She cried too easily and it got on his nerves. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m only saying what any normal person would say.”

  But she stopped as quickly as she’d started, got up and went to the window. “You get it or you don’t get it,” she said, looking out into the back garden. “And you don’t.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t.”

  She rubbed absently at a mark on the glass. “Some people just know what I mean,” she said. “Some people think I’m mad. What? You know, just total misunderstanding? The other day I put on an old jacket and I put my hand in the pocket and there was this old earring I hadn’t seen for years. I don’t even know where the other one is. It’s like—like their little family was scattered far and wide, like it says in that old Irish song, you wouldn’t know it. I just feel for it.”

  “An old earring in your pocket,” he said.

  She turned and looked at him. “It’s not even a particularly nice one,” she said.

  “Poor Rose.” He smiled. “It must be awful to be you.”

  She laughed and walked toward him, fluffing out her hair with her hands. “You haven’t got the faintest idea what I’m going on about, have you?” she said.

  “None whatsoever.”

  She came close and looked unblinking into his eyes. “Really?” she said regretfully. “Really? You have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about?”

  “None at all.”

  Her kind of eyes gave away nothing at all. “Does that mean I’m mad?” she said.

  “Of course, Rose.”

  “Oh, well!” She laughed and moved away. “Off you go,” she said imperiously.

  “You know,” he said, “it would do you a massive amount of good if you could just let all this go.”

  “At least it’s all clean,” she said.

  She made a cup of tea when he’d gone. One of her eyes kept watering and she gave it a rub. She liked her place. Who cares, she thought, stirring the pot with one hand and rubbing and rubbing at one eye with the other. Something had got in it, probably an eyelash. So what? Everything belonged. Above the fireplace, the wall was covered with pictures of the dolls of Dolls’ Island. She heard Adam clomping up the stairs and stuck her head out. “I’ve just made tea,” she called.

  He looked up. His face was thin-nostriled and birdlike. “Hang on,” he said.

  “I put a shelf up.”

  “Another?” He went into his flat and came up a few minutes later. She was looking in the mirror, holding her bloodshot eye open with two fingers. The thin black crescent of an eyelash was stuck tight in one corner, and tears ran down her cheek. “I’ve poured you one,” she said. “It’s on the table.”

  “What’s up with your eye?” he asked.

  “I’ve got an eyelash in it,” she said, poking about in the inflamed corner.

  Adam, sitting down and picking up his mug of tea, snickered down his nose.

  “Brief Encounter,” he said.

  “Ah, I’ve got it. Did I ever show you my eyelash collection?” She turned from the mirror, wiping her face and holding one hand poised as if a butterfly had landed on it.

  “Your what?”

  “My eyelash collection. I’ll show you.” The black eyelash was balanced on the tip of her finger. Holding it up carefully in front of her, she went into the other room and returned with a small silver pillbox in the other hand. “There,” she said, flipping up the lid. An angel was engraved on the inside of it.

  “What the hell,” he said.

  It was a bed of eyelashes.

  “What the hell,” he said again, putting the tip of his finger in. A smile came onto his face.

  “These,” she said, “are all the eyelashes I’ve ever got out of my eyes or that have fallen out ever in all my whole life.”

  He sifted. “That’s impressive.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “How come your eyelashes fall out?” he said. “Mine don’t.”

  “They don’t?”

  “No.”

  “I thought everyone’s did.”

  “Well, I suppose I get the odd eyelash in my eye like everybody else,” he said. “But I wouldn’t say they were falling like leaves.”

  “I started collecting them when I was ten,” she said. “I remember the moment. I was in a math class and it was really boring and I looked down and saw an eyelash on my hand.”

  “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “I used to keep them in a matchbox,” she said, “but now I’ve got them in this nice little pillbox.”

  “I wonder how many there are.”

  “Hundreds.”

  He laughed. “You could get into the Guinness Book of Records with these,” he said. “Hundreds of eyelashes. A great pile of—of—eyelashes! Crazy!”

  Eyelashes from when she was ten, when she was thirteen, fifteen, nineteen, twenty-two, thirty-six.

  “In a way,” she said, “this is me.”

  She flicked the newest lash into the box with the rest.

  “You get it, don’t you?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I get it.”

  Life ran along to the various rhythms of trains and wagons and carriages. She traveled with a sad contortionist and a fat lady, and the world became a series of windows, with dark streets below where people walked, dime museums, sideshows, the sound of a barker’s spiel descending into nonsense, and sheds thrown up fast, with pockmarked mirrors and jugs of cold water and the lingering smell of pomade. She was getting better, playing all the time, practicing in rooms and halls, in warehouses, in backstage lots.

  In Cleveland she saw another doctor, who asked about her monthlies. Since she’d been on the road she’d met three very distinguished men, who were all very, very clever, much cleverer than anyone else she’d ever met, but they’d all said different things. One said she was ourang-outang, one that she was neither Negro nor human, another that she was her own species, a species of one. She was HYBRID, SEMI-HUMAN, MUJER OSA, TROGLODYTE OF ANCIENT DAYS, UGLIEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. The news ran before, everywhere they went, the papers carried it, the newsboys cried it on the corners. Canada sold out before they reached Cincinnati.

  She was good with the audiences by now, knew which eyes to meet and which to let go. She didn’t blame them for looking. How could they not? Might as well ask the moon not to rise. Occasionally, to one particular pair of eyes in a sea of them, her returning stare had said, think about it, just consider, and they had blushed like maidens. When she came down and walked among them, the bold ones stepped forward to shake her hand and stroke her wonderingly, as if she were an exotic animal. The questions were always the same. Are you happy? Have you ever had a beau? Would you like to get married? Sometimes a young buck flirted with her. On their part, it felt like a perversion, she saw that well enough. No one ever made a real pass but there was intimacy in all that staring, and when Beach put out the news that desperate suitors, all refused, vied for her hand, she smiled and went along with it. She was saving. When I’m rich, she thought, I’ll go back home and show them my new clothes. I’ll arrive in a carriage. Walk in, equal, independent. How could it be? What was there in that house but the scrubbing of steps and the hauling of water? Where would she be, where would she live, when she was rich and independent? Surely it would be revealed to her. A house where she was not a serva
nt. Something, someone, a friend. Fresh flowers.

  They played Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Montreal. In some small town in Quebec, she met a bearded lady traveling with her husband, a lean frog-mouthed man who hovered watchfully and silently about her at all times. She’s got a husband. The great Clofullia has a husband. Dr. John Montanee’s love potion was in her pocket. Every now and then she took it out, pulled out the cork and sniffed it. It smelled of cinnamon and lemon. Now and again she rubbed a little on her arms, saying: oh St. Jude, I’m still waiting.

  On the way down to Boston they played sideshows. After a show in Burlington one night, the contortionist, a worried girl called Zelda, started crying and wouldn’t stop. They were in a field outside town, sitting in the fat lady’s wagon. Maud Sparrow was like seven or eight people rolled into one. No one chair could accommodate her, so she always sat on a large and splendidly bedecked sofa, a kind of throne. “What’s the matter, noodle?” she asked brightly. She was working her way through a dish of marshmallows. Eating was part of the job.

  “Just feeling sick for my home,” said Zelda.

  “Have a good cry,” said Maud. “Best thing. Get it out of you, then it’s done.” Her face was supported by an overlapping progression of four or five rolls of chin. Her features in the middle were pretty, but diminished by the sheer quantity of surrounding flesh.

  “I want to eat my aunt’s soup,” said Zelda. Her eyes were huge, blue and bulgy.

  “I know what you mean!” Julia said. “I really miss the food at home.”

  Zelda glanced at her and looked quickly away, smiling faintly. She didn’t know how to act with Julia. She was trying, you could see, but her eyes couldn’t get a hold and slid off whenever she tried to look her in the eye. “She put everything in,” Zelda said, “beans and peas. Bread.”

  “It tastes of nothing, the food here,” said Julia.

  “Too hot for me,” said Maud. “Your kinda food.”

  Zelda blew her nose. “I don’t really want to go home, I suppose,” she said, sighing. She had a face that neither knew nor cared what it looked like, though it was beautiful. Her eyes were soulful and her dark hair, prematurely graying, curled in tendrils on her wide white forehead. “It’s not very nice there. I just miss my aunt’s soup.”

  “It’ll still be there when you get back,” said Maud, tearing a lump of marshmallow in two with smooth pink fingers.

  “I know.” But tears kept on leaking out of Zelda’s eyes.

  Maud sighed, looked at Julia and made a face as if to say, well, we all have our troubles. Nowhere near as much fun as Myrtle and Delia, these two. “You’re so clever,” Julia told Zelda. “I wish I could do what you do.”

  “Thanks.” Zelda smiled sadly, not meeting her eyes.

  “Cheer up, noodle.” Maud stuck her legs out from under a thick yellow dressing gown. She was famous for her legs. Her ankles came down in descending layers like thick whipped cream, almost entirely obscuring the tiny feet that carried her about. Permanent lines had been etched into her flesh where her shoes cut. “You’ll be through with this little show before you know it,” she said.

  Beach stuck his head ’round the door. “Hello, girls,” he said, “everything all right?” His head had a swollen pink look like cured ham.

  “Yes, Mr. Beach,” said Julia.

  “Good show tonight,” he said, looking as he always did, worried and friendly at the same time. “Maud, I’ve got your pictures.” He came in, nudging the door shut behind him with his foot.

  “Any good?” Maud reached out a hand.

  “Fine.”

  She took the envelope. “Beach,” she said, “this girl’s full of misery.”

  Beach turned a long-suffering face on the contortionist. “What is it, Zelda?” he said. “What is there to cry about?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Didn’t you hear them tonight? You’re doing great.”

  “I know I am.”

  “Get her some bean porridge, Beach,” said Maud, licking the ends of her fingers. “Get her some good thick soup.”

  “She hungry?” Beach’s pale blue eyes drooped down at the corners, giving him a look of permanent bewilderment. “Didn’t you eat tonight?”

  “Of course I did,” said Zelda impatiently, strangely twisting her hands together. “I’m not hungry, not at all.”

  “What’s wrong with the food?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the food, I’m just…oh, never mind.”

  “She’s just homesick, is all,” said Maud.

  “Girls,” said Beach, raising his eyes to the roof of the wagon as if to the hills for deliverance, “girls, girls, girls, you’ll be the death of me. If you’re not happy, what’s keeping you?”

  “The money, honey,” said Maud.

  Beach stared at each of them in turn as if they’d wounded his feelings. “Get a hold of yourself, Zelda,” he said. Drops of sweat glistened on his red, contorted forehead. “You make up your mind. Are you doing this or aren’t you? If you are, you got to pull yourself together.”

  “I know.” One of her eyes began to blink nervously. She sniffed and dried her eyes. She was leaving them soon, joining up with a circus and traveling west. Julia didn’t think she’d miss her.

  “Hm,” said Maud, spilling pictures out on the table. Variations on a theme: Maud smiling, skipping, left leg bent, right knee raised, dainty toe pointing. Holding out the huge skirt of her short white dress to show off her pins. She picked one up. “Not bad,” she said without enthusiasm.

  “Christ,” he said, “you girls are hard to please.”

  “Too much dark ’round the edges,” Maud said, passing the picture to Julia. “It’s a shame to have to write on that nice white lace.”

  “There’s a space at the top,” said Julia, “by the curtain. You could sign there.”

  “I guess.”

  Beach hulked around for a while looking disgruntled, told them not to stay up late and left without closing the door. A faint grassy smell crept in with the cold night air.

  “Here, you two.” Maud stood up, parting her legs and letting her stomach fall down between them to hang momentarily visible under the yellow dressing gown, before putting her arms down and with a practiced flounce, manually hauling it along with her as she shuffled sideways to take a cake box out of a corner cupboard. “Take a few with you,” she said, sidling back into place and opening the box on her lap. “Spice and lime. Go on, help yourselves.”

  As Julia and Zelda walked back to their wagons in the dark, Zelda said, “She’s meeting her fiancé in Cleveland. Did you know?”

  “No.”

  Five or six other wagons hunched in the dark like beasts and a small campfire crackled in the field.

  “Sometimes I just don’t understand this world,” Zelda said, cupping her hand around a disintegrating crumble of cake. “She’s got a fiancé and here’s me all on my own.” Zelda licked her palm clean and brushed her hands.

  Julia looked at her in disbelief. “Oh, you’ll be all right,” she said.

  There was an awkward moment.

  “What about me?” said Julia. “I’ll always be on my own.”

  Zelda said nothing. The awkwardness rose higher between them like a wall, and they walked the rest of the way in silence till Julia turned aside at her door.

  It was cold in the wagon, and she shivered. The cold was in her bones. Stupid girl, she thought, surprised at the tears she felt. Stupid girl can walk down the street, no one looks twice. She lit a candle, then got under the covers just as she was, pulled a blanket into a sort of tent over her head and ate the last two cakes, one lime, one spice. The lime cake had an exploding center of sweet curd, and by the time she’d swallowed the last mouthful she was crying. Even Maud Sparrow was going to have a husband. All the others, the plain girls, the not-so-pretty, the squinty, the flabby, the downright ugly, not one was as ugly as her. I am ugly, ugly, ugly, she said, and reached for bald, blurred, worn-away Yatzi. It g
ot her like this sometimes. Some old song would get her. I’ll never have that, she’d think. Love. Never even have it to lose. They love it when I sing those songs, a face like that, like mine, singing a love song. She felt as if a lump in her throat had sprung a leak, and it was draining from her eyes. Tears made long streaks in the hair on her cheeks. She got up, undressed and put on her nightie, got back into bed and blew out the candle.

  She could get no sleep. The wind began to blow, and the wagon creaked. They moved on in the morning, and the wind howled all next day and all the day after as they traveled. Loneliness settled in, as sure and steady as snow.

  A few days later, Zelda knocked on her door and walked in without waiting for an answer. “So,” she said bluntly, as if she’d been building up to it, “how’s this kind of life treating you then?”

  Julia was sewing ribbons onto one of her stage dresses. “Oh!” she said, surprised. “I’m getting along very well, thank you.”

  Zelda sat down and leaned forward, staring into Julia’s eyes with something like defiance. “I can’t imagine what it must be like to be you,” she said too quickly.

  Julia showed her teeth in what she knew to be a disturbing smile. “Of course you can,” she said. “It’s easy. But you don’t try.”

  Zelda looked away. Her mouth drooped open and her eyes were dreamy. “You know, I’ve always thought I had a good imagination,” she said. “I do, that’s the trouble. I imagine all the terrible things that might happen and all the places I could be that are better than this.”

  “There’s no use at all in that,” said Julia, bending her head back to her sewing.

  “I know. But I do it anyway. What are you making?”

  “Just sewing some ribbons on.”

  “I’m moving on,” Zelda said. “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

  “Oh! It’s today, is it?”

  “Couple of hours. Indianapolis, Louisville—”

  “Will you be happier with the circus?”

  “I think so. At least I’m heading in the right direction. When we get to St. Louis, I’ll see my family.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Not really.” She smiled faintly. “They’re not really very nice.”