She can no longer bear to dwell on the moment, and yet as she marches along the path, through the overgrown brush, as she pushes away the occasional low-slung branch that lashes at her, thin as a whip, she can do nothing but think on the moment. The path in the woods appears to her as a graveyard: a discarded buggy to her left, old newspapers, some empty water jugs long ago forgotten. Beyond the warm breeze that catches the leaves and tosses them like wishes, she hears— almost imperceptibly—the sound of her heart, still beating despite everything, still clinging to love because it is the heart that is assigned the burden of such a task. So often forsaken when it risks, when it favors not tomorrow or someday or once upon a time but the moment—the actual, unfolding moment—it is the task of the heart to uncover itself and break and mend. It is the task of the idiot heart to recover.
But now Sissy believes she will never recover. It is all too difficult, this process of growing up. Thinking on this, puzzled, she is a girl suddenly too proud for tears. Pollen drifts up from the disturbed branches. She sneezes, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Smoke clings to her T-shirt and she is dizzy, the woods around her a twirl, a blur, a high spin. For the first time since she left the beach she realizes that not only is she brokenhearted but she is also terribly, ravenously hungry. She is so hungry she could snap a branch and gnaw on bark and pulp.
Still, no matter how hungry she is, no matter how thirsty she becomes, she vows not to go back to the beach and their smoke-screened laughter. She would rather be ravaged by wild boars. She would prefer to be lost in the forest than face the horrible, confusing repertoire of teens.
Just let them come and find her—she will be gone, just like Vicki, her best friend! (How mythic Vicki Anderson becomes in the light of memory, how reinvented.) Sissy will hide in the woods forever, and never go back. Thinking on this sweet victory, Eva and Greg suddenly regretting their selfishness, regretting the loss of Sissy Kisch, future performer, future ghost detective, keeper of a hundred dogs and cats, tamer of everything wild, she feels immensely satisfied. Emboldened, she lets out a barrage of curses that improves her stride and momentarily firms her resolve. But, when she hears a noise—the flurry of squirrels over leaves, the break of twigs—she stops, suddenly worried that Eva is correct—that their father may indeed be omnipresent, or that maybe a madman lurks by the water, waiting to grab her suddenly and make her scream. She looks around and tells herself: No one is here. No one will care. The fractured light pours down through the branches and the clouds dot the sky, a spattering of thumbprints.
She does not stop until she follows the path back toward the park, to the swimming hole that she and Vicki Anderson visited—empty today. She bends down, plucks some ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits that carpet the banks under willows. She finds berries that are bloodred, positively poisonous. She picks them anyway, careful not to squeeze so hard that juice stains her fingers. She takes all these things to the river’s edge, letting her feet sink into the mud as she releases them. She says an incantation, garbled but well intended.
She will never go back. She will journey onward, forever. She thinks: I am never, ever going home again.
“Fuck them all,” she whispers.
The thing that happens when you denounce the everyday world, the thing that happens when you deem everyone except yourself irritating, is that you are faced with the prospect of an incredibly lonely existence. Sitting on a limestone, Sissy listens to the birds that sing eerily overhead and to the rippling water that pools into rapids. The slanted light dances on the water, speckles it like a luminescent wing.
She pulls a thin branch from the overhanging limb, checking to see if it might support her weight. It snaps easily and falls into the water. Across the bank, the peeling birches form shapes of lids and dark chestnut-colored eyes. The knots lapse into uneven circles. The tall grass trembles.
If the everyday world fails her, there is still another under the water, a pulse of music, an ancient place that always beckons, a world not like her mother’s swirling ash, not like the gray moths that float into nothingness, but something else, a world Sissy is already creating for herself, a world she is already shaping into existence. Sissy closes her eyes, and there, on the facing bank, stands a majestic white horse, its harness adorned with a feathery plume. The horse whinnies and snorts before galloping off into the woods, between the thick trees. There on the facing bank, below the trees with their ropey vines, there in the tall grasses, she spots the shape of the golden, chatoyant eye. A lion rises and paces before bending its head over the river and lapping up water. It roars. A thrill moves through Sissy, electrifies her skin.
And there, again, Vicki Anderson appears from seemingly nowhere, thin and pale in the light, stranger and more ghostly but also perhaps more beautiful, an alabaster shape, a moving statue. It seems as though she has always been here, waiting for Sissy in the ferns, somewhere near the edge of the water. “You’re not dead,” Sissy says. “I didn’t want you to be dead, dead. I haven’t forgotten you.”
Vicki bends down and picks ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits, tossing them into the water. She pets the lion, running her hands through its fur. If it is a dream, if it is play the dream is still elusive. Sissy senses it might be pulled from her, easily, as one might pull a thread and unstitch a garment layer by layer, piece by piece. She wants to slip off the rock, swim over to the adjacent bank, and touch Vicki. But it is a growing knowledge that holds her here and keeps her hands planted firmly under her buttocks. If she moves, everything will be broken. If Sissy reaches Vicki, Vicki will disappear. Instead she tells her, quietly, the things she’s wanted to say, which is finally, mostly, only that she’s sorry—sorry about cutting her hair—it was an accident; the blade seemed to go down on itself and that was that—and sorry that she didn’t call to Vicki that day she saw her on her bike, heading down to the park. “Would it have made a difference at all?” she asks. “Would you have even turned around?” And she asks, finally, about God and if death really does or doesn’t exist and if heaven looks like Valley Forge, the way she always imagined. She wants so many answers, she is breathless. She wishes she had someone to talk to, someone who would talk back.
This is the way the story goes, Sissy thinks. Vicki Anderson walked through the forest. Vicki Anderson marched down the weedy paths to the river, sad because of a boy, sad because of her mother. She wanted to hurl herself into the cool water and let it take her in completely. She wanted to drown in the water. She heard a bird’s sound and turned to find a crow, fluttering its wings, hopping along a nearby branch. The crow had muddy eyes. She reached for it and it disappeared. She looked at herself in the water, her face rounded, her freckles gone. She dove into the water, but instead of sinking she floated, the force of the water lifting her until she floated above it, until she realized that she didn’t have arms anymore but wings. This is the way, Sissy decides, the story will go.
She sits quietly for an hour, composing a tale she can believe. She sits until she hears noises and sudden laughter: high-pitched, squealing laughter, and for the first time, she realizes that it has started to rain. “Sissy!” she hears in a chorus of voices. “Sissy Kiss,” she hears from Eva. Their tone not unkind. “Come on, Sissy Kiss,” she hears. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming! We’re coming to take you home.”
They are always traveling. In early September, they come by train along tracks that once transported coal to the region, along rails that hum in the heat, a low metallic sound that gradually ascends into a rumble as the train passes, metal hitting metal, the wheels flattening pennies left by children who wait to collect the thin copper and then wear the shiny discs around their necks, medallions for good luck, coins that transform them into kings.
A whistle. Blue cars and red cars emblazoned with gold lettering, lavish wagons with carved windows and flower beds—Gypsy wagons that transport performers who swing on the trapeze, dancers who twist upon wires—as well as flatcars and boxcars painted pink with waves of pea
ch undulating like psychedelia. On the beds sit massive chunks of machinery, pieces of the carousel and Ferris wheel, the tilt-a-whirl and whip, the spider and bumper cars, the maze of mirrors. Tractors, too, sit idle, waiting to pull and haul equipment. Eighty beds in all, snaking down the tracks, towering against the sky. Around the corner the train chugs into town and slows, finally, to a halt. And with the arrival on an otherwise ordinary day there is crazy hoopla, ascending conversations, fluttering activity. Crowds gather to watch; couples with children point and chatter happily, snapping photographs and instant Polaroids as burly men unload equipment and escort llamas and horses and elephants down dusty ramps. Work crews and teamsters descend with ropes and harnesses. Three men—one red-faced with a wiry-looking beard; one with an octopus tattoo curling down his arm; the other with a cap and black vest—bark out orders about where equipment should be taken and erected. One of them ropes the wagons to tractors and carts them across the field, the smell of wood on his hands and bare back.
On this same day, others suddenly appear in town, arriving in campers and motor homes. They park at the edges of the field, near the tracks. Rosary beads and dice and coins hang on rearview mirrors; state stickers plaster the windows: ten, twenty, thirty states, from Florida to Maine and out to Wyoming. There is noise then, more noise: banging pots and Coltrane’s jazz blaring out the windows. Women appear in trousers and T-shirts, silver bracelets littering their arms, turquoise rings on every finger. They string lines from trailer to trailer and hang out wash. Others appear, performers dressed noticeably well in tight shirts and pants that hug their slender curves.
The world’s fattest woman—four hundred pounds of impenetrable, dimpled flesh—the wolf boy, a horse two feet tall, a midget who swallows fire and spits it out again, a lion trainer looking for a lover in the belly of a mangy beast. A spectacle for all to see, this circus, this circus hired to celebrate a town that was established two hundred years before, to celebrate people, those who first came from overseas, mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and children with dark eyes and empty stomachs. All those who crossed borders and oceans for steel and coal, to work in mines and plants that would, over time, catch fire and burn or shut down completely. Long ago, they came with their hope inside them. They settled and rooted, gave birth to more children, those who grew and stayed in this same town and rooted in it again, like seeds scattered outward, in circles, from trees. They told stories to their children, stories of small towns and things remembered across time, they gave hope that their families held within them, dreams they kept.
The crews move quickly and efficiently. The men lug out canvases worn from age and lay them flat on the ground, like faded suns seeping into the grass. They erect tents on poles, snapping them up in the air, securing them with cross-wires and metal. Teamsters, some of whom consist of local hires made quickly, without question—men who range from the unemployed to the transient, drunk, and indigent—help haul equipment, and then collect pay. A few children play nearby with blocks and sticks. Later, as the tasks of the day are completed and the circus tops and stands and rides are assembled, men roll barrels from the train and place sheets of plywood over the rusted lips. They sit around these ready-made tables on folded chairs and play stud. Some of them, in a boozy swagger, will ante up their wives instead of quarters.
Downtown on this Thursday afternoon, on the ordinarily quiet cobblestone streets left to pedestrian traffic, activity heightens in anticipation of the bicentennial celebration. Natalia leaves Sissy to congregate with girls from school: Beth Trexler, Dana Salazar, and Dawn Grath, children of mothers Natalia knows distantly from sporadic school functions. “Behave,” she says to Sissy. “Don’t get lost.” Then she heads into Orr’s for their basement sale, and Sissy watches as her mother strides away, the line of smooth underwear showing through her white pants, her flats clicking against the pavement.
The girls walk to Toys and Magic on Main, marveling over the circus advertisements that line the telephone poles—clowns with red bulbous noses and dunce caps juggle balls into perfectly ordered arcs; an Asian woman in purple tights and a tutu flies on a trapeze; a blonde, skinny as a candlestick, poises atop a wire; a lion jumps through a ring of flames; a man with charcoal hair and a sinister mustache curled up at the ends shouts into a microphone. One poster obscures a photograph of Vicki Anderson that, in the heat and rain, has grown shredded and worn. Gone, Sissy thinks, almost the entire summer. There were times, in the unending quest for possible career paths and worldly achievement, when Vicki spoke of joining a circus and swinging high above the ground like a daredevil. Sissy loses herself in this thought momentarily, but then is swept up in the girls’ chatter—the plans for bumper car rides and dunking booth attempts, for cotton candy and funnel cakes. The weekend will bring not only the circus but also craft shows on Main Street, stands with crocheted dolls, wicker wreathes, knitted boots, and wooden signs engraved with street addresses. Whitewashed rickety booths have already been erected on the square with signs featuring pierogies from the Polish church; kraut, kielbasa, and bratwurst stands; apple fritter stations. At the close of the weekend, fireworks will pop and crackle in the sky, a hiss of fire raining down like spent stars. In honor of the celebration, Mr. Morris, owner of Toys and Magic, has erected a giant LEGO Ferris wheel in the window. The entire wheel spins, making it a desired object among the girls today, though the sign next to it clearly reads NOT FOR SALE.
The girls prattle on and make animated displays with their hands. Beth tells them all about a circus she went to in Florida and how her father slipped into a tent to watch a girlie show late at night. As she speaks, her top rises over her plump stomach, and her pink glasses slide down her nose. “That’s nothing,” Dawn, the most worldly of the girls, exclaims. “I got stuck in the house of glass once. It was dreadful. I thought I’d die of embarrassment.”
“Dreadful,” Sissy says, marveling over Dawn’s creamy complexion, her obsidian hair and strikingly blue eyes.
They plan what rides and amusements will be of most interest, what prizes they hope to win. Sissy impulsively partakes in all this, though there is still the task of asking her mother if she might go at all. Things have been busier of late: Her mother has been working at the florist; her father has been working odd jobs that sometimes keep him out until all hours of the morning. She and Eva have been sent on errands, paying for things at the grocery store, the last dollar counted in change.
“I saw them,” Michael Massit calls. He pedals fast on his bike, his lanky form upsetting his center of gravity. His blond hair shines, as does his pug nose. Although there is a collective effort on the part of the girls to ignore him, he stops, finally, breaking up their huddle. He grins. “I saw them.” For no earthly reason, he flexes arm muscles he doesn’t have.
“Saw who?” Dawn asks, narrowing her eyes. She stands with her body kinked, one hand on a hip like a model.
“Carnies. That’s what my dad calls them. Performers, drifters. They all used to come by train, you know; now only one or two do.”
“What happened to the rest?” Beth asks, her interest piqued. She pops a huge bubble and peels it from her mouth.
Sissy leans against the toy store window and folds her arms haughtily. “He doesn’t know. He’s only pretending he knows.”
“I do too know.” He says this with such authority that Sissy doubts herself immediately. She slumps more, acting as though she can barely be bothered to listen. She lifts her hand and inspects her fingernails. Michael pauses for several moments before speaking again, knowing that, regardless of Sissy’s newly found nonchalance, he has everyone’s attention. “Well, some of them were sold and some of them went broke and some of them come by bus and truck now.” He lowers his voice, which causes two of the girls to lean in. “Carnies are tricksters and thieves. My dad says if anyone comes to the door saying their car broke down, it’s a trick. They keep you busy at the front door while the others sneak in your back door and steal from you.”
“It was in the paper, moron. My dad read it to me. Crazy stuff!” Michael shakes his head, mulling it all over.
The girls exchange glances, their excitement visible and imaginations running wildly ahead of them like galloping horses. Sissy pictures women in long skirts and bandanas swooping into the house like vultures, sneaking out with her television and diary in hand. She opens her mouth to argue, though she doesn’t know why she wishes to argue with Michael at all. She doesn’t even read the paper; she doesn’t know what he’s said that’s true or not. She watches as Dawn lifts her sweet-smelling necklace and nibbles candy from it. She bites one off for each of the girls and passes it to them, speaking now of the carnies, saying it as though it is a dirty word.
“My dad is what you’d call a minor enthusiast, ” Michael continues. “Back in seventy-two one of the trains was even flooded right here in PA. Some flipped off the rails, killing people and animals. Some disappeared, and now they’re here again, and I’ve seen them.”
Sissy takes all this in, thinking that if it’s true about the accidents and about the disappearances then they are a cursed lot, all of them, and no amount of crossing could possibly change their luck. Absurd and outlandish permutations of Michael’s story race through her mind: a doomed people, drifting from town to town, searching for lost family wandering like Gypsies. She bites her nail, horrified by the last thought, wondering if she’ll have to take extra precautions with her bedroom window, or perhaps spend the weekend tucked in Eva’s bed.
Precious Page 20
