by Amy Bloom
She’d never had a man in the house without Mr. O’Neill around and I knew she’d never met a man like my father. I left your father in the parlor, she said. No, ma’am, my father said, right behind her. He looked down at the naked babies and me and I wrapped them both up and handed them to Mrs. O’Neill, who stood beside me. Mrs. O’Neill was a pretty Boston rosebud and she would not be saving me from Addison Hickok. Lorena is like a member of the family, she said. She’s such a help.
My father nodded. He said it was best that I move with him and Myrtle and Miz Min to Aberdeen. He said that whatever I was doing for this family, I could do for another. He said they was starting over in Aberdeen and could use my wages. To Mrs. O’Neill he said, Thank you for putting up with Lorena. I stood in my little room until he called my name. I got my cardboard box and went back to the kitchen, where Mrs. O’Neill gave me a hug, and pressed fifty cents into my hand on the sly. The two kids waved goodbye from the floor. On the way out the door, I stole a stamp from Mr. O’Neill’s desk, to send a note to Ruby in Wisconsin, about us heading for Aberdeen, which I did never get to. Miz Min was waiting with the wagon, and Myrtle lay in the back, sprawled across two suitcases. I climbed in back and Myrtle kicked at me, to keep me from getting comfortable. As it was getting dark, we pulled up in front of an old farm. Men were sitting on benches in the front and smoke curled up from their pipes and a small campfire. My father said, This here’s your stop. I’ll hold on to your pay. Miz Min didn’t say a word and Myrtle stuck out her tongue, which was the last time I ever saw her.
An old lady opened the door.
“I’m Mrs. Cotter. You’re Lorena. Your father says you can cook. You’ll be the cook,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said.
I saw Mrs. Cotter take my measure, rawboned and broad-shouldered in a made-over dress. People had been sizing me up for a year. They’d been looking hard.
“You don’t look sneaky,” she said.
“No, ma’am, I’m a straight shooter.”
“Well, what choice do you have,” she said. “Looking like you do.”
She tossed me a couple of peanuts from an open sack on the floor.
“I’ll pay a dollar a week, you can sleep in the kitchen, and no nocturnal visitation, you know what I’m saying?”
“I’m not expecting any visitors,” I said.
I slept on a bedroll in the kitchen, cooking for the threshers for three weeks. All the farmers had got together to hire threshers. Two boys my age had come to the threshing with their uncle. They said the settling up at the end was usually more of a party than anything else. The men sat at long tables, drinking, and the farmers with single daughters made small talk with the men who’d stood out as hard workers.
“It’s a big party,” Bernie said. “You can get yourself a husband.”
His brother laughed and so did I.
“You can get yourself a beer,” Jim said.
* * *
—
It was bad weather for weeks, and the settling up seemed likely to never come. The farmers’ wives and daughters were cooking overtime. I was blistered and dirty with burns striped to my elbow. I learned how to cook for a crowd. The boys sat by the fire with me most nights while I lay down near the stove because my feet couldn’t take it anymore. Bernie said he heard that this settling up was going to be ugly. He said it didn’t look like payday was going to come for them. I said their uncle didn’t seem to be looking out for them and Bernie said, Uncle, my white ass. Bernie said they might hitch a ride out on the lumber wagon when it came by tomorrow before breakfast. Jim said, Hell yes, they might, and he showed me a red wool sock with three silver dollars in it.
“Come on, Hick,” Bernie said. “Come with. Ain’t nothing good gonna happen to you here.”
I stretched out on the floor, not minding the soot or the embers. I was almighty tired and I was as dirty as the boys.
“Go on and take something,” Jim said. “We’ll be lookout.”
I crept down the hall to the old man’s desk. I gathered myself. I wiped my hands on my skirt and went drawer by drawer through his big oak desk. I found a little drawer, shaped like a cube and running the whole of the desk from front to back, hidden under a pretty square of bird’s-eye maple. I held up two silver dollars and the boys whooped, quietly. I felt that great tide inside, danger and joy rising and falling, and I grabbed Mrs. Cotter’s gray felt church hat and their best bread knife and put them both in my cardboard box.
The boys and I walked down to the bend and we waited until the lumber wagon came in and then drove out, slowing a bit as it came to the cottonwood we hid behind. The lumberman said, So, three of you, not two. That’s another dollar. The boys looked at me and I gave the man one of my dollars. We rode, like brothers and sister, to the train station, and the boys shook my hand. They lit out for better times in Oregon and I made up my mind, as we stood in the train yard, that it was me for Chicago with jobs and schools and my mother’s sister, my Aunt Ella.
The trainman called and I held on to my box and my ticket. I fixed the gray hat so I could pass for sixteen. My father ran onto the train, sweating and hatless, yelling at me to come back and do my job. Come run the house. He said Mrs. Cotter told him I’d run off and he said I was on the road to ruin. I stayed in my seat. He said he washed his hands of me. I said that we were even, that I washed my hands of him too. It should have been that he admired my spine and my spunk, but he slapped me across the face and knocked my new hat off. I pressed myself against the window, gripping the box so hard, I put my fingers through it and felt the knife handle. I wrapped my fingers around it and let him see. One couple looked at me and I mimed drinking from a bottle and they shook their heads and I thought, You people will not see me dragged off this train. I held on to the wicker seat until the train began to move and my father jumped off.
* * *
—
Eleanor fell asleep in Oneida.
At dawn, she kissed me on the forehead. You are a wonderful storyteller, she said. She left me to wash up and came back, armored, in another fresh blouse and a stiff blue jacket.
“Like Boadicea,” I said, showing off. “Queen of the Iceni.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Great warrior. Go on with the story.”
She fixed my collar.
“And do spruce up a little,” Eleanor said.
Churchill said (to me, in fact), Criticism is like pain. It’s not fun but if it doesn’t hurt, no one pays attention.
Brother and Sister in One Body
I said to Eleanor, My own education began on the train to Chicago. I described the short man in a loud checked suit, walking past me, his manicured hand brushing the back of my seat, steadying himself and rolling with the train. He pushed back his boater and patted his face with a white handkerchief.
He said: Ladies and Gentlemen, I am Lucius P. Wilson.
He gave his ballyhoo and I loved every long, unlikely, and ridiculous sentence.
He said, “Let me introduce you to the seventh, eighth, and ninth Wonders of the World. You may not have expected to find us here in Lake Preston, in Plankinton, in Groton and Brookings, making our magnificent way to Minn-ee-sot-a, by golly, land of a thousand lakes, land of beautiful Indian maidens and their fearsome bucks, culminating in one of our biggest shows ever with the lucky folks of Red Wing, who have begged us, by letter and telegram to return to them with our grand and formidable elephants who have adopted Kiki, our adorable baby hippo, straight from the mud baths of Africa. Our Lipizzaner horses, led by the maestro Tip McCarthy, the greatest horseman of this century, bar none, are in our show under the banner of Showalter’s Spectacular Pyrotechnic Pageant. We’ve got shows and acts for everyone. Bring the old folks and let them gaze with rare delight upon the Forestina Sisters, those queens of the air, with their amazing acrobatics. Husbands, bring your wives. Ladies, bring the menfolk, and you can all enjoy our show of the Golden Orient, starring a bevy of beauties never seen before. Culture, uplift, a
nd that ain’t all….”
“Whatcha think, girlie?” he said. “Gonna get your ma and pa to bring you and the rest of the clan to see us in Brookings? That’s our last stop here in sunny South Dakota.”
I told him I didn’t have parents and I was headed for Chicago.
“No parents,” he said. “How you getting by?”
I told him, a little stiffly, that I got by and he waved a hand at me.
“I’m not asking about your general welfare. You look like a big, smart girl. I figure you know your stuff, I bet you know how to take shorthand—”
I nodded. Mrs. O’Neill had an old book of the Pitman system from when she’d been a secretary and when Mr. O’Neill worked late, and the babies were asleep, we did practice together. I could write a short letter.
“And you look to me to be eighteen, which you would have to be to take me up on the offer I am making you now, to join Showalter’s Show of Shows, the Étoile du Nord Traveling Circus, of which I am only a humble representative and the advance man, Lucius P. Wilson.”
He made a little bow. I bobbed down and did not say, I am almost fourteen years old and I got one dollar in my pocket.
“Am I right about you? You got a head for figures and you can read and write real well and, can you type, sister?”
I said I could, which was a lie, but I had seen pictures of people using typewriters and I knew my alphabet and I was a demon speller.
“I am a demon speller,” I said.
“I’m never wrong,” Mr. Wilson said. “You got a hairbrush or something like it?”
I put my hand up automatically, and I lowered it. I was being eighteen now. I knew shorthand and I could type now. I was a valuable commodity and this was a man with thinning blond hair and a sharp suit with grease spots on the lapel.
“I can smarten up,” I said.
He grinned at me. “All right. Can you lose the hat? Smile a little, that’ll be swell. If you just can’t and folks ask you why you look so goddamn downhearted, you say your mother was Melina, the Lion Queen, and she was mauled to death only last week by one of her own tigers. Oh, looky here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “That’s a smile.”
We got out at Tyndall, which was a bigger town than Bowdle, bigger than Aberdeen and therefore, to me, a proper city. A man in a Model T drove us to the edge of a wide brown field, spread out for acres and flat as a tabletop. We got out.
I saw pennants and gold-fringed banners being hoisted up, huge white canvas squares, each the size of a roof, lying on the ground, being pulled up by men in undershirts and loose green pants and high work boots. Yards of dirty rope, like giant garter snakes, lay coiled everywhere. A blond woman in a man’s jacket and dirty white tights and white boots led two dusty palomino horses across the field. A pair of dark-haired girls walked past with belts of gold fringe around their waists and gold clips shining in their hair, each with a monkey in a gold fringe vest, sitting on her shoulder, screaming while the girls walked and talked. Men unloaded horses, dogs, pigs, and an elephant, red-eyed and slow. A man in overalls fed the elephant handfuls of hay as they walked together. More men wrestled with canvas tents, wires, and pulleys. It was like the inside of a grand clock, sweat and swearing making the gears go round. Red and blue wagons lined the perimeter, their steps thrown down, their shutters closed against the heat. I smelled overcooked vegetables and frying meat, the smell of a farm dinner. I must have looked orphaned. Lucius poked me.
“We can go by the cookhouse later,” he said. “But you gotta start work today. I’m behind.”
He hit me on the fanny and I took no notice. We walked straight to his wagon, which was two rooms with a narrow door between them.
“This here is reception,” he said. “Someone comes, you knock on my door and you say, Mr. Wilson, and you tell me who it is and I come out.”
I sat down on one of the chairs, with my hands in my lap, pulling on the brim of my hat. Mr. Wilson took my hat away from me.
“I’m burning this,” he said.
We worked in the reception room all afternoon. I sorted papers, filed receipts and bills, and wrote down the names of all the town officials and businessmen and the police officers of every town we’d be going to. He said that he was glad to have a smart and serious girl in the office and that he felt sure there was nothing about me or my person that was going to bring drama or lunacy to Showalter’s, for which he personally would be grateful.
I said, “You mean you didn’t bring me here to be in the cooch show?”
“Good one,” he said.
He said I had no cause to worry, no one was going to let me actually handle money. He said I was going to live in a wagon with two other girls and to not make trouble.
“I’ll make an effort,” I said. I liked being eighteen.
We ate our fried beef pies in the reception area. Men were still working outside by electric light. He said I’d be bunking with Betsy the Lobster Girl, who was a good girl who got tired of bunking with her parents, the Lobster Man and Lady. And you got Maryann, the Alligator Girl, he said. A smart-ass. He told me that Showalter’s freaks (They call themselves freaks, he said. Nothing wrong with that.) came from every part of the country where people put their not-right children in attics and root cellars and haylofts. There were freaks from Alabama and Mississippi, which you’d expect, he said, but also from New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Mr. Wilson said, “Western Pennsylvania was a gold mine. We got Legless Louis there and Dimples Delight.”
He said that Mr. Showalter still drove up to people’s houses, if he heard they had a freak in the family, or he’d be driven by Lucius Wilson himself, who’d pave the way, a Bible in one hand and a contract in his pocket. Sometimes, the parents beg you to take their kid, to give the kid a chance. Sometimes, he said, the kids beg you, so they don’t have to live out their days in the cellar. He handed me a flour sack for my things.
The girls’ wagon was a tidy navy blue with white scalloped trim around the windows. It looked like a school dress in a catalogue. Mr. Wilson knocked and we waited at the bottom of the stairs. I heard their voices and quick steps to the door. The Alligator Girl let us in. She was in a green terry bathrobe and shorter than me, covered with a thick, bumpy hide, exactly like a pink alligator. The rough, uneven skin ran up most of her face and around her eyes, like a mask. She stood with a book in one hand and when she saw me, she sat back on her bed and began to read, furiously.
Her roommate, the Lobster Girl, was small and pretty with hands fused into large pink claws. She was whitening her shoes like a regular girl. I ducked, not to bang my head getting in the little wagon. I saw two built-in bunks on opposite sides, like pictures I’d seen of ships’ quarters, and a folding cot with a green blanket, between them, for me. I stood there, holding my flour sack.
“Well, aren’t you Gulliver among the Lilliputians,” the Alligator Girl said. “Plus, you have a flour sack.”
The Lobster Girl laughed and said, “Jeez, Maryann. She can’t help it if she’s not a shrimp like us.”
Mr. Wilson bowed and walked out, saying, This here is Lorena Hickok, she’s working in the front office, so mind your manners.
I had nothing to change into and the two of them watched me sit on the end of the cot. Both of them were deformed and disfigured and probably not even safe out in the wide world, but at Showalter’s Étoile du Nord, we faced off as three teenage girls. The other two had real beds and shampoo and toothpaste and they were the right size for this wagon and I was odd man out.
“Do you have nightclothes?” Maryann, the Alligator Girl, said, and I shook my head.
Maryann said, “Nothing I have would fit you.”
She held up two small pink nightgowns.
“How about you, Betsy?” she said.
Betsy said, with great kindness, “You can sleep in your underclothes, Lorena. Tomorrow, I’ll tell Miss Paula that you could use a few things. There’ll be something, there always is.”
“I guess,�
�� Maryann said. “You’re big. I always wanted to have a bit more presence but ‘can one desire too much of a good thing?’ That’s from As You Like It.”
“Jiminy, Maryann,” Betsy said. “Who cares? Sleep tight, Lorena. Dream of handsome men.”
She giggled and I thought we could be friends.
I put my clothes and my socks on my cot and stood there in my shabby underwear, in agony.
“We’re not modest,” Maryann said. “What’s the point? I mean, c’est pour quoi?”
I said good night. I would have picked up that Maryann was an educated girl, even if she didn’t have a leather set of Shakespeare on a shelf over her bed. She saw me looking.
“Do you adore Shakespeare?” she said. I didn’t answer right away. I had never used the word adore in my life. Maryann sighed and pulled up her blanket.
“Welcome to the wagon, Lorena.”
Maryann put out the lamp over her bed and Betsy did the same. I lay in the dark, for a long time, crying into the flat pillow and looking out the window over Betsy’s bunk. Men were moving around. I saw the firefly ends of their cigarettes.
* * *
—
In the morning, both girls were gone, beds made, towels hung up.
Mr. Wilson knocked on the wagon door. He picked up a couple of doughnuts for us and said that probably I needed a bigger breakfast but it would have to wait, because he was behind in everything. Miss Paula, the costume manager, had been and gone, leaving behind a pair of patched men’s trousers, with a thick belt, a pair of what Mr. Wilson called Turkish slippers (shoes with the satin toes curled up and the sole very thin), and a soft, clean man’s shirt. I changed and took dictation in my bare feet, to save my slippers, sitting under an old sign that said Delight, Entertain, Mystify, making notes while Mr. Wilson read off the list of who to bribe in Tyndall for tomorrow’s show. He handed me a cup of coffee. I wasn’t going to Chicago, just yet, or to high school, or to find my kind Aunt Ella. This here was an adventure. A big man with a pointed beard stuck his head in. Mr. Wilson jumped up.
