by Leslie Parry
Odile squeezed her eyes shut. The routine was unbearable today. Each thud of the blade, each beery pant of the crowd made her tense. Her fists curled against the leather cuffs. Even the knives seemed to be coming slower. They didn’t sound right when they struck. Loose, sloppy, they rattled in their grooves. Usually they were thrown so powerfully, so precisely, that they sank into the wood as if it were a wedge of butter. She opened her eyes and watched the ash-blue proscenium flip over. A sea of gaping mouths rose into the air. She felt her insides slosh from one side of her body to the other. A blade plunged into the wheel half an inch above her head, pinning her back by the hair. Somewhere in the front row a woman screamed and fainted.
“Watch the pretty lady go ’round and ’round, ’round and ’round!” shouted the dwarf in the otterskin hat.
Odile swallowed the bile rising in her throat. If Belle were still at home, she’d be headlining. She’d be the draw. Isabelle Church, the Coney Island Shape Shifter—her twin sister and their mother’s protégée. At seventeen, Belle could swallow longer swords than most men. She could twist her body into impossible shapes. She could stand on top of a piano, bend over backward, and play a ragtime melody upside down. She was daring and mysterious and utterly unafraid—the audience loved her.
At first glance the twins looked alike—they were both freckled and hazel-eyed, with thick blond hair and the snub nose of a second-rate chorus girl. But that was where the similarities ended. Unlike Belle, with her lithe and pliant acrobat’s body, Odile had a permanent crook in her neck and a slight curve to her spine. As a girl she’d been made to wear a brace, a horrible thing like a metal corset, with a tin collar that trumpeted up her neck and flared beneath her chin. She looked like some kind of Elizabethan monster, clanking down the boardwalk in the ocean fog. Croc! the other children teased as she herky-jerked her way down the street. Croc-Croc-Croc-Odile! At night she would cry as her mother unbuckled the brace and put it away, as she rubbed eucalyptus cream over the bruises and welts left behind. Her body looked as though it had been gone over with a pie crimper. Why was she different?
It’s just the way you were born, their mother said. It’s the same thing she said about the marks on their scalps. Odile and Belle each had a bald spot, a crescent of shimmery white skin behind her ear—Belle’s was on the left side of her head; Odile’s was on the right. They’re birthmarks, her mother would say. You’re unique. Unique! Mother said the same thing about Georgette, the dancer born with four legs. Or singular, which is how she described Aldovar, the show’s half-man-half-woman, who had died that day in the fire, too.
For most of her life Odile had watched the show from beyond the footlights. As a child her posture had made contorting and sword swallowing impossible to master. Her lopsided lungs kept her from much exercise at all. (The only thing she had ever been allowed to practice—between shows, in the alleyway behind the theater—was knife throwing. The doctor had thought it might help to stretch her muscles, relieve her back. So occasionally Mack would carry out a corkboard and a quiver of his favorite knives and try to teach her. But her aim was terrible, always off—she keeled too far to the left, and before long the side of the theater was flecked with pits and grooves.) When the brace came off for good last year—thrown with no small bit of ceremony into the ocean—Odile was given a small role at last: the angel in Belle’s Daring Devil routine. There, high on a trapeze above the Church of Marvels—a theater-in-the-round, with a floor of sand—Odile’s sweaty hands grappled the rope. Her heart struggled against her powdered chest. She descended from the cool rafters into the stinging light, wearing a halo and a pair of paper wings. Beneath her, Belle, in horns and a red silk dress, danced and leaped and twisted her body into knots. Odile’s job was to hurl three heavenly thunderbolts, all of which Belle caught between her toes and promptly dipped down her throat. Afterward Odile was cranked back up to the rafters, where she watched the rest of the show beside the noosed sandbags, which swung around her head like the great weights of a clock.
Now the knives were hitting so close to her skin she could feel cold air shaking off the metal. Above the cries of the audience she heard Mack lurch and grunt. His feet didn’t seem to land right—the floorboards, which usually echoed his steps so musically, now groaned, overstressed. Odile drew a breath and tried to concentrate. You’re making him nervous! she scolded herself. In the crowd she saw a white hat rolling above the dirty, black-felted bowlers. It belonged to Mr. Guilfoyle, who had taken over the sideshow after the Church of Marvels burned. He’d come off the traveling circuit, but unlike Mother he spent most of the time in his office, eating nougat candies and sweating over pamphlets, writing letters to showpeople he’d known out west and cajoling them to come to Coney Island. Why, of all days, did he have to be here?
“Step up and see her survive the Blind Man’s Bluff!” hollered the dwarf. “Eleven knives and not a drop of blood!”
Whenever Odile got nervous, her fingers would creep up into her hair and rub at the smooth, silky mark, as if it were a charm or a rune. But now her hands were trapped, her ankles cuffed. She felt her whole body shiver and buck. The letter sounded so melancholy and despairing—not like her sister at all. If for some reason this is the last letter I should write to you—what did that even mean? Was she feverish? Ill? A hothouse, of all things—isn’t that where consumptives lay on wheeled chaises, languishing under ferns?
She thought of how restless and aloof her sister had been in the weeks after Mother died, when all Odile had wanted was someone to cry with, even as she rose early and set to work at the kitchen table, writing letters and settling accounts. Belle had stayed up late into the night in their mother’s room, leafing through her things, even after Odile had snuffed the candles and gone to bed. One morning there was simply a note left on the kitchen table: I need a change for a while—you understand, my dear—so I’ve gone to Manhattan. Perhaps I will find some fortune there. I promise to write. When Odile asked Mr. Aggis at the post office if Belle had sent or received any letters recently, he recalled only one to Manhattan—an address someplace on Doyers Street. He assumed it was a response to one of the many letters the girls had received—sympathy and prayers for their mother from all over the country.
Afterward Odile had searched through Belle’s wardrobe and dresser, hoping for something more, an explanation. But the drawers were jumbled with everyday litter—paper valentines and trolley tokens, lozenges of beeswax and throat balm. Odile was outraged and bereft—she couldn’t begin to grieve another, especially when there was so much left to be done. So she threw herself into a mania of arithmetic: tending to Mother’s outstanding affairs, calculating expenses and balancing the books, practicing with Mack for Mr. Guilfoyle’s show. When her sister didn’t write, Odile convinced herself it was because Belle was busy—she must have found a role on the vaudeville stages of Manhattan. Still, Odile kept the house ready for her, listened for the creak of floorboards in the night. When she couldn’t sleep, she turned and faced the empty bed beside her. She gazed at the faded quilt Mother had made for them when they were young: a dozen tiger faces stitched from scraps of felt, with yarn whiskers and button eyes. She thought of how, as little girls, she and Belle would sit by the fireplace at night, each with a sleeping cub in their laps, and listen to Mother recite poems from an old book: Tyger! Tyger! burning bright . . . In the forests of the night. She remembered, after the shows, putting her hands through the bars of the cage and feeling their great rough tongues roll between her fingers. But these days, when the sun dimmed outside and the arbor of white lights crackled on, the quilted faces seemed to leer at her savagely, their green button eyes shining in the electric wonder of Surf Avenue.
Then—it happened so fast that at first she didn’t think it happened at all. It was like coming up from underwater: the noise of the crowd roaring over her, her body arching against the wheel as she gasped for breath. A pain shot through her knee, icy and stinging. She didn’t wince, or wiggle, or throw herself
back against the boards. If she reacted, the crowd would, too. So she continued to spin, her body rigid against the wheel, the accident undetected, the blade burrowing deeper into the gash with each rotation.
There were cries of relief and crescendoing applause as Mack brought the Wheel to a stop. Odile lowered her eyes as discreetly as possible. She hadn’t been stabbed, just sliced. The knife had come in at an angle, grazed her right above the knee. Mack unstrapped her ankles and wrists and helped her down from the wheel, his smile growing hard and terrified when he saw the carved skin. As she stepped forward, her stocking ripped, and hot blood started to dribble down her calf. Still, she hobbled to the edge of the stage and took two quick bows while smiling assuredly at the audience. Everyone looked deformed, as if she were seeing them through the bottom of a drinking glass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” roared the dwarf in the otterskin hat, “the amazing Mr. Mackintosh and his lovely assistant, Miss Odile-on-the-Wheel!”
Another bow, and as the whispers started up in the front row, patrons leaning in and pointing, she hurried off the stage, limping and grasping Mack’s arm for support. She collapsed in the wings. A stagehand rushed up with a fresh strip of linen and a flask of rum. While he washed and bandaged the wound, she took a few nips and looked around for Mack. She wanted to run after him, tell him it had been a mistake, an accident, she wasn’t concentrating the way she should have been. But all she could do was sit there, weak and shaky, with a single line running around in her head.
You are me and I am you.
BELLE COULD BE HOTHEADED at times, too sensitive. She was painfully meticulous about each stunt in her act—she punished herself when she didn’t master them, and yet refused to believe others when they told her she had. How many times had Odile cleaned up flung powder or a smashed bottle of ginger beer in the dressing room afterward, or lain awake at night while her sister brooded in the bed beside her? Your sister is prone to flights of passion, Mother explained, as if it were some kind of cross for them to nobly bear. But sometimes I feel that way too! Odile wanted to say. But she knew that in herself, any show of emotion would be viewed as something sickly, inferior—self-pity, perhaps; the mark of a weak constitution. But in Belle it wasn’t shameful, or even a flaw. It was some kind of artistic right.
One day when they were girls they snuck off to the beach with Aldovar and Georgette. They were only ten or eleven years old at the time, and Belle had just started her sword-swallowing lessons. They were supposed to be at the theater, helping Mother strike the set, but it was too beautiful out, and they were giddy and restless in the heat. Odile sat alone on the beach while the others ran down to the surf. She watched as Belle and Georgette galloped through the waves, tottering under seaweed headdresses, rolling their bloomers to their thighs. Georgette, who had four legs, wore two sets of bloomers that Mother had stitched together for her. She ran on her outer legs, while the inner ones dangled between, shrunken and spindly, kicking up spray from the surface of the water like the paddles of a steamboat wheel. Aldovar, half-girl and half-boy, waded through the shallows, pausing now and again to pick up a pebble, or jot something down in a small diary. Odile suspected him of being a poet. Onstage his costume was a wedding gown stitched to a tuxedo, but away from the lights, down at the shore, he always wore a gray shirt and plain tailored slacks, nothing fussy. His hair, which he kept long on one side, was braided and coiled beneath a houndstooth derby cap. Without his stage makeup—rouge on one side, a penciled moustache on the other—his face was heart-shaped and fine-boned, like a pretty boy’s or a dapper girl’s. I am lucky to have two spirits, he always said. Most in this life only have one.
Odile sat alone under a yellow umbrella, guarding the lunch-pails, the boots, Belle’s dagger in its leather sheath. She was drinking a bottle of sarsaparilla and humming an old show tune when a shadow fell over her—someone stood above her, hissing and snickering, blotting out the sun. She couldn’t see his face, just the sunlight glowing through his grimy ears. Croc! he laughed—a terrible, wheezy sound, like a balloon losing air. Croc, Croc! he said again. He was barefoot, smelling faintly of boiled wash and chicken dumplings. With a snicker, he reeled back and kicked sand in her face. She felt it clump in her mouth, burn her eyes. She coughed, spit, blinked frantically, cried something in a voice she didn’t recognize. And then she saw through her tears—just beyond the boy’s shoulders—her sister, charging up out of the water. As he reeled back again, Belle jumped on top of him and wrestled him down to the ground. Aldovar and Georgette followed her—they held down the boy’s arms and legs while Belle grabbed the dagger from its sheath. Her eyes glittered as she stood there above him, as she lifted the blade high above her head. She brought it down suddenly, with a whoop. The boy thrashed and screamed. Odile saw his little toe roll away in the sand.
Then, just as quickly as they’d pinned him down, Belle and the others let him go. He scrambled away down the beach, tripping and falling, too scared to look back.
The toe lay between them, in the frilled shadow of the umbrella. For a moment the sisters regarded it solemnly, as if they were supposed to eulogize it somehow. Then Belle picked it up and flung it like a peanut into the waves.
It was then that Odile caught sight of their mother marching across the beach, resplendent in her face paint, her heels sinking into the sand. She wanted to turn around and escape, but there was no way; she couldn’t run fast enough in her brace. Belle just stood there with her back to the sea, sand caked into her knuckles and hair, and faced their mother, waiting.
Then Mother was standing over them, pointing to the blood on the dagger: What is that? What did you do?
She was radiant with anger. She’d only come to find them because they were late for supper—they hadn’t met her at the stage door like they’d promised. She’d had to close up the theater and scrub down the tiger pens by herself. And now here was her daughter, slick with seawater and blood, holding the dagger in her tiny fist. Mother sent Aldovar and Georgette back to the boardinghouse, then dragged the girls home by the hands as if they were babies. Belle was left out on the porch to eat alone—too filthy and savage to step inside, Mother said; why, she’d sooner let the tigers say grace at their table. Belle began to cry, but Mother shut the door and latched it anyway. Later, after a silent meal with no dessert, Odile pressed her head to the darkened window and saw her sister out on the steps with a plate on her knees, crying and crying, while the waves crashed against the shore.
Belle could be that way, too. Provoked, she lashed out, and abandoned, she broke.
BACKSTAGE IT WAS STICKY-HOT and crowded, all elbows and chatter and sweat. Odile pushed her way down the hall, hopping on one leg toward the dressing-room door. This theater was nothing like her mother’s—it was narrow and shambling, a former sauerkraut house still reeking of grease, which Mr. Guilfoyle had won in a card game after plying the diminutive, frog-eyed owner with a few rounds of Irish punch. Every day Odile had to do battle with the other players in the dressing room—grubby fingers digging into jars of cold cream, costumes getting shed and trampled underfoot. Today, thankfully, it was too hot for anyone to linger, so she sat down at the mirror alone and lifted the tray of her makeup box.
Belle’s letter was tucked inside—just a single sheet of paper, so delicate it was nearly translucent. There was no return address, no letterhead, no mention of her life in Manhattan. No Doyers Street, no theater name—nothing that gave a clue as to where she might be. Why had she waited so long to write? And why, if she were so downhearted, wouldn’t she simply come home, where she was loved and safe? Odile pressed her nose to the paper but couldn’t smell anything beyond the briny musk of the dressing room. You are me and I am you. When they were girls they used to hold their index fingers, hooked like crescent moons, up in the air and try to divine each other’s thoughts. After a while—when they were scared or upset, when they were banished to opposite ends of the room for misbehaving, when they saw each other on the boardwalk from a distance too far to sp
eak—it became their own private signal, a flash of alliance and sympathy. Sometimes at night Odile would still reach out toward the empty bed, her finger curled in the dark, and wonder if somewhere her sister could read her mind.
“A little heads-up,” came a voice over her shoulder. Quickly she folded up the letter and slid it back into the box.
Leland the dwarf stood behind her, blotting his face with a handkerchief. “Guilfoyle’s got a bug up his britches,” he said. “How’s the boo-boo?”
“Pretty ugly.” She turned her knee to the light. The bandage was already rusty with blood.
Georgette, still damp from the stage lights, trailed in and sat down beside her, crossing both pairs of legs. “What happened, pet?” she whispered. Her hand, soft and slender as a little girl’s, fluttered up Odile’s neck and leafed gently through her hair. “Is it your back again?”
“No!” Odile said, a little too sharply. “I’m fine. Really—it’s practically a paper cut.”
She was grateful that Georgette laughed and began gossiping about something else—the woman in the audience who’d screamed and fainted, and who was now crying into her handkerchief outside the theater, proclaiming this entire place the devil’s playground. The Daring Devil’s, Odile thought.
She slipped behind the screen and peeled off her beaded costume. Half of her wanted to tell Leland and Georgette about the letter, but she didn’t know quite what to say. She hadn’t talked to anyone about Mother or Belle, not in months. After the fire Belle had grown so quiet and withdrawn. Everyone must have been whispering about it all along: what poor work Odile was doing, looking after her! When Belle left, Odile began to notice that people lowered their eyes—they turned their heads from her and looked bashfully away. If they saw her coming down the boardwalk, they pretended to study their pocket watch, the menu at the frankfurter stand, a tangle of kites in the sky. When she came home at night, there would be food on her porch—gravies and aspics in stained crockery, soaking under damp squares of cheesecloth—but no one was there to welcome her or share her table. She dumped the food over the railing in the back. Bone-thin dogs, no longer scared away by the scent of tigers, waited for her in the wide sandy alleyway, wagging their tails and howling.
