Authors: Carolyn Turgeon
When the lights came on I just closed my eyes and leapt.
My act opened with me tearing out in a hoop and then flipping over and over it, catching it with my feet and my palms as it twirled and twisted over the audience. I became a swirling sparkling circle of white before stopping suddenly, splayed out, my arms and feet spread, in the center of the circle. The lights caught on my costume and reflected out into the audience, sitting under me in the dark.
My body moved of its own accord. I cut through the air as if it were a part of me.
One moment I was leaping into the air; the next I was landing on the platform, feeling the sting of the bar in my palms, the platform swaying slightly under me as I adjusted to its surface. The roar of the audience seemed far away. My breath came shallow and quick.
The Roman rings dropped down next as the hoop disappeared into the folds of the tent. I reached for them and went straight into my routine. The iron cross and then a series of positions I had done before on the rope and trapeze. From the rings the movements looked more weightless, fluid.
Finally, the
corde lisse
dropped from the top of the tent and I caught hold of it. Hanging from the padded loop Paulo had designed for me, I blocked everything out and just started to go.
One swing-over, two swing-overs. By the fifth one, the audience had begun calling them out. It buoyed me, gave me a rhythm where I hadn’t had one before. I closed my eyes, leaned into the rope, and turned in time to the audience’s chant.
Twenty-two, twenty-three . . .
“Go,” I said to myself. “Don’t stop.”
Twenty-nine, thirty.
I turned and turned, moved my body like a stutter as the crowds counted out each spin.
Up in the lights like that, punishing my body with twist after twist, I didn’t actually think; my body took over until I was nothing but breath and movement, the twisting of skin and muscles into one perfect motion after another.
Sixty-nine, seventy.
On the ninetieth spin, I felt something in my arm give out, and I stopped. I switched arms and hung there by the rope for a second. I could have been back in Oakley, hanging from the barn rope and the oak tree, until I heard the burst of applause hit that tent like a wave. The audience was cloaked in darkness; the light was bright on me and dim everywhere else. The applause seemed to have a will of its own, and it spread through the tent, sweeping right up into me. Without even thinking, I threw out my free arm and did a tiny bow, still hanging from the rope. The crowd screamed and hollered and just kept on clapping.
Then, in one swooping motion, I slid down the rope and to the floor. Standing in the sawdust, I smiled and bowed a final time before running behind the curtain. “And that was the magnificent Tiny Tessa in her Velasquez Circus debut!” I heard the ringmaster call.
“Tessa!” They all swarmed me at once, hugging me and knocking rhinestones from my leotard to the ground. Paulo and Lollie whooped around me, while Mauro slipped his hand through mine and beamed. Carlos bolted toward me and threw me up into the air. I felt myself laughing and laughing, but it seemed like it was all happening to someone else.
“Do you hear them?” Lollie asked. “Do you hear the crowd?”
“They love you,” Paulo breathed. “It’s amazing, like you have no weight up there.”
The crowd did not stop. “Go back and bow, Tessa,” Lollie said.
I took a deep breath and ran to the center of the ring. The light hit my skin and reflected off it. I felt like a sliver of glass held up to the sun.
That was when it broke open for me, and the dreamy world I had inhabited until then became shocking, loud. I stared out at the faces in the audience, and I could see them—men and women and children with faces lit up by joy, clapping and whistling and calling my name.
That night we celebrated for hours. Everyone whirled around me with congratulations and kisses. Everyone wanted to shake my hand or lift me up and twirl me in the air. I could barely keep any of it straight. At one point Mr. Velasquez came over and said simply, “Good job.” When he left, Carlos leaned over to me, grinning so wide I thought his face might break. “That’s as good as it gets,
chica,
” he said. “Enjoy it. Drink it all in.”
Paulo lit a huge bonfire out by the train cars. One of the concession girls mixed a vat of pink lemonade with rum and started serving it in ice-filled plastic glasses. There was music all around us. The band moved outside the moment that the crowds left the big top and started spilling out of the lot and back to their cars and tents. Mauro never left my side; I looked up at him, woozy, and his face was lit up as if an explosion had been set off.
“This is just like the night Mary performed with us for the first time,” Lollie said at one point. “When everything was about to change.” She looked at me, drunk and happy. “I knew you were something special,
chica,
the first time I saw you.”
I burrowed my face into Mauro’s neck and sighed. My muscles were heavy, and my head spun with rum. When the fire finally went down and, one by one, we all drifted off to our cars or tents, Mauro actually had to carry me off to bed.
Later, as I fell into an exhausted sleep, I dreamt of Mary, and my mother and father and brothers and Geraldine sitting in the shadows below me. The lights flashed from my body over theirs, and I swooped
and arced and flew. I dreamt that they all watched me the way the audience had, with faces caught up in the fantasy and glamour, the new worlds I spun in the air.
I woke to the sound of someone banging on the compartment door. I turned over and pulled a pillow over my face. The early-morning sun streamed in through the open curtains.
“Tessa!” I heard, and more banging.
A minute later Lollie pounced on the bed next to me. Before I could even protest, she snatched the covers away and thrust a paper in my face.
I blinked my eyes open and saw it: a photo of me from the night before, in mid-swing-over, right on the front page of the town newspaper.
“What?” I sat up straight, grabbed the paper and read about my “glowing face and tiny body,” my “endless rotations that left the crowd speechless and stunned.”
“Geraldo picked it up in town,” Lollie said. “I don’t know what he was doing there, but he said everyone’s talking about it.”
I stared down at the photo. My smiling face, my graceful, arching body.
“Come on,” she said, grinning and tapping my back. “Let’s get some
café.”
Wide awake, I rushed to throw on some clothes, and the two of us burst into the bright morning, where Mauro and Paulo were waiting. Most of the performers were still sleeping, but there was plenty of activity on the lot: roustabouts at work cleaning the grounds, random circus people milling around, a smattering of fans.
We made our way to the cookhouse. The Ferris wheel hung over us
like a sleeping beast, and the tent just sat there. An open mouth, waiting for us.
We were passing the big top when a young woman approached us.
“Tessa?” she asked, walking straight up to me.
“Yes?” I looked at her suspiciously. I was completely unused to friendly attention from strangers, let alone anyone actually knowing my name like that. She was young and eager-looking, with short brown hair.
“I’m from the local newspaper and would like to interview you for tomorrow’s paper.”
“Interview me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Go ahead,” Lollie said, smiling at me.
I looked up at Mauro, who nodded. “Be careful,” he whispered, as I pulled away.
The woman, Rachel, and I talked while walking through the menagerie tent. I pointed out the animals to her, the way Lollie had done for me, as she asked about my background, my life.
“I came from Kansas,” I said. “I knew a woman who had been in the circus, Mary Finn, or Marionetta, and she showed me how to fly. Then I made my way here.”
“You knew Marionetta?” the woman asked, turning to me. “Marionetta the flyer?”
“Yes,” I whispered, suddenly uncomfortable.
“I was a huge fan,” she said, visibly becoming excited. “We always wondered what happened to her, why she stopped performing, where she went. You say you met her in Kansas?”
“Yes,” I said. Suddenly adrift, suddenly floating in that water, her hair wrapped around my neck.
“What was her story? What happened to her?”
I looked up at her. My voice strangled in my throat.
Why did I mention her?
I thought.
How could I be so stupid?
Somehow I still thought of her as all mine, despite everything.
“I can’t talk about that,” I said finally.
“Well, then, can you tell me the nature of your relationship?”
I looked at the Vadala horses, zoomed my gaze in on their white manes.
“She was my friend,” I said. And suddenly my eyes filled with tears.
My friend,
I thought.
My best friend.
“Where exactly in Kansas did you say you were from? Is that where I can find Marionetta now?”
I shook my head.
“This is unbelievable,” she said then, smiling at me, not even noticing my wet eyes and pinched face. “God, we’ve been wondering about Marionetta for so long, and then you pop out of the woodwork.”
The pit in my stomach grew, my heart started to beat faster, and suddenly I realized:
I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to say another word.
“I’m sorry,” I said, before walking out of the menagerie, then breaking into a run, heading straight to the cookhouse.
Lollie, Paulo, and Mauro looked up in surprise. José and Carlos had joined them.
“That was quick,” Lollie said with a laugh, setting down her coffee. “How does it feel to be so famous?”
I sat down and looked at the ground. Before I could even register what was happening, I began to weep.
“What’s wrong, Tessita?” Mauro and Carlos asked again and again while Lollie shushed them, stroked my hair.
I looked up at her. When I was finally able to speak, I said, “She wanted to know about Mary. That’s all. I couldn’t do it.” I choked out the words.
“Oh,” Lollie said, shaking her head angrily. “Of course. I should have thought of it, warned you.”
“Bastards,” José said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mauro said to me. “Let’s have our breakfast and forget about it.” He leaned in and kissed me, then went to the line and brought back coffee and pastries. We ate, and I tried to shake it off. More and more circus folk wandered into the cookhouse and congratulated me on my performance.
“Look,” Lollie said to each one, displaying the cover article proudly. “Look, they love her. Doesn’t she look gorgeous?”
Everyone seemed to be happy for me, kissing my cheeks or shaking my hand, patting my back.
As the day wore on, there were more reporters, each of them wanting to talk to me. Most weren’t able to find me; either the roustabouts got to them before they sneaked into the backyard, or back of the lot, or the other performers claimed I’d gone into the city to get my hair permed, or to buy leather gloves, or any number of other things I had never done in my life. I just stayed in the car and stretched and played cards.
Lollie had spread the word fast: no interviews, no reporters. Refusing press also made the sting less biting for the other performers, Carlos said.
“Everyone wants to be where you are now,” he said, over a lunch of black beans and
platanos.
“Our livelihoods depend on it, on the people loving us. You’ve got to be humble to keep friends,
chica.
”
I nodded, almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of it.
But that second night, the lot literally overflowed with fans. Backstage, the atmosphere was electric. Even Mr. Velasquez stood back there that night.
“Go get ’em, kid,” he said, making me laugh.
Several people came up to wish me luck, but I began to notice, that night, the many performers who looked away when I caught their eye, or seemed to look me up and down disapprovingly when I walked by. Geraldo, especially.
“It is the flying trapeze they all come to see, the act that grabs their hearts and imagination,” I heard him say loudly to one of the menagerie girls, who didn’t even blink. “Not all this
spin spin spin.
”
I ignored it the way I used to when I walked through Oakley and it was just me and Mary, no one else. I stood behind the curtain in my leotard clutching Mauro’s hand. When the time came I scuttled up the rope ladder and stood staring down at the sawdust, past my glittering slippers. This time the applause came before I even began.
Afterward there was no celebration like the night before. Just quick congratulations before we packed up and dismantled the lot, leaving the grass so bare and blank that you’d never know we’d been there. The train whooshed out of town deep in the night, speeding to the next lot, the way it would over and over again. I loved feeling the ground rumble under us. I opened the curtains and watched the dark earth passing by, all the homes with glimmering windows and families sleeping inside, the endless stretches of crops and fields, the jagged cities and quaint towns, the fences strung along the tracks. That night, very late, there was a heavy rain that came slashing across the windows. The air roiled outside. I just lay back and listened to the pattering, the rumbling wheels.
I imagined what life was like in each town, each house, what selves I might have been had I lived there instead of where I did. It was safe, thinking like that, and there was nothing more safe than being in that
train car, deep in the night, traveling between lots. I lay back and thought about all the lives unfolding around me, and imagined my family exactly as I’d last seen them: my father in his rocking chair, Geraldine tending her garden, my mother chopping and roasting in the kitchen while my brothers harvested the crops in the fields. What would they say if they could see me now? I wondered. If they could see my rhinestone-drenched costume, hear the applause? Flying across the countryside, it didn’t bother me to think like that. With each Spanish word I learned, each kiss Mauro gave me, each footprint I left in the sawdust of the big top, the farther away I got from Oakley, the more separate I was from my own past.