by Amanda Davis
“My brothers are bad news,” Wilma said later in the trailer. “Each in their own way. Oh, I guess that isn’t fair. Rod means well, but he’s only eighteen and he takes the world so literally and Dad hasn’t been able to afford a bridge to replace the teeth he knocked out when he fell off the pyramid in practice. He’s always a little lost in his books and stuff, I guess. Every year he gets a little weirder.
“James is completely self-involved and Luke is so flaky that sometimes it just feels like he isn’t here. And Hugo…” She paused and looked out the window in the direction of her family’s trailers. “Every girl who comes within fifty feet of Hugo falls in love with him and he knows it.”
My heart sank at that. Of course he had that effect on everyone. Who was I to think I was special? I wasn’t the girl who got chosen, the girl who got asked to dance. I was the girl who got red punch at Homecoming—
“Faith?”
I whipped around and caught sight of myself in the mirror, eyes enormous, red spots the size of quarters high on my cheeks. I could barely force the words out. “What did you call me?”
“Annabelle?” Wilma looked at me, bewildered. “What’s wrong with you? Did you hear anything I said?” The fat girl stood behind me. Her reflection was wide and plain.
“I’m going to go lie down for a minute,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just want to lie down.”
She shrugged, and continued to talk while I made my way to the bunk.
“My family’s just fucked,” she said. “I mean Jenny—you’d think the sun rose and set around Jenny the way everyone dotes on her. Some of that is just that she’s the youngest I guess, and that she’s such a part of the act—”
Her words overflowed with vinegar. “But they just revolve around her, my brothers, my father. So of course she’s grown up spoiled. A spoiled brat. That’s not really her fault, I guess.”
I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling. Why did my body feel so heavy?
“You take it all too seriously,” the fat girl said, inches from my face. She had a drumstick in one hand and a Twinkie in the other.
“You have to shut some of it off,” she said. “Or you’re going to go nuts.”
“—I mean I never wanted to be a part of it, you know. I was always satisfied with my little world, the world that I found for myself—”
“You don’t need anyone,” the fat girl whispered. “You just need you.”
“—because I knew that I was just as good as them, as people, I mean—”
“You just need you.”
I put my hands over my ears and squeezed my face into a knot, my body into a ball.
“Are you okay?” I heard.
And then darkness.
Flu.
It got everyone eventually. It didn’t start with me, but I was early in its tirade. I was feverish and achy and incredibly thirsty.
I tried to help clean up costumes after the show, but I was pretty useless and Wilma sent me back to bed. I tried not to sleep because I knew I had to go to Olivia and Bluebell, but I must have drifted off at some point.
I struggled from it, the blackness, the depths of the syrupy dream that had swallowed me, and made my way up the hill towards the animal trucks. There were wagons and wagons of shit, all of it belonging ultimately to me, my responsibility, mine to tow away and bury.
And then I woke in my bunk in a sweaty puddle of my own making and knew I hadn’t made my way up the hill at all. I had been dreaming, hallucinating, and now was damp and clammy, but light as a new idea. I was back in my body, wobbly but no longer feverish.
I swung my legs down and fended off dizziness, landing and stumbling, steadied by the iron frame. It was late or very early, I couldn’t tell which, and I felt that if I didn’t hold on I might drift away, float up into the sky and evaporate like my fever.
Wilma sat by the window, her hands wrapped around a mug, her attention captured by something far away and sad. She hadn’t heard me land, or didn’t appear to, and I watched her for a moment before knocking on the side of a trunk to announce myself.
She shook her head, as if to scramble whatever unhappy thing had been there, and smiled at me, but her eyes were black and still far away and I wondered what she’d seen. I wanted all of it opened up, my secrets and her secrets, everything spilled out onto the floor in a festering mess for us to kick around, because I was tired and I’d had enough of all the weight.
I liked this feeling of lightness. It was what I imagined the world felt like from up on the trapeze, what Mina the Ballerina must know. It was what I imagined it felt like to fall when you saw the outstretched hands before you and knew you would come out of a spin and be caught. It was this lightness, this emptiness, this trust that you weren’t about to plummet to an unforgiving surface, powered by the weight of yourself. No. You would spin and be caught, you would flip and fall and catch, and you would swing back to a platform at the end, arms in the air, high above the crowd, proud of your victory over what hadn’t happened.
Wilma sipped from her mug. I was pretty sure it was whiskey. I didn’t say anything, just crept towards her in my strange state and pulled out the other chair, drifting slowly into it like a feather.
She didn’t say anything either. I took the mug from her and sipped without looking in. It was whiskey, whiskey mixed with tea, warm and fiery and sweet from sugar or honey. I could feel it rush through me, but Wilma took it back before I could drink again.
“You should eat something,” she said. “You haven’t eaten in days. I don’t think a toddy is the best first meal.” She examined her mug, then turned the handle carefully and drank from a place my lips hadn’t touched.
“There’s bread,” she said. “You could toast some.”
I nodded. But I wanted whiskey and tea, sweetness and warmth. I wanted nothing to fill me up or weigh me down. I wanted to feel the things that were creeping behind me, the slithering dark awful things I’d been dragging around for so long. I wanted to want to cry, but I didn’t. Where was the fat girl? I looked around but she wasn’t with us. She would have known what to do.
“You look so sad,” I said. “What makes you so sad?”
Wilma took another sip of toddy before answering, and then it was slowly, with an angry quiver in the background. “Let’s keep some things to ourselves,” she said. “There’s not a lot of privacy in this life. You need to mind your own business. Some things I don’t want to share.”
Who could argue with that? Certainly not me. I nodded and stood, unsteady as ever, and went off to find the bread, to make toast, reliable toast.
In the true morning, the circus woke up. I had reached some peace in that stretch between waking and morning, between dawn and now. I felt as if a tiny callus had formed, something rough and trustworthy covering what needed to be kept quiet and tucked away. I pictured it inside my body like a net or a web, keeping everything safe and possible. It was good. Firm. I could tend it and it might become impenetrable.
And I could feel the world all around me. This day would evolve until it was like all the others that stretched before me. I would scoop and shovel, brush and feed. We would perform, we would entertain. And at dusk I would gather with everyone else and eat a meal prepared for the circus. Hugo Genersh would be there, spreading his light. And Lily VonGert. And Mina and Victor and Elaine and Sam. Everyone would be there and we would feel like part of something larger than us. But we would each be alone inside our own skin.
The fat girl joined me on the step. Inside the trailer Wilma slept the hard uneasy sleep of one who dreams with whiskey. “We have a ways to go,” the fat girl said. “But we’ve done all right so far.”
I didn’t answer, but I agreed. I didn’t have to say anything. The fat girl knew it all, everything that happened and everything there was.
“You’re going to leave someday,” I said softly.
“We have a ways to go.”
I nodded. In the dist
ance Benny was trailed by five little figures, each with a red ball. We could hear the midway opening for business. Somewhere, I knew, people swung through the air, practicing for the evening show, for the spin and the plummet. For the act that would make the audience gasp.
I sipped my coffee, content to be alive. Content, for now, to be a part of something.
FIFTEEN
AND then days turned into weeks, which gathered into months, and I learned more about the world. I learned that in Springfield, Massachusetts, the land sloped gently. That in Montana the sky was enough to swallow you whole, but the people laughed with their heads thrown back and their mouths open, willing and grateful. In Iowa they were somewhat suspicious, but many saw the show twice. In St. Louis they didn’t come at all, thrusting Elaine into the worst of spirits. We all felt her grim desperation in our bones. In Youngstown, Ohio, they came but they were drunk. In Morgantown, West Virginia, they circled us like prey, then entered the gates and were delighted.
I learned that in each town, each city, we were the same and they were different. Until the lights came up, until Ken Sparks, the ringmaster, began his trembling Ladies and gentlemen! Until the clowns tumbled out of their tiny car and the Genershes flipped from each other’s shoulders high up on the wire. Until Roscoe Kryzyzewski flew from the cannon and Rapunzel Finelli spun from her hair. Until Bluebell and Olivia stood on their hind legs, one foot each balanced above delicate things—a china tea set, a balloon, a lone kitten—and didn’t crush them.
But the final symbiosis belonged to Mina the Ballerina. When she ascended, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, church groups and first dates, school classes, foster homes, and orphanages—the entire tent full of people breathed together and leaned forward in their seats. As Mina swooped and spun, whirled and then pretended to fall, catching herself with one hand or the tops of her feet, we moved as one. We gasped, we ooohed, we aahhhed as one. We clutched each other and covered our eyes, peeking through the slits our fingers made.
Her sister and brother-in-law warmed the crowd up, but nothing competed with that moment the net was removed, when the roustabouts scurried to the tune of the ringmaster’s booming voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, at the terrifying height of almost one hundred feet above the cold hard ground, Miss Mina the Balleriiiiiiiiiiiiiina of the Air will tempt fate and embrace destiny as she dances through the heavens for your entertainment!”
We couldn’t tear ourselves away.
And in each town there were policemen who stopped by to scan the crowd or were hired to manage the audience, to keep the peace. And in each place I was afraid of being recognized and careful to keep my distance. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say anything. Circus people seemed especially able to let one another harbor things. I held it all close, certain that I could be undone quite quickly if I wasn’t careful. But I became more and more comfortable with myself, as Annabelle. Gleryton began to feel like a movie I’d seen, a book I’d read. A sad story about some girl I’d barely known, some scared little girl who couldn’t take care of herself. And I wasn’t like that at all.
By then I had come to know everyone better. Even Wilma, still as secretive as ever. I came to know that she was complicated, fickle. That she was prone to fits of sleeplessness, that she resented the life as much as she clung to it. That she preferred to live far away, alone in her own mind.
Somewhere along the way she and Jim reconciled. One evening I came back to the trailer and he was there, his arms around her waist, their sudden silence a signal to grab what I came for and get out.
But the best thing, the most surprising thing, was that Rod Genersh and I became cautious friends. He liked to visit Bluebell and Olivia and the horses, and could explain things to me without making me feel foolish. He told me his mother had been a trick rider when she met his father and it was something that he missed, watching her gentle way with horses. She rarely rode once she’d learned the high wire, but in every show they’d been with she’d visited the horses and brought them apples, as he did now.
I enjoyed Rod’s quiet company. I liked having him around and I’d begun to trust him. He didn’t ask questions, he didn’t invite the condemnation of the fat girl, and his presence was comfortable, easy. Hugo’s light still lured me, but I’d quickly given up hope for any sort of heart-pounding attention from him.
I learned to live in the present, which meant shoveling shit and riding out the minidramas and scandals that were always erupting on a circus lot. It meant watching allegiances and working hard. And it meant keeping myself beyond scrutiny. I learned to keep Gleryton and all its secrets locked away.
Whatever vague notions I’d had about going to find Charlie, about trying to help him, dissipated slowly until they were gone. When I thought of him, it was as part of everything else I’d lost or left behind. It was as a piece of my former life. But I no longer thought of him often.
And then one day I was wheeling elephant shit down a hill towards a gully in rural Ohio, and the landscape was wide and clean and open and I felt, deep down, that things were about to be different.
I had this nagging feeling all day long; I couldn’t put my finger on it, couldn’t say exactly what I meant, just that I was sure. Change was coming. Or something was.
Once, in Phoenix, the fat girl suggested I introduce myself to the aerialists, but I was too shy to speak to them.
“Oh please,” I’d said to her. “How am I going to do that?”
We were alone in the trailer in the early evening. It was a night off for everyone and the dry heat had left me sapped and too thirsty to do much of anything. I’d seen Wilma head for Jim’s place. The fat girl had seized the opportunity to try on wigs.
“You just say hello, tell Mina you like her act.” She flipped strands of long yellow hair over one shoulder. “How does this look?”
“I can’t just say that. I can’t just walk up to her and say that.”
“I’m sure they know who you are already. It’s just a formality.” She gave me a measured, pointed look. “I thought Annabelle could do anything.”
But she couldn’t—I hadn’t been able to do it. I’d been with the show long enough to understand the circus hierarchy a little. As Benny had said one night: “The closer to God they are in the rafters, the more snobbish they are to us mere mortals.” Which seemed to be true of everyone but Rod.
I felt ridiculous, as though even talking to them, even saying hello to Mina, would reveal everything about me. Instead I watched the aerialists stretching out near their trailer or securing their rigging in the big top, and tried to seem cool.
And then it was late spring and we were set up in a picnic grounds near Scranton, Pennsylvania. I still had the strange tingling sensation deep in my blood that something was afoot, but no idea why or what. I was bone tired from the months of climbing hills with my heavy wheelbarrow, but I was also stronger now. Sometimes, alone in the trailer, I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to understand how this new body, with its new shape, belonged to me. My arms and shoulders had grown ropey with shoveling and lifting. My face was angular, my waist narrow, my legs sinewy. In Tulsa, Wilma had cut all my hair so it was very short but would grow in evenly. We’d washed it blond again, banishing the orange, and though roots had returned more than once, I had come to appreciate this spiky light version of myself, had grown used to the reflection that found me in the mirror. Now, before the show, I put on my own makeup, applied long Mylar eyelashes, and liberally sprinkled glitter. All by myself, I transformed into that sparkly creature that danced in front of the crowds. I’d even begun to like her.
And the fat girl?
The fat girl was petulant, lonely, sad. She disappeared for whole days at a time and I fell completely into the rhythm of circus life, the monotonous drudgery of it, the familiar exhaustion. I never knew what to expect when she reappeared. Sometimes she was full of kind advice. Sometimes she was angry, or in a sour, bitter mood, and wanted to make sure I understood what danger I was in.
I had pushed it all away, and she knew that.
I had packed all images of Tony Giobambera and the others into a small room with a door, which I’d shut. And except for the occasional lightning bolt of memory, I didn’t think of them, or of what we’d done, and the fat girl didn’t like that at all.
But we were coming full circle, slowly and surely heading back to the mid-Atlantic, to Tennessee, North Carolina, the whole route refreshing itself. It would happen, the fat girl liked to remind me. Not tomorrow, but someday: we would play Gleryton. It was only a matter of time.
In Scranton, I left the elephants and walked past the aerial encampment on my way to our trailer to change for dinner. Victor and Mina ignored me, but the other half of their team—Victor’s brother, Juan, and Juan’s wife, Carla—sometimes said hello. I liked watching them use the trampoline, the way they flung themselves in the air, bouncing higher and higher and higher. I liked that before trying anything they hung upside down like enormous possums from bars they set up, and I liked the easy way they had with one another.
And after watching them, and the Genershes, for so many months, I’d taught myself to do a handstand by balancing against the side of the costume trailer. It had taken a little while. At first I’d seen stars, but as I did it more often—at least several times a day—my arms had grown stronger and the stars took longer to appear. By Pennsylvania I could do it easily, keeping steady with one foot touching the trailer and the rest of me extended into the air. Sometimes, for brief moments, I could balance without the wall of the trailer, but I wanted to be able to walk on my hands, like I’d seen Jenny Genersh do, as balanced and poised as if they were feet.
Scranton was wide and green, and everyone, the entire circus—performers, roustabouts, gamers, even Wilma—was gathering in the parking lot to eat together before the evening show. Rod Genersh caught me upside down when he came to get me for dinner.
