Wonder Show (15 page)

Portia did not complain. She thought about how she could be shoveling horse manure instead and went on peeling the seventeen-thousandth potato she had peeled that summer. She had visions of herself peeling potatoes until the end of the world, at which point she would perish alone because no one would be able to find her amid all the naked potatoes and piles of shredded skins.

But the day after she took the platter of chicken and biscuits to Mrs. Collington’s trailer, the Fat and Bearded Ladies whirled into the kitchen and ordered Portia to leave immediately.

“What? Why?”

Mrs. Collington tightened her mouth and said simply, “Out.”

Mrs. Murphy smiled as she tied a scarf over her beard. “She’s feeling better,” she whispered to Portia. “Now hand me that peeler.”

Mosco was outside the pie car, whittling chess pieces out of discarded stage boards.

“Who’re those for?” Portia asked.

Mosco muttered, “I don’t know.”

She waited a few seconds, but he said nothing more.

“Well . . . I guess I’ll . . . take a bath?”

Eyes still down, he said, “You asking my opinion?”

“Just trying to make conversation.”

He looked up then and closed his pocketknife. “Let me give you some advice. And I’m only doing this because it looks like you might actually stick around awhile. In the carnival, when you ask a question and the answer you get is ‘I don’t know,’ it means you have crossed a line. It means, ‘None of your business.’ It means you are not entitled to know something just because you ask about it. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “Now leave me alone. I’ve got to finish this in time for Marie’s birthday. And if you tell anyone I told you what I just told you, you’re fired.”

Portia wasn’t sure what he meant was the secret: the business about “I don’t know” or the fact that he was carving a chess set for Marie. But Portia had just been set free from the pie car and threatened with unemployment, all in the span of about three minutes. Her future at the Wonder Show was no more secure than a bridge made of eggshells. She wasn’t about to disagree with the boss.

“Right,” she said. And that was that.

The Legend of Marie

Mosco was the strongman, the mighty fellow who nonchalantly bent iron bars to look like wishbones, let Jackal snap his wrists into shackles so he could break the chains with a satisfying pop, silently lifted a barbell with two children from the audience sitting on either end. He did not smile or grimace or try to look mean. He simply did what was necessary, finished his portion of the show, and returned to his business.

Of course it had occurred to him to hire another strongman and spare himself the inconvenience of performing, but the only thing more bothersome than doing the shows would have been paying someone else to do them. He was capable. And the exercise was good for him.

And it gave him an excuse to be standing front and center when Marie took the stage. As the plucky opening strains of Josephine Baker’s
La Petite Tonkinoise
wafted out of the speakers above the stage, Marie stepped gracefully from behind the curtain and took her position. As if in a dream, Mosco watched as Marie stood on one leg and brought the other foot to the small wooden table at her side, selected a knife, gripped it between her toes, and fired it at the target with perfect accuracy. Then, with the thud of the knife piercing wood, a shudder went through the crowd like a chill wind through tall grass. It was the precise moment when the spectacle became real, when they realized what was before their eyes: a beautiful, deadly, disfigured creature. Marie, the Armless Knife-Thrower.

Anna appeared at the other end of the platform, removed the knives from the target, replaced them on the table, and returned to stand with her back pressed against the target.

Marie could make a knife do anything. Pin a fly to the wall, cut an apple in perfect halves, cut a lock of her sister’s hair without ever drawing blood.

But she didn’t do her best tricks anymore. The only thing worse than being poor, she said, was being famous. That’s when you stopped being a real person. People told stories about you, and the stories got bigger until you were more in their eyes than you could ever be in your own. They took your soul that way.

So she did enough to stay well known, enough to keep Anna in good clothes and herself in sharp blades, and tried to forget about the rest.

Except some nights, every now and then, she let it roll back to her like water coming through a dry riverbed. She tucked her head through her leather sash and let it fall around her neck, walked to a stand of trees or an empty building, and threw knives in the moonlight. She did it by feel, by the position of her leg and the strength of the wind (if there was any). She did it by sound. By instinct. By magic, almost.

It was there, in her own quiet country, that Marie was truly happy.

Her costume was dark blue satin, like a layer of the ocean no one had ever seen. It had a halter neckline because she liked to show off her perfect shoulders, below which there might have been a pair of perfect arms except that she’d been born without them. She was not ashamed of the emptiness along the sides of her body. In fact, she couldn’t imagine having limbs there—how unwieldy they would be, dangling there, waving around, whatever arms might do. She did not mourn the lack of them. She simply did not need them.

Marie could sign her name, comb her hair, clean her kitchen, turn the pages of a book as delicately as if her toes were fingers. When she spoke, she sat down and crossed her legs and gestured emphatically with her upper foot.

And of course, she could throw a knife with unflinching accuracy.

“Show me how you do it,” Portia begged. She had watched Marie’s show a dozen times by then and still couldn’t figure out how the knives went from Marie’s toes to the standing target board at the other end of the stage. It happened too quickly. There was Marie standing like a crane, poised on one foot with the other leg raised, holding a knife between her toes, and then she gave a little kick and the knife was in the target. She made it look easy, but Portia had tried to mimic the motion (knife free, because she didn’t want to cut anyone, especially herself) and felt nothing but awkward.

Marie shrugged her orphaned shoulders. “You can watch me rehearse, if you like. But I cannot throw the knives any slower. You must watch more closely.”

“How did you learn to do it, though? Do you remember when you started?”

Marie ignored the question. She raised a slippered foot and pointed to the thick roll of felt waiting on the steps of her trailer. “You can carry my knives for me. Anna has gone into town.”

“How’d she get Mosco to let her?”

Marie shrugged again. “She is quiet, my sister, but she is persuasive.”

Portia grabbed the bundle, and they walked the short distance to the midway stage.

Marie used her toes to hold the back of her shoe and lifted her heel out, first the left and then the right. She wiggled her bare toes in the grass. “I was very small when I began. My father taught me—he was a knife-thrower in the old days. He quit when he met my mother, but he never forgot the art.”

The word
father
made Portia swallow hard. “Did he use his feet, too?”

“You’re asking me if he had arms.”

“Yes.”

“He did. But he tied his hands behind his back so he could teach me to throw with my feet. We learned together that way.”

“Did he teach Anna?”

“No. She was normal.” Marie rolled her head side to side, to loosen up and make sure her sister wasn’t nearby. “She
is
normal. She can do other things. She did not need to learn the art.”

“That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t want to know how to do it,” Portia said.

Marie mounted the steps, walked to her mark, and tapped the stage with her toe. “The knives, please.”

Portia ran up and set the bundle down at Marie’s feet. She untied the ribbon that secured it and unrolled the felt, revealing the long row of knife handles. The blades were concealed in deep pockets that were sewn to fit each knife like a tailored sleeve. Aunt Sophia had the same kind of case for her knitting needles. She had made it herself.

Portia wondered who had made this one for Marie.

Before she could ask, Marie waved her away with the flick of a foot and started to slide the knives out of their pockets. Not all the way, just enough so that she could grip the base of each blade with her toes and lift the knife into position.

“It is important,” said Marie, “to have each knife in the same place each time, because each knife is different. So each throw is different. If I throw the fourth knife just the way I throw the third, the pattern will be ruined.”

Portia had the beginning of a thought, the image of Anna posed against the target board and a knife thrown the wrong way. She shook it away and concentrated on the chain of motions Marie created with her throwing leg. Her right leg, closest to the edge of the stage, closest to the audience.

She could throw with her left just as well, but if the crowd couldn’t see the whole sequence, it simply wasn’t as impressive. And above all, Marie was a performer.

“It is quite simple. A combination of heart and precision.”

“That’s what Aunt Sophia used to say about baking,” said Portia.

“Was she right?” asked Marie.

“Sometimes,” said Portia. “But not always.”

From the Notebook of Portia Remini

Once upon a time
I made an apple tree
It grew too tall to climb
It shadowed over me

On every reaching limb
The apple blossoms flowered
But when the fruit came in
The apples all were sour

Once upon a time
When promises were made
The stories all were mine
But now the stories fade.

Family Recipe

In her notebook, Portia wrote stories told by other people, rhymes a child might sing, bits of conversation she overheard on the midway, descriptions of the rubes that processed through the tent every evening like ghosts. She tried to be watchful, and to see every face, and she kept a tally of how many men she saw who could have been Max but weren’t. Each one was a bit wrong in some way—too short, too old, too young, loud, cruel, sad, heavy, dark. Looking so closely at strangers gave Portia the sensation of wearing spectacles that distorted everyone just slightly. She began to wonder if the sideshow tent actually changed people, as if upon entering they were rendered different by one degree.

The only folks who looked right were the ones on stage.

Every night, after the bally was done and the crowds had dispersed from the last circus show, as the roustabouts broke down the lot and prepared to get back on the road, Portia huddled in her trailer and scribbled words onto paper, hoping they would mean something, make something happen.

How many more days could she tell herself
one more day
? This had been her only plan. She was immobilized by the possibility that it simply would not work. Worse, Gideon seemed to have adopted her search for Max as a personal cause. Perhaps to make up for having teased her about the bicycle, or for reasons of his own that he did not decide to share, he hounded her daily about her progress.

“See him?” he’d ask. “Anything?”

“No,” she mumbled.

Having to say aloud over and over that she had not found Max, nor anyone who even closely resembled him, made Portia furious. She did her best not to show it—her temper had gotten the best of her before. But this time, she lost her resolve.

“Leave me alone!”

Gideon looked as if he’d been slapped. His hands sank into his pockets, and he let his breath out slowly. Then he said, “I put up a sign in the ticket window with his name on it, saying he’s got free tickets waiting for him. Word could get around that way.”

Portia blinked. “How do you do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Just . . . breathe like that. Stay so calm. How do you do it?”

He smiled, drew his hands out, spread them in front of her. “Magic,” he said, and began whistling like a calliope.

Portia laughed. It sounded strange to her, her voice bending to that cadence. Gideon smiled again.

“You’ll find him,” he told her.

She knew he was only trying to make her feel better. There was no reason to believe in Max showing up on the lot, no mysterious force that kept fathers and daughters in the same universe simply because their blood was the same recipe. And yet, as Portia looked around, at the dusky sky and the great flat expanse of prairie and the bones of the circus readied for their journey, she thought she could feel something—a buoyancy, a lifting of the ground under her feet, keeping her upright. Perhaps this was the physics of faith, the knowledge that the earth was moving and so was she.

“Thank you,” Portia said.

And she continued to spin.

More Secrets

Each week was a cycle, built out of scheduled tasks that no one ignored or questioned. Bathe on Monday, wash clothes on Tuesday, go to the market on Wednesday, clean house on Thursday, mend costumes and canvas on Friday. Extra shows on Saturday. Day off on Sunday. For the circus performers and the human marvels (plus Jackal and Portia), every day brought rehearsal, and for the roustabouts and mechanics there were constant repairs, and the near-daily breakdown, transport, and reassembly of the circus. But that was work. The rituals of regular life happened one day at a time, each week, like a wheel in perpetual motion.

The circus and the Wonder Show followed the same schedule, but the circus people did certain things first. There was only so much space in the dining tent and only so many washtubs and only so many stalls in the bank of outdoor showers, so the carnival folks ate second, washed their clothes second, bathed second. They were accustomed to eating warm food instead of hot or cold, to bathing under high noon sun instead of low morning light, to wearing clothes that were never quite as clean as they might have liked.