Wonder Show (2 page)

“But what is it? I can’t see!”

A large man next to Sophia leaned down to Portia and said, “You can’t see? Well, that won’t do. Here, let me help.” She was small for her age—it took no effort at all for the man to reach down and lift Portia as if she were a bag of groceries and plunk her down onto his shoulders. Sophia sputtered a bit, but she lived by “good manners above all” and couldn’t bring herself to reprimand a total stranger.

Portia’s newfound height gave her a perfect view, but even though she could see the figure on the stage, she still wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It seemed to be a man, but he didn’t look like any man Portia had ever seen. His head was very small and bald and rather pointy at the back, and his face seemed too big. It was sloped as though someone had grabbed his nose and pulled everything down toward his nearly absent chin.

Accidentally out loud, Portia said, “What is it?”

“It’s The Pinhead,” the man told her.

“Is he . . . What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t know,” said the man. “But he sure is funny-looking, ain’t he?”

The Pinhead smiled peacefully as he played his accordion and gazed down at the stage. He did not look into the audience, and everyone stared and whispered as if he were on a movie screen instead of right there in front of them. Finally, he finished his song with a little flourish and, still smiling, shuffled off the stage, slipping behind a hidden opening in the tent canvas.

Another man stepped up to the podium. He was wearing a white suit, so white in the early afternoon sun that Portia had to shield her eyes to look at him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called, “let’s hear a big round of applause for Gregor, last surviving member of the lost tribe of Montezuma.”

There was a smattering of hesitant applause, and the white-suit man went on.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, our main event. This is what your friends and neighbors will be talking about long after our humble show is gone from your fine town. You will tell your grandchildren the story of this day, and they will scarcely believe you, it is so fantastic. Seeing is believing, but you will not believe your eyes.”

He paused and put his hand in the air.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The Gallery of Human Oddities.”

Portia looked down at her father, to see what he was making of all this, but Max wasn’t looking at the stage. Instead, he was staring past one side of it, fixing his eyes on something far away.

Sophia tapped Portia’s benefactor on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir, but I think I should take my niece to a more . . . suitable part of the show.”

“Of course,” he said. He lifted Portia from around his neck and set her carefully on the ground.

“But—”

“What do you say?” Sophia snapped.

“Thank you, sir,” Portia said to the man, and he tipped his hat.

Portia jogged to keep up with Sophia, who was striding swiftly toward the biggest tent on the lot. Max floated distractedly behind her. “Why couldn’t we stay and watch?”

“It’s not appropriate,” Sophia said.

“
What’s
not appropriate?” Portia’s mind was swimming with what it was she’d seen, what the white-suit man could have meant by “human oddities,” why Aunt Sophia was practically running away from the midway stage.

“The sideshow,” Sophia said. “No more questions.”

There was no better way to ensure Portia’s obsession with something than telling her to forget about it.

She was distracted a bit as the circus performance began. Portia had never seen such things outside of her imagination: girls hanging by their hair and turning somersaults, small stocky men throwing themselves into the air and catching each other by the wrists, massive tigers obeying the whip-snap commands of the fearless woman who stood inside their cage. Girls riding horses standing up, bears on bicycles, elephants dancing like ballerinas. It was enchanting, like a fairy tale come to life.

But for all the whirling colors and motion and noise, all Portia could think about was what she had
not
been allowed to see. And that night her dreams were filled with new characters—a man with the head of a bear; a woman the size of a zeppelin, hovering overhead; an army of accordion-playing pinheads—as she tried to figure out what stories might have been hiding behind the curtain on the midway, waiting just for her.

It was barely another week before Max determined that it was time to go. In the years to come, Portia’s memories of the circus would become hopelessly tangled with the image of her father driving away, so that it eventually seemed clear to her that Max had gone to follow the circus. His distant silence during their outing became, in Portia’s mind, a symptom of deep fascination with the midway, the menagerie, and that mysterious tent she had not been allowed to enter. As actual memories faded, they were replaced by dreamlike pictures of Max as a lion tamer, a roustabout, a ringmaster.

Max and the circus were united for good.

And then they both vanished.

Gone

When he finally departed, her father said the same things her aunts and uncles and cousins all had said. “I will come back for you.” “This is not goodbye.” “This is our only chance.” And the last thing, always: “Be brave.” Someone always said that. This time it was Max.

“Don’t tell me that,” Portia whispered, and Max looked suitably ashamed. He should have known better, she thought. He should have given her something of his own to keep.

“It won’t be long,” he said softly. He said it into the air above Portia’s head, like a blessing over her. Like a prayer.

“As long as it takes,” Sophia told Max. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Max made himself believe her. He kissed Portia one more time and climbed into his truck. Portia angrily rubbed her cheek as the motor started, wiping Max’s kiss away, and then immediately regretted it when she saw his pained expression in the rearview mirror as he drove away.

There were no other children her age around anymore, so Portia was the only one there with Aunt Sophia. She was the only one who stood in the road and choked on the dust that rose up behind her father’s truck, the only one who cried dirty tears that night (unless Sophia cried, too, which was very hard to imagine). She was the last storyteller in her haunted forest, and Aunt Sophia was an unkind audience.

“Nonsense,” she barked. “All that stuff about goblins and trolls. Your mind is ridiculous, Portia.”

“Don’t you believe in monsters?” Portia asked.

“I believe in bears,” Sophia replied, “and I believe in the devil.”

“Those aren’t monsters.”

“You face them down and then tell me that.”

Portia imagined her barrel-shaped Aunt Sophia doing battle with the devil and an army of bears, and then thought better of asking if such an event had ever taken place. Even if it had, Sophia would never tell her about it. Aunt Sophia didn’t believe in stories. She believed in practical knowledge, in cooking, in planting a garden, in survival. She believed in staying where God had put her, which was why she agreed to hold on to Portia until Max returned.

Sophia had meant what she said.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

Portia

Papa said he didn’t want to leave but he had to. Whenever I didn’t want to do something but I had to, it was because Aunt Sophia made me. So I asked Papa who was making him leave, and he said, “Money
,”
and I got angry because money isn’t a person, it’s a thing, so he wasn’t answering my question.

Then Papa went to pack up the truck, and he hugged me real tight and said, “I’m gonna miss you so much, little bug,” and I made him let me go because I wasn’t little anymore. I was nine. And he should have known better.

I think Papa left because there was no more whiskey, and no more music at night. There was plenty of work to do, and we could have done it together. I would have helped, I wouldn’t have argued when Papa asked me to do anything. Even if it was something hard like mend the latch on the sheep pen. But it wouldn’t have been that because there were no more sheep, either.

I told myself: Papa went to find the sheep and bring them back to me.

I am going to wait for him every day.

I am going to be a good girl for Aunt Sophia.

I am going to learn new stories for when Papa comes back.

And I am never going to stop waiting.

The Apple Tree

It was where Portia did her best waiting, under the apple tree. The tree was not very big, and she liked that because so many places made her feel smaller than she wanted to be. She was shaded from sun and rain there. There was a curve in the trunk that fit against her back like another body, and it helped her remember what it was like to be held, to be safe.

Aunt Sophia did not hold her. Aunt Sophia took care of her, fed her, kept her clean and dry. Taught her what Aunt Sophia knew how to teach: manners, churchgoing, and cooking.

There were always apples on the ground, with soft brown spots from falling and sitting still too long. Portia bit into one once, one that looked more perfect than the others, but it did not taste like an apple. It was hard and bitter. She spit out the bite she’d taken and laid the rest of the apple back on the ground, bite side down, so it looked perfect again.

If she lay against the trunk of the tree and looked up through the branches, she could see only bits of the sky and the clouds passing over the leaves like a moving picture made just for her. When the road was too empty to watch anymore, Portia had this other view to comfort her. When, after a while, that was not enough, she knew it was time to go back inside.

She was careful with her apple tree. She did not ask too much of it.

While I Was Waiting (From the Notebook of Portia Remini)

A partial list of things that happened
accidentally
in the year I lived with Aunt Sophia:

1. A small fire involving dining room curtains and candles during an attempted séance to call forth the ghost of William Howard Taft.

2. A disagreement as to the meaning of the word
disagreement
between myself and one Miss Eugenia Throgsmorton, Headmistress, Sutton County Day School.

3. The loss of an entire batch of newly carded wool, which was left outdoors during a rather exciting thunderstorm.

4. The acquisition of a mild case of influenza, resulting from the exploration of waist-deep sinkholes in the midst of said thunderstorm.

And the following incidents, which took place in church:

1. Daring escape by mouse from pocket of my dress.

2. Similar escape by salamander—same pocket, different Sunday.

3. So-called defacement of prayer missals, in which certain words were altered in unsavory directions.

4. Unfortunate misfire of pea from peashooter, leading to the removal of pea from Miss Eugenia Throgsmorton’s ear.

All of the above were completely unintentional, not to mention unfairly punished.

Broken Promise

Aunt Sophia was a hard spirit. She had survived her life because of a stalwart, stubborn refusal to change. Some women are that way, no matter how many sons they lose in a war, no matter how hard they must work after their husbands are carelessly dispatched by a hay baler, no matter how many troublesome girls they take in. Women like Sophia are great rocks in the sea, weathered and worn but never broken.

When Portia first went to live with Sophia, she thought she would not let herself be changed, either. Portia thought she would be in Aunt Sophia’s house only for a short time. She did not know that her father would go down that open road and not return on any of the days she stood at the front gate and watched until she saw trailing black spots from staring so hard. She thought she should be the first to see him coming, so she gave up climbing trees and writing down stories and doing all the things she loved. She only watched the road. Finally Aunt Sophia got fed up and dragged Portia into the house, and she didn’t stop even when Portia kicked her in the stomach.

I hate her,
Portia told herself. But even then she knew it wasn’t true. Aunt Sophia taught her how to cook and sew, and she let her read any book Portia wanted as long as she spent the same amount of time reading the Bible, which was fine with Portia because the Bible has more than its fair share of gory tales and intrigue.

Portia once imagined herself as David, with Sophia playing Goliath, and saw herself land that stone directly between Sophia’s eyes so that she dropped dead immediately. Then Portia felt terribly guilty and washed all of Aunt Sophia’s unmentionables without complaining once.

Did David feel so guilty? After he killed Goliath, did he gently bathe his gigantic body with a wet rag tied to a very long stick? No, he did not.

It is a terrible curse for a storyteller, to have such a conscience.

“As long as it takes,” Sophia told Max. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And she didn’t go anywhere. But Portia did.

Four years after her father was swallowed in a cloud of dust, Portia turned thirteen, and the old family traits were in full bloom. She was willful, stubborn, and prone to daydreams. She was clumsy. She was emotional. She was, in fact, exactly like her Uncle Hiram, who had been Sophia’s husband and the bane of her existence until he got himself crushed by the hay baler. (“Head in the clouds” was all Sophia said when the men came to tell her the news. She was not the least bit surprised to find herself a widow. Nor was she particularly upset.)

Sophia decided the best thing for everyone was to install Portia in a place where she would be safe, disciplined, and out of Sophia’s way.