The Fainting Room (23 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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She ducked behind the scrim that blocked off the warm-up alley, intending to go out that way, but a mirror propped against a stack of tires caught her attention. It was a full-length mirror with ratty blue ribbon stapled around the edges of the frame. She stepped up, meaning to check only whether the freckle remover she had bought was working, but found herself glaring instead at the body of her mirror twin. The tee shirt she was wearing made her look fat. She sucked her stomach in, turned sideways, arched her back. She still looked pudgy, lumpy. She took off her glasses.
That was better. Now, if not quite her sister’s body, it could be her still agile mother’s or some cousin’s maybe, with a flatter stomach, hard thighs, and even, in these shadows, normal-colored hair. Seen myopically, her skin could be creamy, unblemished by muddy brown freckles. Some cousin, yes. This new cousin was part of the high wire act, was, in fact, its centerpiece. She could dance on the wire as if it were a floor, jump on the wire as if it were a trampoline; she could perch there as if she were a bird.
Evie turned from the mirror and without putting her glasses back on, picked her blurry way past indistinct objects looming up along the ringside. She crossed to the pole in the center of the ring and hesitated only a moment before beginning to climb.
After the first few rungs she kicked off her sandals and continued barefoot, feeling the metal bars against her feet and then finding her hands on the gritty rubber pads of the platform at the top. She stood up on the platform and placed one foot on the wire. She hadn’t done this in almost two years, not since her parents had given up on her for good, but the rope under her feet felt right.
When she looked down all she could see was blur. The lack of markers to gauge her height gave her the feeling that she could be just a few feet above the ground on the practice rope, with just a few steps to take to reach the other side. Perhaps that had been her problem all along—it was not her balance that was at fault, but the unnerving distance that upset her. She let go of the platform railing and took another step out onto the wire. Why had she never tried to walk tightrope without her glasses? It was easy this way. The wire pressed hard into the soles of her feet each time she stepped, but the tingle of pain it produced reinforced her sense of balance. Ouch—one step, zing—another. Zing—she walked on, eyes naked, around her nothing but dark air whose forms had dissolved. Evie stepped her body forward, arms extended on either side like bird wings, helping her fly.
And then she
was
flying; she swung her arms and the air found a sound and whistled: she was falling, she was falling from the high wire.
And because her family performed without nets, nothing would catch her before she hit the ground. In the two seconds it took her to fall, Evie tried to change herself from bird to cat in the absurd hope of landing on her feet. Through the singing terror of her blood hurtling toward the earth, for two seconds of her life, Evie surpassed her family in her understanding of what it meant to be a high wire walker. She was having the consummate experience of the art.
And then she hit the ground.
“Jesus,” said Ingrid. Her glass sat empty beside her, her cigarette unlit and forgotten in her hand. “It’s amazing you’re not dead.”
Evelyn nodded. “That’s what everyone said, once they started speaking to me again. I was in disgrace for the rest of the season.” She drained the remains of her wine cooler. “Another drink?”
Ingrid held out her glass. “We’re out of Fresca. I’ll take straight wine.” She was drunk enough to have relaxed into the extraordinary science experiment her nervous system was conducting; it seemed that when Evelyn spoke to her, something in the tone of her voice caused high voltage electricity to shoot all through her body. With the addition of alcohol, however, the experience was not frightening and unbearable; in the presence of wine, the chemical reaction produced was more like the delicious electrics of having your scalp lightly scratched, or the tingle of sinking into a warm bath.
“So what bones did you break?” she asked.
“Let’s see. I had a concussion, and something called a burst fracture along my spine, and I broke my right leg and both ankles, and a bunch of ribs. The only thing they could set was the leg and ankles, so for the spine and the ribs I had to just lie around not moving for about a month while everyone ignored me. To teach me a lesson, you know. It was awful—it hurt even to breathe.”
“Have you ever done it again?”
“Walked on the wire? Not high like that. Joe—my first husband—bet me once that I couldn’t walk a wire that was about three feet off the ground and I did it. That was, gosh, six or seven years ago, I guess. I haven’t done it since.”
“Could you do it now?”
“There’s no wire.”
“Sure there is,” Ingrid said. “The wire on that guard rail thing down the road by the bridge.”
“That’s not a wire. More like a big steel cable. Anybody could walk that.”
“I couldn’t. I’ve tried. Would you? I just want to see what it looks like. Please?”
Evelyn looked out across the dark backyard. You couldn’t see anything out there, there was no moon, and there were no streetlights until Old Adams Road joined Brook Road, where the bridge was. The night was full of crickets, singing in her ears and in her bloodstream, it seemed; she felt excited, buzzy, daring. She looked over at Ingrid, who was gazing at her intently, but when their eyes met Ingrid looked away.
“I’ll show you,” Evelyn said, deciding as she spoke. “It isn’t hard. Come on.”
They picked their way along the dark road to the bridge, which was in fact just a part of the road that ran over a dry creek bed filled with sumac and poison ivy. Evelyn kicked off her shoes and stepped up onto the guard rail post, then laid one taupe-stockinged foot on the cable.
Next foot, now step—but she was leaning too far back on her heels: her arms pinwheeled and she jumped down onto the asphalt, glanced at Ingrid standing a few feet away under the street lamp.
“Try again,” Ingrid said.
Evelyn thought of her father, imagined her father’s feet folding themselves around the wire—feeling, as he said, for what the wire wanted. She tried again.
One step, another, a third. A half-dozen in rapid succession. From under the streetlight, Ingrid applauded.
But the guard rail was only two feet off the ground. Evelyn thought she should show Ingrid something actually worth clapping for. Try a little jump, reverse turn.
She bounced in preparation, jumped and spun, landed facing the other way. She had done it, actually done it, and now another reverse jump, a quick run forward to the next post, another jump, reverse turn, a skip, and now she was falling, jump again, make it look like part of the act, arms high, dismount!
She landed on her feet on the pavement, staggered, but stayed upright.
Ingrid clapped and whistled through her teeth, ran up beside her.
“That was so excellent. That was great!”
Did you see that?
Evelyn thought at the ghost of Joe Cullen.
Ha.
But Joe was passed out in the ravine and had missed the whole thing.
“Do it again?” Ingrid asked.
“No,” said Evelyn firmly. “It’s amazing I did it even once. We’ll go back and celebrate that.”
“Awesome,” Ingrid said.
Coming around the side of the house to the dark backyard, Evelyn thought of the night she’d broken the window. She looked up toward the study and stumbled, nearly fell. She realized she was still barefoot save for her torn stockings.
“Where are my shoes?” she asked.
“I have them,” Ingrid said. “Can we have some more wine?”
“Haven’t you had enough?”
“You drank practically all of it. Besides, you said we had to celebrate.”
“That’s true—how often have I done that jump right while someone was watching? Never. Celebrate how?”
They went in through the back door.
“Champagne?” Ingrid suggested.
“
Champagne
.” Evelyn laughed. “Ray will love that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Who cares what he thinks? Go see if there’s some downstairs, then. In the wine cellar.”
While Ingrid was downstairs in the basement, Evelyn looked in the fridge. She was hungry again, she was starving. She was drunker than she’d intended to be, but so what? There was no Joe here to ruin it, take it from buzzed to ballistic, ball up his meaty fists. She pulled out the Pyrex dish of chicken, now congealing in fat mixed with tomato, and sat down at the kitchen table, speared a piece of chicken with the tips of her nails.
Ingrid burst through the basement door yelling something. “What? Slow down.”
“I said, it’s a fucking fallout shelter, your wine room. I totally forgot. How awesome is that? Right in your own basement, the whole concrete and steel shebang.”
I don’t think it works,” Evelyn said.
Ingrid began to laugh. She laughed so hard she sat down on the kitchen floor. “Of course it doesn’t work. How could it work? Oh, boy. Your basement is not where I’ll run for safety when the bombing begins.” She twisted the wire off the champagne cork and aimed the bottle at the ceiling. “Bang,” she said, as the cork hit the door frame. “But let’s talk about
you
, sweetheart,” she said, old movie voice. “You got any glasses in this dump?”
The champagne glasses were in the china cabinet in the dining room, but that seemed too far away. Ingrid found two coffee mugs out of the dish drainer instead and filled them to the rim. “To your balance,” Ingrid said, and laughed.
“Oh, I just love you,” Evelyn said, and drank.
“You do?” The chemistry experiment inside Ingrid sent up a shower of sparks.
“I mean,” Evelyn said, “this is great. You’re great. I’m so glad you’re here. Ray would never do this.”
“Do what?” Ingrid asked. Sparking, blinking, dizzy.
“Oh, champagne for no reason, champagne in coffee mugs—I can’t explain it. It’s just—relaxing.”
They ate cold chicken and drank warm champagne.
“Can I tell you something?” Ingrid said after a while. “When I met you I thought you were—I don’t know how to say it. Like, you were just this
wife
.”
“I am just a wife,” Evelyn said. “Mrs. Arthur Braeburn Shepard.”
“I know, but I just mean, I don’t know. If
I
had something really interesting in my life, I don’t think I’d try to hide it.”
Evelyn sat up a little. “What do you think I’m hiding?”
Ingrid made an impatient face. “Um, everything? Like that you were in the circus and stuff. How come you didn’t just tell me?”
Evelyn relaxed again. “Because when I tell people, it’s all they see. And they think I’m some kind of freak. I feel stared at.”
“That’s not why people stare at you,” Ingrid said.
“No?”
“They stare at you because you’re beautiful, duh.”
You’re drunk, Slade. You must be fucking drunk.
“How would you know? Pass me some more chicken.”
Ingrid passed a drumstick and watched Evelyn beautifully eat it. “There’s tomato sauce on your cheek,” she said.
Evelyn wiped the wrong side of her face with the back of her greasy hand, missing the tomato sauce and smearing what was left of her Maybelline.
“Why do you wear pancake makeup, anyway?” Ingrid asked.
“It’s called foundation, not pancake. Because I have too many freckles.”
“But I like them.”
“Besides, it moisturizes.”
“That’s no reason. So does chicken grease.”
“You don’t
wear
chicken grease.”
“You’re wearing it right now. It’s your
left
cheek. It makes your freckles shiny.”
“You’re crazy,” said Evelyn, wiping at her other cheek.
“I am not—look.” Ingrid dipped her finger in the oily tomato sauce and rubbed it against her own cheek as if she were applying rouge. “See? Glisteny. That’s how you look.”
“Crazy,” Evelyn repeated.
“Try it,” Ingrid insisted. She dipped her finger again and dabbed it against Evelyn’s cheek. “New formula! Goes on smoother than ever.”
“You maniac!” Evelyn stuck her hand in the pan and painted a smear of sauce across Ingrid’s forehead.
Ingrid burst out laughing. “How do I look?” she asked.
“Yummy.”
Ingrid dipped her fingers into the sauce as Evelyn had done. She reached up and touched Evelyn’s other cheek, then laid her whole hand there.
“Hey,” Evelyn protested.
Ingrid took her hand away; it was on fire anyhow. “Now you look great too,” she said, and put her burned fingers in her mouth.
Evelyn grinned. “Look great, taste great!” She began to giggle. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.”

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