Authors: Carolyn Turgeon
The light from the streetlamp slanted in and illuminated my closet door. I tossed and turned. I longed for sleep, for peace, to just disappear.
Stop,
I kept thinking. The thoughts came, one after another. The images: Mary floating in the river, the corn and the moon and the dirt pressing into my back. Sitting cross-legged on the library floor as Mary rubbed glitter across my eyelids and cheeks.
None of it is real, I kept telling myself, staring at the outline of a smokestack outside my window. Only this is real, here and now. I clutched my body, imagined that spinning, gleaming girl above everyone, slicing the air right open.
The next morning I rose, showered quickly in the small bathroom, and walked across the street. I was determined not to think about anything but the task in front of me.
“Where can I apply for a job?” I asked a tired-looking woman carrying a smock. She pointed. A sign led to “Applications.” The place was desperate for bodies, it seemed, and within an hour a foreman was handing me a smock and a time sheet and putting me to work sewing school uniforms.
I was given my own little station, a chair with a spindly black sewing machine in front of it. I looked around at the other girls, but they all kept on working, their faces bent to the fabric. At first I had difficulty placing the fabric in the right spot, getting the machine to move the way it was supposed to, but by the end of the day I’d gotten it down well
enough to keep my job, even if my hands were stuck through with pinpricks and bleeding. That night I went back to the boardinghouse, ate a bowl of soup and a hunk of cheese with Esther in silence, and fell into bed, dreamlessly.
After several more days I got used to the way the sewing machines clattered like teeth, the feel of the needles jabbing me when I made a mistake. I settled into a routine so dull it seemed to wipe out everything, both my past and my future. Every day I picked up the gray wool vests that prickled under my hands while one hundred girls did the same thing on either side of me, lined up in rows. Time stretched out in a way it never had before, until a minute seemed like an hour and an hour a whole day. My head pounded with the whirring of the machines, which strung vest after vest and skirt after skirt with the same dull thread. I returned to my room so wiped out that I did not even think about the circus or the trapeze, just the bliss of darkness and sleep.
But it was at night that everything returned to me, and I dreamt of Mary floating on the river, her hair coiled blackly and wetly against her forehead and throat, wrapping itself around her neck like ropes; of the opal that was all light, a million points of light contained in one small, swirling face glowing from her breast; of the letters and photographs she had left strewn across the library’s wooden floor, the papers she had let pile by the front door; of the leaves that had clutched her skin, the thin, narrow leaves of the tree weeping over her; and of her cat’s eyes opening under the water.
Sometimes I dreamt that the river was pressing down on me, too, pushing me to the bottom, where plants and reeds encircled me and my lungs slowly filled with water. I gulped the air, tried to remember how to breathe when I woke up. I cried so many tears into my pillow that I could not believe that my tiny body hadn’t shriveled into a dry husk. And for those moments the world was dark and hollow, inside out,
until I rose from the bed, covered myself with a smock, and stuck my head under the rusted bathroom faucet. The dreams vanished like mist then. Outside my window, there was only concrete and steel.
On Sundays, my day off, I took to wandering the streets, hoping to spot some sign of the circus—some dash of color in the gray winter landscape—but there was nothing. The smoke covered my clothes with its scent and its weight. The feel of piles of buttons under my fingertips stayed with me even as I wandered the streets or lay on my bed in my room, staring at the ceiling. For weeks I couldn’t bring myself to think about the trapeze, and a heavy guilt settled over me, burying me in my new life. My only pleasure was walking to the five-and-dime on Sunday mornings and poring over the shelves for that one tiny, perfect thing, something new to set on the dresser in my room. I bought soaps shaped like seashells, mirrors with pictures of the Eiffel Tower on the backs, tiny figurines, boxes carved with dragons and fish. I could spend whole evenings just lying back on my bed, staring at my growing collection, rearranging the things I had bought.
I didn’t realize that I was grieving still, that the grief had exhausted me and wiped out all desire for the future. Often I thought of Riley Farm and the hedges that lined the front yard. What my father had been doing the day he’d carved that giant peacock with the leaves spraying out behind him. How it had taken weeks for the branches and leaves to grow back again, though they’d never taken on the same shape they’d had before. I thought of that feeling I’d had, crawling into bed each night and lifting the quilt to my shoulders, that feeling of being home, as terrifying and sad as it was. You can’t just shuck it off, I thought, just as Mary had said. I spent hours imagining my life, rewriting it, as I bent over the sewing machine, as I sat alone in the lunchroom while the other girls chattered, as I wandered the city streets and stared at the lit-up windows, wondering if I would always be alone, if there would ever be another person for me to love.
Slowly the winter gave way to spring, and then flowers burst out of the flower boxes hanging from every window. The trees that dotted the streets turned a bursting green. And after many weeks and months of the grief that clung to me like ice, I, too, felt ready to come back to life, and was able to part that dullness, pull it back ever so slightly and reveal something new, a longing that came from deep within my muscles and blood. One day in April, alone in my room after work, I placed my hands on my flat torso and realized it was mine, my own body, a body that could twist in the air and crumple into a box two feet wide. And then I missed the rope and the trapeze so feverishly that I almost cried out. I left my room and walked the streets until I found a hardware store, where I bought a length of heavy rope. Later that same night I tiptoed down to the basement with a candle and hung the rope from one of the pipes crossing the ceiling, using a ladder I borrowed from Esther. For a dollar more each week, she said, she didn’t mind.
The first time I swung up into the air, my muscles ached and burned and my balance was so off that I kept slamming into the wall. But it didn’t matter. I worked hard, pushing myself. I returned to the basement after work each night, anxious to climb up to that rope and practice. With one turn after another, I forced my creaky muscles into submission. Seeing me huddled over those uniforms in the daytime, nobody would have guessed that I spent my nights flinging myself into one rotation after another, in the air.
The Velasquez Circus would come any day now, and I was ready.
But the circus did not come that spring, or that summer, and I began to get nervous. I worked and saved every penny I could, eating the beans and bread and soup Esther provided in the evenings and buying small containers of tuna in the factory cafeteria every day for lunch. I
stopped visiting the five-and-dime, as if denying myself small pleasures would make the circus come faster. I began to wonder if I’d missed it—if the circus had come and gone without my noticing, if I’d been too lost in all that reflecting and wandering. I was sick of myself and my thoughts, and I couldn’t stand another year in the factory. If the circus didn’t come to me by winter, I decided, I would just have to set out once again and find it myself.
I continued to practice in the basement until I collapsed into bed each night, exhausted. Days and weeks and months passed. I worried and waited, wondering if my life would ever truly begin. And then finally, after a long, blistering summer that baked the sidewalks, well into an autumn that sprinkled leaves over the city sidewalks and streets, news of the circus finally came to Kansas City. From a fourth-floor window of the factory, I saw posters splashed across buildings and lampposts, even in that lonely part of town. The name
Velasquez Circus
burst above tigers, trapeze stars, and elephants with sequined harnesses on top of their heads. At first I thought I might just be imagining it, I’d been waiting to see that name for so long:
Velasquez Circus,
which seemed to contain everything within it. I was dizzy with excitement.
“Look!” I shouted, pointing. “I’m going to leave with them.”
All the girls left their machines and ran to where I stood, pressing in toward the dusty windowpanes, craning their necks to see. I turned to a girl next to me, who looked down at me with wide, surprised eyes. “I know the trapeze. I learned from a famous aerialist. I’m going to do it!” She backed away from me, and I could hear the others whispering, laughing, but I didn’t care. Flying Lollie appeared again and again in the posters, her hair glaring red and flowing out behind her, her skin coffee-colored and outlined in dark blue. “Flying Lollie, Dream of the Circus!” the posters screamed. The leotard she wore was made up of thousands
of tiny yellow points, and she always lay flat across the bar, her arms spread out on either side like wings.
I didn’t even hesitate. That day I told the foreman I was leaving and collected my pay. I gave Esther a week’s notice and spent every waking moment stretching in that basement, jumping up and down in place, practicing my one-armed swing-overs and forcing my body to fling out from the rope in a clean straight line, with nothing to hold me up underneath but air.
I remember my last night in Kansas City as if it were yesterday. I packed my bag, left the boardinghouse, and camped out beside the railroad line on the outskirts of the city. I was suspended between lives, between my grief and the freedom of being out on my own, about to have my greatest adventure. I pressed my starfish hands on the cold railroad tracks, feeling for rumbling. I lay on my back staring at the moon, remembering those nights when I first learned to read among the cornstalks and those nights, a little later, when my father changed the meaning of those fields so completely. Now I was seventeen years old, free of the burden of family and of love, lying next to a line of tracks and staring at that same yellow moon. Everything was open to me.
The night seemed so full and strange, and to stretch out forever. Dirt and gravel pressed into my back. I stayed awake for hours, despite my exhaustion, imagining what I would say and do, how I would find Flying Lollie and tell her about Mary, about everything I’d learned and done. I closed my eyes and imagined Mary was there lying next to me, that I could reach up and wrap my fingers in the coils of her hair. “I am finally here,” I whispered. “Can you see me?” I felt a breeze pass over my face and sat up, sure I could smell the faint scent of cloves. “Is this how you felt, too?” In the distance I could see the outline of buildings
stamped against the sky. I was afraid to breathe. I closed my eyes again and felt the edge of her skirt brush my leg, her hair curl around my finger. Eventually I fell into a deep, dream-filled sleep, my body curled into a ball next to the tracks.
I woke to the sound of voices and rumbling. I jumped to my feet, confused and disoriented, and saw that people had begun gathering behind me and were rapidly lining up on both sides of the train tracks, for miles in each direction. That was how it seemed—like we stretched out for miles. I gathered up my bag and looked around, as if I would see Mary there, waving to me from the other side of the tracks, the sun lighting up her face, her eyes glowing bright blue. Instead I saw crowds of people, more people than I’d ever seen in one place. My heart fell a bit to be back in the world, but the world seemed to have changed completely. The air was heavy with waiting, longing. Children ran through the crowds, and the people surrounding me took out binoculars to see into the distance. I looked in the direction they were facing, listened as the rumbling on the tracks grew louder. For a moment I felt raw fear press into my gut. This is it, I thought. If not this, then I have nothing. I closed my eyes and imagined my body cutting through the air like a steel blade, slicing through skin and bone and this mass of people until it was just me, swinging up to the canvas and back down again.
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was the color. A mass of sequined colors coming toward me, sparkling under the sun. I saw the trunk of an elephant, the flash of a trombone, and the whirl of the feathers that drifted from hats, capes, and boas. Children cried out with delight all around me, and I found myself crying with them, rushing forward to meet the parade. Confetti whirled in the air. It did not feel real, any of it. I was caught up in something nearly holy, no longer myself. As the parade and train moved forward, I moved back, as we all did, to clear the tracks and make space. I felt the crowd of people behind me as I
moved, the whir of noisemakers spinning through the air. Everything blurred together, and I opened my mouth and shouted, amazed that I could be invisible in the midst of all those people. My head reeled with it. What I saw next were the colors draped across the performers’ bodies, the shocking pinks and oranges and blues. I remember the green and silver of the gilded wagons rolling past, tigers roaring behind the glittering bars.
I followed the procession, once it had passed, as if I were a child in Hamelin. The earth thumped and shook, the sky hung behind clouds of confetti, and people rushed past me while I struggled to keep up. We traveled like this for a half hour—moving until we arrived in a pristine green field with only the occasional dandelion interrupting, where we watched as spikes were laid into the ground and the canvas tents raised up on them. We watched the train unload, the wagons and cages being rolled off one by one. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I didn’t care. I had been waiting my whole life for this, I felt then, even if I hadn’t realized it until I’d met Mary Finn. I thought of all those mornings I had spent hanging from the bar in the window, staring out into the fields as the sun burned into my parents’ backs, imagining that there was something wonderful in the world, beyond what I could see.