Circus

by Claire Battershill

  Leon is a marketing executive for a company that makes organic chocolate products. Their apartment is full of tins and wrappers, all dark brown with gold lettering and bars of colour at the edges to indicate flavour. The brown was Leon’s idea: “The colour of chocolate,” he said at the interview, and so they hired him. Leon mostly ignores Susan’s quirks, which is comforting and necessary. When Susan says things that don’t make sense, or when she makes sock monkeys for days and days without doing anything else, Leon just rolls his eyes and carries on reading, or shaving, or doing whatever it is he’s doing at the time. He does intervene when necessary: he bought a bed skirt to conceal the shoeboxes for when company comes over, and had a gentle word about the crack-cocaine phase before it got too out of hand. Yesterday, he tried to come to her rescue by buying a new pair of loafers and leaving the box suggestively beside the laundry line on the carpet. But Susan is not ready, not yet, to give up on the tightrope.

  At her new job, Susan draws cartoons about the apocalypse on a pad of Post-it notes. In her previous job, she also doodled, but she drew the End Times on the backs of invoices for European Hardwood flooring. At the job before that one, she rendered scenes of destruction on the bits of paper that were left for testing pens and highlighters at the University Book Store. Usually the apocalypse involves a lot of ants and, naturally, a spirally explosion with rockets emerging from it. She’s not sure how to explain the ants, but they are absolutely vital to the proceedings. They look like the fire ants she saw on her trip to Toronto Island last fall, and they bite. Of course, after the apocalypse they won’t have much to munch on, and Susan is sorry about this. She never draws what happens after the apocalypse. She doesn’t presume to know. In a graduate English seminar two years ago, Susan met a girl who announced that she “was engaged in examining deconstructionist analyses of post-apocalyptic fiction.” This deeply alarmed Susan, who had just declared that she “quite liked Laurence Sterne.” The girl’s academic interest also had Susan worried that she’d somehow missed the apocalypse. She left the room after an agonizing two-hour discussion about globalization and culture, experiencing a small panic attack as she tried to get out of the building. That day, Leon arrived at their apartment before she did, and greeted her by handing her a wine glass. “It’s okay,” he said, “you’re home now.”

  She quit her English degree two days later.

  Susan often worries about whether she actually loves Leon and whether he actually loves her. There have been signs pointing both ways. Her worry led to a phase last month of picking the petals off daisies one by one, but never saying, “he loves me” or “he loves me not.” The last time she did this she was in elementary school and had had no one in mind. This more recent time was much more distressing, and she hated herself for doing it. Still, she sat in front of the TV and picked at the petals, tossing them onto the coffee table one after another, no longer even keeping track, and vowed never to do anything superstitious again. She simultaneously broke and repeated the vow each time she tore off another petal. Leon came home just as she was about to change the channel. He bent over and kissed her hair, then went to the kitchen. He returned with the dustpan and brush, swept the coffee table clean of petals, and emptied them into the trash.

  Cartooning the end of the world on Post-it notes is not what they pay Susan to do at this new job, but it may as well be. She sits at a computer all day while hundreds of dots pass across the screen representing numbers. Sometimes she answers the phone, and sometimes she lets it ring. When she first arrived at the job two weeks ago, she tried to make her cubicle more homey by sticking black-and-white postcards to the walls with sticky tack. A starlet dressed in sparkling silver, a team of synchronized swimmers in a star formation, a cowboy straddling a fence. Now the cards fall off slowly, one corner at a time, with a little fluttering sound, onto her desk and her lap and her keyboard. She doesn’t put them back up.

  Susan doesn’t often speak to her co-workers in the cubicles on either side of her, although they sometimes flirt across her, their heads poking out the top of the cubicles like the plastic gophers people beat with soft mallets at fun fairs. Not Susan’s kind of fun fairs, of course, but the cotton-candy kind. She often goes to lunch with colleagues but isn’t very good with names, so all she can ever manage to think about while trying to eat her sandwich gracefully is whether this man is called “Frank” or “Rick.” Whenever anyone says “Susan” she cringes because she feels guilty that he knows her name and she doesn’t know his. Mostly people at work think Susan is self-deprecating and shy, but her hunching and shuddering is actually on account of her terrible memory.

  As Susan smushes her toes into the carpet on either edge of the makeshift tightrope, she thinks about the manager of her department at work. He’d been unusually talkative earlier today when she met him at the coffee machine, and he’d told her all about his daughter’s school play, in which she was going to be a star. “Not the star,” he said, “an actual star! Her costume is made out of chicken wire! She has five points!” He’s an extremely small man, though perfectly formed, and Susan is always tempted to touch his wild, wavy hair, which circles his bald spot like an eagle’s nest. She’s never actually reached out and done it, though. This is not an attraction thing. “It’s just a thing,” she’d told Leon last night, who had replied by looking up from his New York Times and saying, “Sixteen across: Meddlesome. N_ S_.”

  “Nosy. Don’t patronize me,” Susan said, without pause.

  “I wasn’t,” he said, circling around the O. “Just drew a blank.”

  Susan has never been good at crossword puzzles, and has been trying very hard to get better. This is another thing she does at work. There is no shoebox for the puzzles because it’s an ongoing quest. Her ex-boyfriend was the best crossworder she’d ever known, and could even do cryptic ones with clues about the Anglo-Saxon word for “helmet” or a type of Gregorian chant or the anatomical term for the space between the upper lip and the nose. She never showed an interest until she was about twenty-five, when her roommates started reading clues out loud at the breakfast table, and she’d felt anti-social for not joining in. Leon had never done a crossword before he met Susan, and now he usually finishes them before she has a chance to see the paper.

  Halfway through Susan’s thirty-seventh trip across the living room, the phone rings. For a moment, she’s uncertain about whether she’s allowed to leave the tightrope to answer it. After three rings she jumps and runs to the coffee table, snatching up the phone just as the answering machine beeps in.

  “Are we being recorded?” her mother asks.

  “I’m afraid so,” Susan replies.

  For precisely two minutes, neither of them speaks. Susan sighs. Her mother coughs. The answering machine beeps again, and they both say “Hello” at the same time.

  “So,” says Susan’s mother.

  “So,” says Susan.

  “Well. The thing is,” she pauses, “you know I miss it.”

  “I know. What is it this time? Has Dr. Harman seen you?”

  “Well, Susan, it’s my hip. I’ve dislocated my hip. Dr. Harman seems to think I can’t really manage this sort of thing on my own. So I was wondering. Where’s Leon? Is Leon home?”

  “He’s at work.”

  “So late? Is he always this late?”

  “No. What do you need?”

  “I need you to come, just for a week or so. I mean, I imagine a week would just about do it.”

  “Of course.”

  They hang up. Susan goes to the bedroom and begins to pack her suitcase. What’s in there already is:

  One spoon.

  One marble hippo, palm-sized.

  Thirty-seven cents.

  One unused tissue.

  A list.

  She packs the rest of her belongings and pauses for a minute, her fluorescent pink lacy underwear that she bought as a joke (but secretly quite likes) dangling from her finger. It occurs to her that maybe this has been the apartment
phase, the job phase, the Leon phase. She packs as much as she can fit in the roll-along suitcase, and heads to her mother’s.

  Before she goes, she leaves a Post-it note on the counter.

  Contortion accident. Love.

  IT WASN’T THE SPORT I WOULD HAVE CHOSEN. That’s the thing about being an Olympian, or any kind of serious athlete, musician, or artist. You don’t decide. Maybe your parents do, or your teachers or your coaches or your friends. One well-timed suggestion and the course of your life is set. But it’s never really you who makes the call. Many people, I’m sure, can’t fully explain why they do what they do for a living. Or they might have a great deal to say, but none of it gets to the heart of the matter. Maybe someone says she became a doctor to help people. But there are lots of useful jobs. Postal workers are immensely helpful, for example. That’s why I find it bewildering when people ask: “Why did you become a lugist?” I just don’t know how to answer that question. I embarrass myself every time. All those repetitive hours of training, those doleful looks from friends who wanted to hang out during sliding times, and I simply have no answer. I didn’t even like toboggans or crazy carpets as a kid, which is a reply I’ve heard my teammate give. No, luge is not something that occurs to a child when he’s at swimming lessons or riding his bike in endless circles in the driveway so his grandmother can keep one eye on him and one eye on Coronation Street. Hockey is the stuff of childhood fantasies. Kids dream of snowboarding, skiing, and speed skating, even. But two-man luge?

  Don’t get me wrong: we’ve always been an athletic family. My dad was a champion hammer-thrower in his day, and my mum is still freakishly good at cartwheels and handsprings from her time as a high-school cheerleader. We went to all the sporting events we could and cheered just as hard for the six-year-olds competing in the potato sack race at the fall fair as we did for the sweepers at the provincial curling championships. So it was just another family outing when my parents, grandparents, and fourteen-year-old me piled into our van and drove to an elementary school in the next town to see my ten-year-old cousin, Jessie, perform in a fundraiser for her Jump Rope Demonstration Team. We cheered her on as we watched her master the double-under, skip backwards with her eyes closed, and kneel atop a human pyramid while turning two ropes in opposite directions. There were little girls bouncing all around, chattering like wind-up toys. They were barely listening to their coach, an older lady who was head-to-toe Eighties in her neon pink, blue, and white tracksuit, with her hair gathered into a voluminous side ponytail. She seemed to be chewing an entire pack of gum with her back molars, which didn’t stop her from hollering tips from the sidelines: “Smile, Becky! It wouldn’t kill you to grin a little!” The gym was enormous, and the basketball hoops, volleyball nets, and gymnastics equipment were all folded against the walls as if to give centre stage to the event of the moment, the other sports tucking themselves away, quiet as moths. “Baby Love” by the Supremes seemed to be playing on a loop. The girls were performing in small groups all around the gym while their families followed the skippers from station to station. It was like a workout circuit for supportive parenthood.

  My cousin’s show-off move was “The Wounded Duck,” and I whistled as she started jumping with her toes together and then clicked her heels back and forth as the rope swung over her head. It was a wonky, sped-up version of the Charleston, and it was somehow graceless and miraculous at the same time. Jump rope was like that: all about the bravura gesture, the one trick that no one else on the team could perform. One tiny red-headed girl did a somersault into the double-dutch set-up and skipped while sitting on the floor, bouncing her bum over the rope while two other skippers turned the long ropes for her. No matter where you were in the room she was the one you couldn’t help watching, the one who held your attention even in a crowd of twenty-odd teammates popping up and down around her. At the end of her routine, she pulled herself up into a perfect bridge position (still skipping), then pushed into a one-handed handstand (still skipping). The crowd stamped their feet and shouted their love, and I found myself spontaneously hollering enthusiasm for her along with everyone else. She couldn’t have been older than eleven, but already she must have known that she would always be the best at these tricks. I guess it must have been the same for my dad when his hammer hit the dust way ahead of everyone else’s, or for my mum when she stretched out her arms to make her body into a perfect letter K. What did it feel like to be so skilled? Would I ever be that good at anything?

  While the red-haired girl took a break after her routine to greet her adoring fans, I lined up to make a donation at the pledge table, which was manned by volunteers from the grade five boys’ basketball team. They were drawing tattoos on each other’s biceps in ballpoint pen and taking turns throwing their empty juice boxes into a distant garbage can as if they were shooting three-pointers. A boy my own age joined me in line and we signed $1 pledges for heart health and received red skipping ropes for our contributions.

  “What are you going to do with yours?” he asked, flicking me playfully on the shoulder with the coiled jump rope he’d just been given.

  I told him I’d read that boxers use them to stay agile on their feet. I was trying to sound tough, even though my arm was still stinging from where he’d hit me. “And Floyd Mayweather is the best skipper of all time,” he said. “True story.” He grinned at me as he unfurled his rope and started to skip, first on one foot and then the other, boxer-style. Although he was still a little lanky, he had the swagger of a champion fighter, and his feet danced quick and light as the rope fluttered faster and faster around him like a blur of tiny wings. The way he skipped, his triceps flexing as he pulled the rope over his head nonchalantly, had all the grace and ease and finesse that the little girls lacked. He was literally jumping for joy, which made me want to join in. The more I watched him, the more I felt as though my own feet were hovering just slightly above the ground. Eventually, he twirled the rope to a stop, slung it over his shoulder, and as he gave me a gentle punch on the arm, he said he was glad he’d come to the demonstration.

  He said it as if we’d had a choice, but if you knew any eight-year-old girl in the whole Peace River region, even simply by name, who could skip double dutch or cross her arms over or do the grapevine, you were there. Them’s the rules. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that I could have said that to him. Made the conversation last a little longer. Still, if I hadn’t tagged along with my family for a day of Razzle Dazzles and Turning Rodeos, I wouldn’t have met him that first time.

  Of course, I’m not the first to question my vocation. There are newspaper editorials all the time attacking the Winter Olympics and questioning what they mean as an institution. Sports like two-man luge, or “doubles luge,” as it’s sometimes called, get the wrong end of the stick in pieces like this. “Luge: A Death Trap for Dummies?” is my latest favourite headline. “Luge is the fastest and most dangerous of the Olympic sliding sports,” the journalist writes, “with athletes travelling at speeds close to 160 km per hour and experiencing centrifugal forces of up to 3Gs – equivalent to those faced by NASCAR drivers – on tight corners. Common injuries include broken bones and concussions. Accidents resulting from poor track maintenance can be fatal. In light of the sport’s dangers, we have to ask ourselves: Why are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars so that athletes can slide down icy man-made tracks at ridiculously fast speeds?”

  My mum often asks the same kinds of questions. She wouldn’t let me play rugby when I was in grade ten because she objected to any sport where you have to tape your ears to your head so they don’t get ripped right off. But in luge we keep our chins tucked in to minimize resistance, which doesn’t seem so different. There are helmets to protect our noggins, so that’s something. I’ve never been hurt badly, but bruises are part of any athlete’s job. For us they blossom in the smalls of our backs, right where the body meets the sled. Of course, there are occupational hazards in any job. I’ve been lucky; my injuries have been r
elatively minor, but you never know what’s going to happen when you push yourself to be that split second faster. That’s the goal, to subtract more and more time from every run so you’re speedier than you think you can be. Sure, there’s always the chance that you might push it too far, might fly off the track, but you have to take risks if you want a shot at that one great run.

  The next time I met the jump-a-thon boy was at a regional track meet three years later. We were both seventeen, nearly through high school by then, and running the 1500m. I loved running long distances on my own. It was a way to test the borders of myself, to see where the ground beneath my feet ended and I began. Eventually, I found it hard to think without the thud of my running shoes striking the track. I liked running until my legs were numb and my body felt as though it were a sort of watermill, moving of its own accord. I liked varying my speed and distances and testing out my legs to see what they were good for. I liked going until I was past my limits and my whole body gave up and I had to throw up in the bushes and stagger home. I even liked circuit training at six in the morning, doing crunches with a twenty-pound weight in each hand, holding the plank position until I buckled, and, yes, skipping rope. I disliked homework, house parties, and snow shovels, which were the other things I spent a lot of time with. I was bad at saying no.