Authors: Carolyn Turgeon
“It’s okay,” she said. “Shhhhh.”
It was as if the broken part of me had spilled out, and I wailed and twisted around, in the grass. Mary kept me bound up in her arms. The pain gnawed at my gut, strangled my throat. I thought of my mother and father and sister and brothers, of how much I used to love them, how hurt I used to be when they laughed at me, when they joked that I was a punishment from God. I thought of the other kids under the oak tree always looking and laughing, and the cornstalks bent in front of the moon, the feel of dirt against my back, the feel of my body and my heart and my entire self being broken down, erased and wiped out. How much I wanted, sometimes, to be wiped out, how Mary was the only person in the world who could fill me again, remake me into something new.
Slowly I became aware of a vague herb smell, a handful of herbs in my face and on my skin. The pain lessened. The broken-glass feeling in my gut numbed, then disappeared. I lay back and felt the words and images leave my mind, until there was nothing left except
that
moment, right then.
I opened my eyes and came back to earth, to the library, to her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Everything is okay.”
I sat up, and my head pounded with grief. “Please,” I said. It was a terrible feeling, looking at her right in front of me, feeling her hands on mine, knowing how far I was from her now.
I can never tell her,
I thought. But as she watched me, it was as if she knew what I was thinking already, as if I had unleashed my whole heart there, in the garden, and she was holding it in her hands.
We looked at each other, and her cat’s eyes seemed to grow bigger and deeper, more dark, the way they had before. I felt a whooshing feeling through my gut, a tickling, and then a laugh whispered through me.
“You can’t let it take you over,” she said. “You are stronger than anything else, any of these people.” Her voice wrapped around me like arms.
I couldn’t speak, just stared at her and then at the ground.
“How about I tell you a story?” she said. “Would you like that? Something that happened a million miles from here, many years ago?”
I looked back up at her and felt relief wash through my body, tears start at my eyes. “Okay,” I said. I sat back and closed my eyes, let the last vestiges of pain slip away. The spice scent swirled around me. Mary leaned back and draped her arm around my shoulders.
“Once,” she said, “in a small Turkish village, there lived a man named Mihalis, who had a son named Costas. Mihalis had eyes the color of kiwis and bright black hair, just like his son.”
I pictured it: a man with hair like Mary’s, sticking out in every direction and as black as ink. My whole body released and let go, sinking into the grass.
“When the child was a year old, the father decided to leave the village because he wanted to teach his son to be good, and to teach him to live without love, as he had done. Mihalis set out into the world with his baby strapped to his chest. He walked and walked and never stopped to sleep. He wanted so much to be someplace new that his feet wouldn’t stop walking when he was tired but began to run, and he ran for six days from the love he’d never found, until he ended up in a barn.
“There the father and his son survived by eating sunflowers, cooking them over a fire. They spent every day lying in the sun reading the clouds and the books they’d brought. The child Costas learned about mathematics, jewelry-making, agronomy, homemaking, horseflies, and seeds. He learned to read as many languages as there are in the world, though he had no one to speak them to.”
I laughed at the idea, letting the story overtake me. Mary paused and laughed with me, touching my hair.
“One day,” she continued, “when Costas turned eighteen, Mihalis decided to return home to the village he’d left so long ago. He felt safe, convinced that he’d raised a child without love. But Costas was terrified of walking over the edge of the earth, and begged his father to stay. Mihalis tried to describe the wonders of people and other places, but his son could not understand. And when they left their home and Costas began to see other creatures like them, the boy was afraid and filled with delight when he saw that the world did not stop, but kept stretching before them.
“They had only been walking for two days when a group of young girls passed by them. Their bodies looked like fruit trees to the young Costas, who turned to his father and asked what these creatures were that made his stomach drop and his breath grow short. Mihalis turned
to his son, who had stopped in the road, and saw his stricken face. He looked back at the young women and saw that one of them had stopped also, and was turned to his son.”
I was breathless, imagining it: the group of them paused in the rough, rock-ridden road, the girl’s deep black hair strewn with jewels and hanging to her knees, her sad eyes and the sand streaking her legs.
Talk to her,
I thought. I imagined her curving, parted lips.
Go on.
I imagined myself like a fruit tree, wearing sandals that revealed my toes.
“Mihalis remembered then the girl he’d run from. Her image appeared like a storm cloud over him. Mihalis had dreamt of Katerina every night for seventeen years, but the herbs that grew by the pond had made him forget every morning the dreams of the night before.
“
What is it,
whispered his son again as the girl walked toward them. Mihalis knew, at that moment, the waste of seventeen dreamless years; he thought quickly and replied,
It is a kind of duck, and it will eat you.
The son thought for a moment before he spoke again.
I want one,
he said.”
I looked up at Mary. “A girl can’t be a duck,” I said.
“It is all true, Tessa,” Mary said, “every last bit of it. Costas never returned to the barn after that. The world was too big.
“You can always leave,” Mary said then, looking right at me. “There is always more to discover, more selves inside you that just need to come out.”
“Thank you,” I whispered.
She paused, then leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Now, why don’t you show me what you’ve been doing on this rope of yours?”
We went inside, and I hauled myself up to the bar, the shelves of books towering on either side of me. Mary went to help the few readers who had gathered while we were outside, then came back to me.
“You’re improving, Tessa,” she said, as I held my body straight in the air, with only my palms on the bar.
For a moment, I was tempted. I felt my muscles pulling, my hand reaching for the cable on the side of the trapeze. I could show her my new trick, release it into air.
“Why don’t I show you how to flip down?” she said, in the moment I spent hesitating. “I think you’re ready. And I can show you my own
special
trick, one of the things that made Marionetta so loved and desired.”
“Marionetta?”
“That was my name, up there, Tessa.
Marionetta,
” she said, stretching the name out until I could feel it wrap around me.
I forgot about the rope, my new trick, my hours by the river, completely.
She slipped off her skirt to the leotard underneath, then reached up for the bar. She smiled at me and started to swing. For a moment, as I watched her fly through the air, I imagined that there was only this, this moment, right here.
I remained closed in, as if I occupied two separate worlds: the world that my father stood over, a dark, secret place where the moon and the corn masked unspeakable things, and then my world, which was always Mary’s. I walked into Mercy Library each day, and the earth-pounding sun turned to mist. The smoke and the smell of cloves and cinnamon wove around me, and I began hearing the patter of rain, seeing the flash of fish out of the corner of my eye, feeling the
swoosh
of the trapeze under my hand. The force of Mary’s world was so strong that it even changed the air around her. What would it be like to swim in a river, I wondered, with rain sprinkling all around and fish sliding against your skin? How would it feel to spin five times in the air before dropping into a silver net?
And then I shrugged out of myself and those nights in the field and threw glitter across my skin and tumbled across the floor, as Mary danced and clapped. You could see a wildness in her still, left over from her days on the trapeze: her skin made for circus lights to bounce off it, legs that could curl past her neck and over her shoulders.
More and more I asked Mary about the places she’d lived before coming to Oakley, before she’d taken over the abandoned library on the outskirts of town and begun cataloguing the minutiae of all of our lives.
I stayed at the library so late that my parents would be in bed by the time I got home. In the night I would sneak down to the river and practice, beating my body against the rope. I wound my body down to a spark of energy, so tight that I could fly out of the room, twist and disappear when my father came near me.
I began to imagine that other places and lives existed for me, too, places where I could become what Mary saw in me. “Rain Village,” I repeated to myself in the dark, and dreamt of floating boys with white skin. It seemed so far from the stark, bright fields of Oakley, the heavy manure scent that was everywhere, the swooping wooden house inhabited by a father who never seemed to sleep.
Most of all I dreamt of the circus: the sequined women with red lips who’d hang from ropes by their ankles, the men who could order a row of lions to walk on their hind legs, the flames streaming from men’s mouths, and the sticks a girl could juggle while hanging by her hair. Mary described these things for me again and again.
What Mary described was like nothing I had ever seen or heard of, and the one thing I needed was something to imagine, something far from home. She told me that after William’s death she cried for one year straight. Tears flowed from her eyes and down her face so constantly that tiny rivers of tears followed her wherever she went, and anyone who wanted her had only to look to the ground to trace out her path. She left Rain Village on a boat, she said, and then walked and walked through the country and into the little towns where she eventually became the stuff of legend: at night the townspeople would whisper to each other about the crying lady, and mothers warned their children to keep their windows shut at night, lest the crying lady climb inside and steal them away.
She lived off the vegetables she stole from farmers, she said. Once in a while she would think of settling in a town or village, but who would hire a woman with a steady stream of tears falling down her face?
One time a shopkeeper actually did let her spend a day folding boxes in the back room, but when he saw the pile of boxes that night, perfectly folded but soaked through with tears and falling apart, she was fired on the spot.
And so she kept wandering until, soon enough, the winter came. She had nowhere to go and began shivering at night, when all she could do was try her best to warm herself in piles of hay and straw. Soon even the straw was specked with crystals of ice and snow. The teardrops froze right on her face; icicles hung from her hair.
But unbeknownst to her, not everyone who heard the story of the crying lady turned away in fear. Some lit candles for her, some prayed to her, and some trekked through the snow trying to find her. Some tried to interview her for their magazines, while others proclaimed that she was a hoax, or the devil. But one man, Juan Galindo of the Flying Ramirez Brothers and star of the Velasquez Circus, thought only that she would make a fine addition to the circus sideshow, and Mary, for her part, couldn’t have agreed more.
Juan found Mary curled up in a haystack, outside a town famous for its strawberries and loose morals. As he came upon her he gasped: the tears had all turned to ice that streaked her face and her clothing and hair, and her dark eyebrows were sprinkled with frost. She was as pale as the snow that coated the fields. The ice shone and gleamed on her skin and caught the light until rays of colors came off it. When she shifted in her sleep, the ice clanked and tinkled against itself. Juan knew that the woman in the hay would draw crowds in the hundreds. The tears were like diamonds on her cheeks. He gazed at her, and later he would tell anyone who’d listen that he’d never seen anything or anyone so beautiful as Mary right then.
But the moment Mary woke up and saw Juan standing over her, with his dark skin, burning eyes, and the black mustache twisted into a slight
curl on either side, she stopped crying once and for all. Her body became so warm that the ice melted instantaneously, and her pale cheeks became rosy and bright. Her heart beat like drums in her chest.
“At that moment,” she told me on the library floor, “I knew William was dead and gone forever.”
Juan Galindo watched in horror as Mary’s entire body flushed with an unbearable desire. The dollar signs that had been floating in his head vanished along with the tears and the ice, until all that remained was one ordinary girl, lying in wet hay. Juan’s plans for Mary were over before he’d even had a chance to hear her speak, and in sorrow and disgust he turned back toward the night.
“Wait!” Mary cried, and pulled herself out of the hay. “I’m coming with you.”
And there was nothing Juan could do to stop her.
I often thought about Mary walking away from Rain Village to find a new life, and it was around the time I turned fifteen that I really started thinking about leaving my hometown, too. I became convinced that I could persuade Mary to go with me, that she felt as trapped as I did. I began to have long, elaborate daydreams about us traveling the world together in the circus, flying through the air, hearing the crowds roar, and meeting wild, fascinating men like Juan Galindo who would make the sky turn pink, they were so dazzling. Sometimes I laughed out loud, imagining such a glamorous life, and I’d emerge from my daydreams feeling groggy and dazed, heartbroken to be back in the world once more.
The more I fantasized about the circus, the crazier it seemed to me that someone could ever leave such a life, especially to come to a place like Oakley. There are better worlds than this one, I thought. How could Mary not agree, when she was the one who’d shown them to me? By then
I could do one hundred one-armed swing-overs. In the silver box I had hidden downstairs, buried in one of Mary’s boxes of leotards, I had three years’ worth of savings—well over two hundred dollars.