Sideshow

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “I do,” said Bertran, wiping his eyes on his forearm. “It’s real, that story. Things are like that, they are.”

  “Only a fairy tale,” said his mother, shocked at the depth of his feeling. “Berty, it’s only a story!”

  “Real,” he insisted. “The way he feels.”

  “You know,” said Marla in a slightly confused and worried voice, “if you practice, very soon you’ll read well enough to read to yourselves. Then you can each read what you like.”

  She wiped Nela’s tears and found herself longing for the person who had once wiped her own tears, her older sister Sizzy. It had always been Sizzy who had read to Marla when she was a child, always Sizzy who comforted her when things went wrong. Sizzy had left home long ago. Sizzy would be in her forties by now. Marla hadn’t heard from her in over two years and didn’t even know for certain she was still alive, but at that moment, wiping Nela’s tears away, powerless to help whatever was really wrong, Marla wanted Sizzy very badly.

  When the twins were six, they went to first grade at Holy Redeemer parochial school. The nun in charge—the school actually had a nun in charge, and some teaching nuns as well, despite the diminishing number of religious nationwide—made a halfhearted attempt to refuse them admittance on the grounds they didn’t live in the parish. There were other nonparish children in the school, however, and Marla had a few choice words to say about the Pope’s stand on birth control and the sanctity of life, ending with the question: Would Sister have preferred that the twins had been aborted?

  Sister, shamefaced, said no, and forgive me, and we’ll work it out somehow. The perennial rest-room question came up yet again, and was solved simply by letting the twins use the private toilet off the teachers’ lounge, which was, presumably, unisex anyhow. Marla bought a duplicate of the small stool the children used at home, one they could move from one side of the toilet to the other, as necessity demanded, so both could sit while one was eliminating.

  There was some teasing from the other kids to begin with, though old Sister Jean Luc soon put a stop to that. The twins sat at the back of the room, so the other students couldn’t stare, occupying two chairs set side by side behind a small table brought in from the library where it had formerly held the big dictionary. Everyone tried very hard to be understanding and civilized, and the twins did not feel at all handicapped at any intellectual level.

  Sports were something else again. The only exercise they were able to engage in was walking, which they managed in the manner of a three-legged race; Bertran, wearing his elevator shoes, his inside arm about Nela’s shoulders, Nela’s inside arm thrust into the front of her jacket, their outside arms swinging freely. The only problem with walking any distance was that neither of them enjoyed it very much. Their single heart had to work quite hard just to keep them both going; putting extra strain upon it fatigued them both to exhaustion.

  Anything that required hitting a moving ball was out. Anything involving hitting a stationary ball was out, since neither of them could get their arms into a good position for whacking anything. Sister Jean Luc found them crying in the teachers’ lounge one afternoon after a particularly trying attempt at kickball.

  “Why?” demanded Bertran, more angry than sad. “Why are we like this, Sister? We can’t do anything! Why?”

  Marla would have told them to be patient, it was only for a time. Sister Jean Luc was less comforting though more truthful. She had a strong feeling that if the children could be separated, someone would have done it by now, that encouraging them to think they could be separated was much akin to lying to them.

  “God always has a purpose for everything,” she said firmly. “The fact that you were born in this strange way and must live differently means that God needs something from you he cannot get from ordinary people. Of course it is hard. Being a tool in God’s hands is always hard.” Sister Jean Luc considered herself a tool in God’s hands, knew how hard it was, and believed what she was saying. Her words were implacably convincing.

  Thereafter, most often at night when they were in bed together, they would remind one another of what Sister Jean Luc had said. When the day had been difficult, they would remind each other that being a screwdriver wasn’t easy, being a hammer wasn’t easy, being a pipe wrench wasn’t easy. The idea wasn’t exactly comforting, but it gave them something to hold on to, something to bolster one another with.

  “Being a left-handed jackplane isn’t easy,” Bertran would say, trying for a laugh.

  “Being a plumber’s helper isn’t easy,” Nela would respond with a giggle.

  Though they shared many of their thoughts and fears, they tended to keep their dreams and longings to themselves. Bertran dreamed water-skiing dreams in which he skimmed across white-topped waves. Nela fantasized being a ballet dancer and not merely a ballet dancer but a premiere danseuse, leaping weightless through waves of applause. They feared to share these visions with one another and had no way to share them with anyone else. They had learned to be wary of one another’s feelings, since the unhappiness of one inevitably became the unhappiness of both. They shared misery through the bloodstream, like oxygen. This did not stop their bickering, which those closest to them eventually came to understand was more a recreation than an expression of real annoyance.

  They encountered puberty, as their pediatrician had feared they would. At age fourteen, various indeterminate organs began pumping hormones into their bodies and an endocrinologist was added to the working group of physicians who met from time to time to confer on the matter of the twins.

  “There’s no way we’re going to be able to keep her on estrogens without him being on them too,” the hormone expert snorted. “No way we’re going to get him on testosterone without her growing a beard.”

  “What are they producing naturally?” one of the surgeons asked.

  “A most god-awful mix,” gloomed the endocrinologist. “Like a ragout.”

  “They’re both growing pubic hair and breasts, if you can believe that.”

  “Feminizing hormones, then.”

  “Well, yes. Except they’re both growing hair on their chests and faces too.”

  “Don’t forget the libido,” said the pediatrician. “Their mother says they’re definitely sexual.” That hadn’t been what Marla had meant, exactly, though she had mentioned the fact.

  “With each other?” asked the geneticist, inexplicably horrified.

  “Who else?” sniggered someone, unforgivably.

  The twins were, in fact, sensual with one another and had been for some time. Though their carefully constructed organs were not reproductive in nature, they were well equipped with nerve endings. Bertran and Nela, deprived of many other joys, had discovered certain mutual comforts when they were about six. Prohibitions against such activity, which they encountered in religion class and which all seemed to involve sins against reproductive nature, simply did not apply in their case. So Bertran had assured Nela, when they were about twelve. Nela told him she was sure Father or the nuns could think up a reason since they could think up reasons most everything nice was sinful.

  “Even though we can’t ever make a baby,” she said. “The doctor told us that.”

  “We could pretend to have one,” Bertran suggested tentatively, hearing sorrow in her voice but uncertain whether her grief was related to the matter of babies.

  “I suppose we could,” she said doubtfully, wondering why Bertran would suggest such a thing, but thinking perhaps he was sad over not being able to be a father. “What shall we name him.”

  “Turtle,” said Bertran, the word coming out with no thought at all. “Call him Turtle. Turtle Korsyzczy.”

  “Not Korsyzczy,” she objected. “What happens is, when he grows up a little, he changes his name. He says, ‘Korsyzczy is too much of a mouthful. I want a name that says who I am, not who I’m related to.’”

  “Well, who is he then?”

  “Well, he’s our turtle, Berty. Gray-wind-rising turtle. Only, let
’s pretend he can fly. Call him Turtle Bird.”

  Bertran thought about this. “I don’t like Bird,” he said. “It sounds too much like that long ago president’s wife, the one our history teacher said got the billboards down along the highways. Something else with wings, maybe.”

  “Butterfly? Angel? Moth?” Nela suggested. “Eagle? Owl? Duck?”

  “Dove,” he said suddenly, liking the sound of it. “Turtledove. Like in the Bible, the voice of the turtle, you know.”

  Turtledove he became, their child, Turtledove. He, a boy, and never any discussion about that. Nela hadn’t demurred. Their child was a boy by virtue of being a “he,” but he never did anything that could not have been done equally well by a she or an it. The twins made up marvelous stories about him, though they never mentioned Turtledove to anyone else, any more than they mentioned what went on between the two of them. And aside from Marla’s plaint to the pediatrician and the pediatrician’s sneer to his colleagues, no one mentioned their intimate activity to anyone, least of all to the twins’ father.

  Lek was, therefore, totally unprepared when he entered the twins’ room without knocking one morning and found them intimately engaged. He had entered silently; they didn’t know he was there. In wordless shock, blank-faced and blind-eyed, he departed as soundlessly, left the house, and went to work. During a coffee break, a new coworker, one who was unfamiliar with Lek’s family but who had recently heard something about him, made sniggering allusions to the foolishness of a man who believed he’d made love to his wife four times on their wedding night when he’d actually been asleep the whole time.

  Though he did not seem to hear, the words went through Leksy like a knife. Without a word to anyone, Leksy put down his cup, left the plant, and went to a bar. All through the (mostly) sexless years, it had been the memory of that morning that had kept him relatively constant. Not what Marla had said or the idea of it, or even the confirmation of his own maleness, but the feeling of the moment. The surge of contentment and joy and fulfillment. His whole body and mind had seemed to glow from within, as though lit by a joyous flame. He remembered it as the happiest moment of his life, shining like a star, and he had held that light before him, guiding himself with it, determined from the depths of his despair that it would someday be like that between them again, if not on this earth, then in heaven.

  Now, he saw the star flicker out, a coal, a cinder, a black hard nothing. It had been a lie. His joy had been a lie. Marriage was a lie. Fatherhood, children, all that was a lie. Things coming out right if you just had faith and worked hard, that was a lie. He drank for a time, without becoming at all drunk. The alcohol went through him into some dry other place where all the liquor in the world could not have made a splash. There was no change in his feelings, his arid hopelessness. Finally, he got off the bar stool, went to a car lot, sold his car, took the money, and got on a bus. By suppertime he was two hundred miles away, headed toward the Atlantic seaboard, nothing in his mind but flight and emptiness. When he got to New York, he called one of his brothers, a priest, to say that his and Marla’s life together had been a sin and a delusion, that he was going, he didn’t know where, and would not be back.

  The brother called Marla. She screamed, then wept, then blamed herself and threatened suicide. They talked her out of that, repeatedly. There wasn’t much anybody could do. No one knew where Leksy had gone. No one knew exactly why he had gone, though everyone guessed at part of the truth. Everybody on both sides of the family pitched in to keep Marla and the twins fed and clothed and the rent paid. Leksy had had some savings too, and there was a welfare fund at the plant. After a couple of months, Marla went back to work at the lumberyard.

  Leksy’s folks made a modest effort to trace his whereabouts, without luck. Months later, one of his brothers heard through the clerical grapevine that Lek had joined a contemplative order of monks in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, an eremitic order living in a high rock city where everyone ascended by ropes and no female person or animal of any kind was allowed to enter.

  Marla lasted less than eighteen months by herself. She grew accustomed to going out for long lonely walks after the children were abed, trying to wear herself out so she could sleep. She couldn’t marry again because Leksy was still alive, somewhere. She couldn’t seek the company of men for anything less than marriage. She couldn’t do what Leksy had done and run off, leaving the twins alone. He had been able to do that only because he’d known she was there to care for them. Men, she thought, had always been able to seek holiness when they wanted to because some woman was back at home taking care of their obligations. That’s why most of the saints were men and why most of the women saints were virgins. Sometimes she spent the hours wondering if suicide was actually a mortal sin.

  During one of her long, introspective hikes, she was accosted by a mugger who demanded her money or her life. She laughed hysterically at this. Judith had been right. Some men get awfully bent out of shape when they are laughed at. Marla’s funeral Mass was well attended.

  Neither set of grandparents felt quite able to take the twins. It’s true that all of them were far advanced in years.

  Aunt Judith, who by now had ten of her own, shook her head in dismay. Sorry, she said, but …

  Most of the other aunts and uncles were in holy orders one place or another, and children were not allowed.

  And then, out of the blue, the twins’ Aunt Sizzy showed up. Marla’s oldest sister Sizzy, who hadn’t been seen by any of the family for years; Aunt Sizzy with her apricot-dyed hair and sapphire-blue eyelids, her bright-glossed lips, bangles halfway to her elbows, a cigarette habitually dangling at the corner of her mouth even now, even after everyone knew it could kill you. Fifty-some-odd-years-old Aunt Sizzy who, everyone said, hadn’t changed a bit.

  “I’ve come to get my niece and nephew,” she announced. “I’ve kept in touch through old friends here in town.” She didn’t remind anyone it had been her choice in friends that had contributed to her departure in the first place. No one needed to be reminded. “I know what a problem the twins would be for you people who have families of your own, but I’m alone, and I can take the twins with me.”

  None of the agencies that might have moved in to investigate Aunt Sizzy, which would have moved in to investigate Aunt Sizzy had she been going to take anyone but the twins, none of them did zip. All of the agencies in town had been involved in the twins’ life since Lek had gone, and all of them had thrown up their hands, some in pity, some in exasperation. Not one social service employee checked out Sizzy’s lifestyle. Not one intrusive do-gooder nun or priest stuck his nose into her past. Not one relative asked Sizzy where she planned to live, how she planned to support them all. As a matter of fact, the relatives kept the conversation very, very general and genial, never admitting to themselves for a moment that they didn’t really want to know.

  So, when Sizzy departed in her little red car with the bemused children in the backseat and the modest proceeds from Marla’s life insurance in her purse, no one had an inkling as to where they were going.

  Sizzy, who knew the town intimately, who knew all the relatives well, who had had years apart from them in which to make calm judgments about them, had chosen not to mention her destination. She chose not, even though she had known since she first heard about the twins that she would someday invite her niece and nephew to live with her, in her milieu, in the place where Sizzy herself had found both refuge and work for many years: in Matthew Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus. Zasper’s petition for retirement was granted routinely. The personnel Files found no reason not to do so. There were always more provincial Enforcers wanting Council status than there were open slots for them.

  “But I don’t want you to go!” cried Danivon Luze, now seventeen. When Zasper had rescued the toddler Danivon from Molock, he had not foreseen that Danivon would grow up to attribute to Zasper many virtues and qualities Zasper himself was not at all sure of. Danivon had just enrolled in the Enforcer
Academy at Tolerance, a prestigious institution that would prepare Danivon to be, so Danivon said, just like Zasper himself.

  Zasper thought Danivon would be better trying to be like someone else. He had even considered dissuading Danivon from an Enforcer’s career, giving up the notion only after several days’ worrying about it. He had no right to influence the boy. Letting People Alone was more than mere slogan, or so Zasper had always believed, though he’d become less certain of it latterly. Just because Zasper himself had this sick feeling about Enforcement didn’t mean Danivon was going to. Besides—and this was the critical point—there weren’t all that many avenues open to a foundling in Tolerance. All the servants, guards, and technicians were Frickian and had always been Frickian. All the Supervisors were whatever they were, some hereditary class or race or group or tribe; Zasper didn’t know what and had sense enough not to ask. Information that wasn’t freely offered was better not asked for, at least in Zasper’s experience. It did a man no good to get a reputation as a prynose.

  Whatever Danivon was, he wasn’t Frickian, and he wasn’t Supervisor blood, either, being a great deal taller than the former and a good deal handsomer than the latter. Though his mouth was a bit wider and his hair a bit curlier than Zasper’s idea of perfection, he was a handsome, articulate, well-built lad who should get on with life. Full of the juices of youth as he was, Danivon no doubt had a good deal of life to get on with!

  Danivon didn’t see it that way, complaining that Zasper had no right to go off and leave him. “I like the Academy,” he explained. “I really do. I like the other students too, almost all of them. It’s just, I get lonesome sometimes. When some of them talk about home it makes me wonder why I don’t have one.” He confessed this to Zasper in a whisper, as though it were shameful.

  When this subject came up, Zasper always swallowed deeply and reminded himself there were excellent reasons not to tell Danivon what he knew about Danivon’s origins. Not least that telling the boy might get both of them killed.