The Fainting Room (25 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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She climbed into the shower and considered. She and Alice Marie had used have a good time together once in a while. But she hadn’t talked to Alice Marie in almost a year, hadn’t seen her in close to two, not since she left Virginia with Joe’s ashes. Had she ever had fun with Ray like she’d had with Ingrid last night? Perhaps once, a winter evening just after they were married. The Charles River had frozen hard enough for skating, and they’d gone out on the ice. That night, perhaps. Well, that was something. She and Joe had never had fun that way, of that she was sure.
Where was the ghost of Joe Cullen this morning? Evelyn looked down at her body, dripping on the bathmat. Stars and flags and bluebirds, the sun and the mermaid. The feel of Joe’s hands, never steadier than when he was working, was still all over her. Marking her as different forever. There and there and there.
It’s amazing I’m here at all, she thought. Both here in this house and here alive. That’s the real feat.
She met Joe in the wake of her adolescent fall from the high wire. After being discharged from the hospital with a cast on each leg and a bottle of pain medication nowhere near as strong as what she’d had in the ward, Evie had been left on her back in the trailer with instructions not to move unless necessary. The feeling around the circus lot was that her luck at being alive and not paralyzed was exceeded only by her stupidity. What she’d done was inexcusable, the kind of thing a townie would sneak in and try. She was in disgrace. Except for the circus tutor who brought her homework, no one came to see her.
She lay in the trailer lost in the ache of misery and her own body. Each inhalation radiated dull stabs of pain along her broken ribs; the casts on her legs itched her. The pills she’d been given didn’t work. Then someone stood in the aluminum door frame, blocking the light; without her glasses, she couldn’t tell who.
“Evie?” said a resonant, male voice she recognized but could not place.
“Come in,” she said, and the shape came in, bulky in the blur of crowded space. Now that he was within her range of half-clear vision, Evie saw it was the new roustabout, the good-looking one with the tattoos. He stood awkwardly just inside the screen door and offered her a paper circus cup, which turned out to be filled with grape soda. She disliked grape but drank it gratefully: she was lonely and thirsty.
Joe stayed only a few minutes that first day. After he had gone, Evie occupied herself with those minutes for the next several hours. She recalled what she knew of him from circus gossip: He had been in the war but didn’t have any medals. He had learned the art of tattooing while stationed somewhere overseas. He had done a stint as a roustabout for a sideshow in Texas, where he had learned to swallow swords. She had seen him herself, out behind his trailer, lifting dumbbells he had made from a steel pole he’d stuck into cement-filled coffee cans.
Joe came back to see her the following afternoon. This time he brought bringing a whole bottle of Ne-Hi orange and a paper cup full of ice which she let him run up and down the back of her neck. No boy had ever paid her so much attention. She asked him about his tattoos, about the way they were made. Then she asked if he wouldn’t mind giving her one.
“You’re a girl,” Joe said.
“Please,” Evie said. “It will take my mind off the itching in my casts. Come on, just a little one.”
“The casts itch?”
Evie nodded.
“Well, sorry, but no. Your father would kill me.”
“He won’t see it,” Evie answered daringly. Joe raised his eyebrows, then grinned at her. She smiled back, and in that brief exchange of happiness, much was decided.
He returned that evening, bringing his tattoo equipment. It was during the evening show, when Evie’s father and mother and sister were busy riding bicycles in midair. Evie was alone in the trailer, freckles burning with excitement.
She gave Joe her left hip, on the belly side of the bone, just below the band of her underwear, a spot chosen because privacy was so scarce in the trailer that the artwork could only be hidden by her underwear.
Joe, in return, gave Evie a tiny bluebird, wings outstretched, a small red heart held in its beak. The pain was intense. While he was inking her, she could think of nothing else but how it hurt.
He was professional, didn’t crack jokes or try to feel her up, but bent over her body frowning, steadying his forearm against her thigh. When it was over he left, just before her parents came down off the wire. Evie fell back on the tiny day sofa, her finger resting lightly on the spot where, beneath her pajamas, beneath the bandage, there was a bright blaze of color that proved someone was interested in her, that someone thought she was interesting. All this where nothing had been before.
A week later Joe gave her an orange and yellow butterfly on her other hip. She let him kiss her, on the lips only. Like the tattoos, the kiss was all the more zinging, stinging and delicious for having to be kept hidden.
Evie had been listening to barkers work the crowds with promises since before she could talk, but at age sixteen she still had not learned that few seductions yield the product advertised. Joe shared with her a love of color, the label of outcast, and, as it turned out in the end, a talent for accidents. But that came years later. For now there was the seduction and the absolute distraction of the needle that Joe dragged expertly over her flesh, creating a pain so intense and specific that she could feel no other. And there was the discovery of sex. In those early years before Joe began drinking so heavily, sex drugged her with pleasure endorphins just as the needle did with endorphins of pain.
In the army Joe Cullen had learned to box and play poker, a combination that eventually earned him a dishonorable discharge for knocking out a superior officer’s front teeth during a fight over cards. Back in civilian clothes with no money and his forearms full of tattoos, he drifted to Texas and joined the Bob Beaufort Traveling Freak Show as a roustabout and driver. It was there he learned to swallow knives, swords and umbrellas, and there that he perfected his gambling skills. Playing pinochle with the Human Canvas he won his tattoo equipment; playing Guillotine with the Human Torch, he picked up the equivalent of two months’ wages. Playing poker with Mr. Bob Beaufort himself, he won the boss’s Camaro and paid for the privilege with his job. He left Texas and worked his way east along the Gulf Coast, doing odd jobs and giving tattoos to sailors, until he finally signed on as a roustabout for the Jones and Wallace Big Top. A few months later he fell for the younger daughter of the circus’s high wire stars and convinced the stage manager to let him perform his sword swallowing act in the slot between second clowns and trapeze. Evie, in a spangled leotard not unlike the one Alice Marie wore on the high wire, stood under the spotlight beside Joe and passed him his props. A year and a half later he married Eve Lynne Mott the day after her eighteenth birthday. He was twenty-six years old.
With the marriage, Evelyn was out of her parents’ trailer, and when she went, her parents, who didn’t like Joe, stopped treating her as someone they had a particular responsibility for, or investment in. When they talked to her it was about the coming weather, or details of the show, or the truck engine. They never asked how she was, or how Joe was, or if she needed anything at all. It would have bothered Evie more except that she’d finally achieved the status she’d so long wished for—she was a performer at last. As low on the totem pole as First of May clowns, to be sure, but she was part of Joe’s act, she was actually working in the ring now. And that, coupled with her rapidly spreading tattoos, seemed to raise her in the eyes of the other performers, her immediate family excepted.
At first her marriage to Joe was not bad; he did things she’d never dared to—talk back to the boss, kiss in public, give up on her parents. She gave up on going to lessons in the classroom trailer as well—“You aren’t going to learn anything worth knowing sitting on your ass at a desk,” Joe said, and in lieu of the social studies hour he took her to the track and showed her how to bet on horses. She won fifty dollars on a long shot and never went back to class, leaving her twelfth grade year unfinished. When she was with Joe she didn’t care; people looked at her as if she were someone to be reckoned with now, and her proximity to a man with a volatile temper made them more careful about what they said to her as well.
But after the first year of marriage, the next five slid downhill as fast as Joe himself: beer by beer and card game by card game, Joe became a drunk. By the time Evelyn was twenty-three, they were arguing every night. Joe was getting into fights with the other performers and once pulled out one of the swords from his act and threatened to kill the ringmaster, who had beaten him at cards. When he got this bad, someone—usually the roustabout they called Tall Shale—would lock Joe and his fists in an empty animal cage until he sobered up, after which he would swear off drinking until the next payday. Had he not been married to the daughter of the biggest act Jones and Wallace had, he would have been fired. But he was, and without him, Evelyn felt, she would go back to being nothing. Better to be a someone with an occasional black eye or broken rib than no one at all.
Evelyn had stayed in the shower so long that the water was cold. She shut it off, dried her hair and dressed. Maybe this morning she and Ingrid could drive over to that little diner in Waltham, the Hideaway, and have a real road breakfast, greasy eggs and burnt bacon.
Charred food ’s the best thing for a hangove
r, the ghost of Joe Cullen reminded her.
But when Evelyn went looking for Ingrid, she found only an empty bedroom, an empty fainting room, an empty backyard. Ingrid’s bicycle was gone. Evelyn stood in back door and felt lost. What was she supposed to do all by herself in this huge house? Knock around alone all day while Ray was at work, or clean things that weren’t even dirty. She turned to look at the kitchen behind her. In fact the kitchen was dirty; no one had cleaned up after dinner and the remains of the chicken had been left out all night. She fed the sauce to the disposal and dumped the bones in the garbage pail. And then, for no reason at all that she could see, she started to cry.
 
It took Ingrid an hour to bike into Harvard Square. She’d wanted to go far enough that she would be exhausted, and perhaps convince the Geiger counter in her chest to stop detecting danger everywhere.
Now she straddled her bike on the sidewalk in front of the Harvard Coop, wiping sweat from her forehead. Across the street by the subway entrance was the spot kids referred to as the Pit. It was a sunken seating area, down a few steps from the rest of the brick plaza, with a semicircular ledge designed for commuters to sit on while waiting for their bus. But the ledge was perfect for skateboarding on, and so the Pit had been named and commandeered by teenagers, at whom the displaced commuters scowled and referred to as punks.
Today was no different. From across the street Ingrid could see a preponderance of punk haircuts, heads with hair the colors of Easter eggs, hair whose Mohawk cuts revealed ears sporting safety pins or skulls, heads shaved bald. Spiky metal bracelets the white kids called slave bracelets, black denim and threadbare plaid and combat boots that, she had to admit, looked slightly ridiculous in the July heat.
The Pit had been Ingrid’s destination once she’d pedaled off the Shepards’ front lawn this morning, but now, eyeing it from across the street, she hesitated. Over the summer, with no one but the Shepards to notice, she had let her hair grow, and now, three weeks into July, the light brown roots were taking over the black. Though she had rubbed soap into her hair as usual, it was getting too long stick up very well. She had left her combat boots at home, since she was biking, and she hadn’t bothered with a leather bracelet or safety pins or any of that stuff.
She lit a cigarette and stayed where she was on the other side of the street. Sometimes, she thought, it was easier talking to adults than talking to other kids. Adults thought you were weird and didn’t expect you to act like them, so to the degree they accepted you at all, they accept you on your own terms. But kids spoke the same language, and so were constantly jockeying for position. She could almost hear the anxious tinny soundtrack playing inside the Easter egg skulls across the street: Am I cool enough? Ironic enough? Am I rad enough? Am I bored enough?
Boring
, Ingrid thought viciously, and jaywalked her bike across to Boylston Street instead, past the Tasty and the Garage, past Crimson Travel with its Please Go Away on the marquee, past the Harvard buildings and down to the river.
Once, over Columbus Day weekend, she and Jessica Rosen had stayed at the house of another girl who lived in Cambridge. The girl’s mother was a stoner who didn’t care what they did, so the three of them went down to the river in the middle of the night and drank the mom’s beer, and then at three in the morning a huge rat crawled out of the river right in front of them.
Was it Lenin who said about someone, “He is with us but he is not one of us?”
Mister, I am not one of you
, Ingrid thought.
 
Ray arrived home just before seven to find the first floor empty: no Evelyn, no Ingrid, no dinner. On the second floor, still no Ingrid, but there was Evelyn in the bedroom, lying on the bed watching the little black and white television with a pile of unsorted laundry beside her.
“What’s going on?”

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