We So Seldom Look on Love (6 page)

It didn’t take long for Sylvie’s parents to find out what was going on. Sylvie’s compliance was the thing that her mother couldn’t get over. She called Sylvie a dirty dish rag. She said that a steady diet of scratches and pokes in the eye would have soon taught the children a lesson.

“But if I don’t show them, they’ll scratch and poke
me,”
Sylvie said.

“Then that is your lot!” her mother shouted. “That is your cross to bear! Think of what Sue has borne! Think of what
I
have borne!”

At this point her father appeared from another room. “Why not she stay here?” he said.

“What?” Her mother looked startled by this rare intervention.

“You give her the lessons,” he said.

“What?” her mother said louder.

“Like before.” He shrugged.

“What did I tell you?” her mother shouted at him. “What did That Man say? Truancy is against the law! Against the law! Do you want us all hauled off to the slammer?”

At dismissal the next afternoon her mother showed up and laid into Sylvie’s teacher, Miss Moote, for not being on the ball. From then on, Miss Moote kept Sylvie inside at recess and waited with her outside the front doors until her mother arrived in the cart. Tuesdays and Fridays, the days her mother cleaned the funeral parlour, her father was supposed to come for her, but more often than not he got tied up at the factory, and finally Miss Moote would walk around the school and say timidly that all the children were long gone, she was sure it was all right for Sylvie to walk home.

It was never all right. Boys ambushed her and poked and tickled her little legs to see them kick. One day the boy who chain-smoked stuck his finger up between both pairs of her legs, her little ones and then her own, and she had to race home to wash out the blood that dripped onto her underpants.

She lay them in the warming oven to dry, but Sue’s pair, a higher-quality cotton than her own, were still damp when she heard her mother opening the front door. She had to put them on anyway (she and Sue owned only one pair each) and just hope that her mother wouldn’t notice.

Not only did her mother not notice, she had a gift from the funeral parlour. After stroking and massaging Sue and asking about her day, she stood up, reached in her coat pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

“Found it beside Mr. Arnett on the slab,” she said, unwrapping the napkin to reveal a dead praying mantis. “Right beside his ear, like it was praying for his old skinflint soul and then keeled over from the formaldehyde. Don’t ask me how it got in there, though.”

As Sylvie carefully picked the insect up, the boy’s finger stabbing her and Sue became the darkness before the dawn, the terrible trial that had earned her this otherwise unaccountable blessing. The blessing wasn’t just that Sylvie had never seen a
real praying mantis, it was that her mother had been trying for months to find a buyer for the microscope. Her father, claiming to have got the microscope cheap at a fire sale, gave it to Sylvie on her birthday. Ten dollars, her father finally confessed, and for a day Sylvie’s mother muttered and raged that amount, and then she posted For Sale notices on telephone poles in town. But there were no takers, and meanwhile Sylvie used the microscope to study insects.

With the praying mantis, she began a collection. First she studied the insect from every possible angle, then, after flattening it with a rock or by rolling a pencil over it, she cleaned it off with vinegar and water. When it was dry she ironed it between pieces of wax paper and glued it into a scrapbook.

She filled three scrapbooks in three years. In her fourth scrapbook she branched out to include larvae and worms. By then she was identifying her catches with the help of a library book, and making labels from letters cut out of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. On the facing page she would write down some aspect of what she had read or observed. “To defend itself the
catocala
hides its colourful wings with dull wings that blend in with the surroundings.” “A black line under its back wings is the only difference between the Basilarchia butterfly and the monarch butterfly.”

A few weeks after her fourteenth birthday she gave this activity up. One day she didn’t have the heart to flatten another insect. Also she hardly ever discovered anything she didn’t already have, and this frustrated her, especially as she knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of different insect species right on her land alone.

The exciting feeling of the hunt didn’t end, though. In fact, because of her memory spells, it came back to her at least once a week, as vividly as the real thing. Other moments came back as well (she had no control over what entered her mind at these
times) but usually in her memory she was stalking or preserving one of her insects.

The spells had started a year before, and always when she was nervous or upset. Her mother would be yelling at her, and Sylvie would hear every word her mother said, and she’d see her mother there, banging a pot down, but why she squinted was from late-afternoon sun glancing off the barn roof, and why she felt an urge to lift her hand was that her hand
was
lifting, to pluck an aphid from the rose trellis. She heard her mother in the kitchen and heard her mother two years ago, calling from the barn door.

Even without her spells Sylvie had an excellent memory. She memorized her textbooks and got perfect grades and achievement pins. During spare periods and physical education classes (from which she was excused) she studied in the library or in an empty classroom. Since everyone who wanted to had seen her legs at least once, she was left alone.

In her junior year, however, an army base was set up down the road from the school, and cadets began to wait for her, two or three of them a day, outside the school gates. They took pictures of her to send to their families and to carry in their pockets—for good luck, they said, when they were shipped off to fight the war in Europe.

Sylvie didn’t mind. The truth was, she had a soft spot for the cadets, who brought her chocolates and told her she looked like the movie star Vivien Leigh. They made jokes and teased her, but they did it to her face, there was no hypocritical pretense of sparing her feelings.

One day a carnival came to town, and not a single person from school had the nerve to tell her about the freak show, but the cadets did, no beating around the bush, straight to the Siamese-twin foetuses in a jar.

“Like you, except with four arms and another head,” one of the cadets reported. “And dead, naturally. Can’t hold a candle to you, though.”

Sylvie turned on her heel and made for the Brown farm, where the carnival was set up. She found the side-show tent by following red arrows that said, “This Way for the Thrill of Your Life!” and “Keep Going, Thrill-seekers!” Next to the tent was a big sign that said:

M.T. BEAN OF NEW YORK CITY PRESENTS
THE SIDE SHOW OF THE DECADE.
TALLEST, SMALLEST, THINNEST, FATTEST,
STRANGEST, RAREST EVER TO WALK
THE FACE OF THE EARTH!

Underneath was a painting of a thin man in a tuxedo, a fat lady wearing a crown and sitting on a throne, and a tall lady with huge hands holding out a plate that had a midget standing on it. The foetuses weren’t in the painting.

“Next show in half an hour,” a boy said. “You can buy your ticket now. Fifty cents.”

Sylvie didn’t have any money, she hadn’t thought about having to pay admission. “I’ll come back,” she said.

She was sure that her parents would want to see the foetuses as badly as she did. She was wrong. An odd, dark look came over her father’s face. Her mother called M.T. Bean a vulture.

“But, Mother,” Sylvie protested. “Siamese twins. Like me and Sue.”

“Not
like you and Sue!” her mother cried, shaking a ladle at her. “Naked! Meat on display! That’s what I saved you from!”

The next day Sylvie left home. She hadn’t planned to, but when she got to the fairgrounds and found the tents gone, she started walking to New York City. She remembered that Mr. Bean was from New York City. She figured that by heading east
and following road signs, she’d eventually get there. In the back of her mind she had a plan to exhibit herself at diners in exchange for free meals and a place to sleep.

Three hours later she came upon the carnival in a meadow, not set up but with the trailers spread out and people lounging around drinking beer. A piebald Negro wolf-whistled at her.

“Is Mr. Bean here?” she asked him.

“Honey, you don’t want to see the Bean man,” he said. “We got two trailers broke down, and the Bean man be a mean man today.”

“He’ll want to see me,” Sylvie said.

He sure did. He offered her his chair and a bottle of Coke. He said he knew her mother.

“My mother’s dead,” Sylvie told him. “So is my father.”

Mr. Bean narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”

“Almost eighteen.”

“Can you prove it?”

“When I was born, it was in the papers.”

He smiled. “Right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

He was a fat bald man in an undershirt and suspenders and with an English accent. He had her take off Sue’s shoes and stockings, and then he squeezed each bare leg along its length. “Can you move ‘em?” he asked. “Bowels function?”

She signed a contract that afternoon. Five years, forty dollars a week, free room and board, a fifty-fifty split on wardrobe and prop expenses. A second big sign would be painted, featuring her alone and calling her The Incredible Girl-Boy. Sue would become Bill, and Sylvie would tell funny stories about the trials and tribulations of being attached to a boy.

Sylvie and Merry Mary share a trailer. They’ve been sharing one for six years, from Sylvie’s first day, their only stretch apart being when Mary had a fling with Leopard Man, and Sylvie
moved in with one of the barker women.

A baby came of Mary’s affair, a surprise baby, since Mary had no idea she was pregnant until she started giving birth on her specially made toilet. Sylvie was in the trailer at the time, and she pulled the baby out while Mary grunted in mild discomfort and gripped the toilet’s support bars. It was a girl. Tiny, normal. Perfect.

“Well, whaddaya know?” Mary laughed, and on the spot she named her Sue, after Sylvie’s legs. Mr. Bean went into high gear, planning a wedding, printing flyers. But before the flyers were sent out, Sue turned blue and died.

“The fat lady don’t cry,” Mary said when Mr. Bean advised her to let it all out a couple of hours after Sue stopped breathing and Mary was still holding her. She gave her up only when supper arrived. After eating, she put on her crown for her act and said, “Easy come, easy go,” to comfort Sylvie, who was crying into a pile of laundered diapers and having a memory spell about gluing down a gypsy moth.

It took weeks for Sylvie to stop crying. She couldn’t understand why she and Mary and the other freaks were alive, and a perfectly formed baby was dead. The minute she’d laid eyes on Sue it had struck her that it was all right being deformed if deformity had to exist for there to be such perfection. Sue’s death left her out of kilter. “It doesn’t make sense,” she kept saying. And Mary said, “It sure don’t,” and “That’s life,” and then she said, “Who said it’s supposed to make sense?” and finally she told Sylvie to snap out of it.

Mary never shed a tear. She said she wouldn’t, and she never did. Instead she gained another eighty pounds, mainly in her lower half.

Now, Mary can hardly walk twenty feet, and more than ever she badgers Sylvie to visit whatever town they happen to be in, to see what’s going on and to tell her all about it. “Take a break,” she says, referring to Sylvie’s ability to pass for a
normal. It gives Mary a charge that the freak everyone comes to see is the only freak who can go around without being seen.

At one time or another all of the freaks have asked Sylvie what it’s like to pass. What it’s
really
like. She knows that they want to hear how wonderful it is, because passing is their dream, but they also want to hear how strange, even unpleasant, it is, because passing is a dream that won’t come true for them. The truth is, it’s both things. On the one hand Sylvie loves the feeling of being like everybody else, which is to say like nobody in particular. On the other hand when she feels most like a freak is when she’s getting away with not being one.

For one thing she isn’t as inconspicuous as the other freaks like to think. Aside from the spectacle of the unfashionably long full skirt she wears to cover her legs, there’s her resemblance to Vivien Leigh. Wherever she goes, men look at her. Of course, she discourages the advances of strange men, but one day, when she is having lunch in a restaurant, a man at the next table isn’t the least bit put off by her fake wedding ring or by the annoyed looks she gives him. He keeps smiling at her, an oddly conspiratorial smile, and in her agitation Sylvie is pouring a mixture of hot mustard and water down worm holes fourteen years ago while knocking over her Coke right now.

The man is there in a second, offering his napkin and introducing himself. Dr. John Wilcox.

Sylvie is trapped by him blocking her way. Trapped by his man’s body, his adoring eyes and all his questions. She gives her name and is surprised to find herself admitting that the ring isn’t really a wedding band. One part of her mind is rinsing the burning worms in a jar of water, and the other part is telling Dr. John Wilcox that she works in the travel business. Considering the miles under her belt, this isn’t entirely a lie.

“I’ve got to leave,” she keeps saying, but weakly. She feels melted to her chair. Between her little legs there’s a soft ache, and she can’t tear her eyes from his mouth. He has a beautiful mouth, a rosebud, a cherub’s mouth. He has blond, curly hair. Seven years in show business and how many men has she watched watching her? Enough to know that ones like him aren’t a dime a dozen.

Suddenly he is quiet. He lifts her hand from the table and holds it for a few minutes, turning it around, studying it. When can he see her again? He can’t, she answers, she isn’t what he thinks she is. No, not in love with anyone else, but not free … not what he thinks. Pressing her purse against her little legs to keep them still, she stands up and walks away.