Wonder When You’ll Miss Me (23 page)

I nodded. In the distance Benny was trailed by five little figures, each with a red ball. We could hear the midway opening for business. Somewhere, I knew, people swung through the air, practicing for the evening show, for the spin and the plummet. For the act that would make the audience gasp.

I sipped my coffee, content to be alive. Content, for now, to be a part of something.

A
ND
then days turned into weeks, which gathered into months, and I learned more about the world. I learned that in Springfield, Massachusetts, the land sloped gently. That in Montana the sky was enough to swallow you whole, but the people laughed with their heads thrown back and their mouths open, willing and grateful. In Iowa they were somewhat suspicious, but many saw the show twice. In St. Louis they didn't come at all, thrusting Elaine into the worst of spirits. We all felt her grim desperation in our bones. In Youngstown, Ohio, they came but they were drunk. In Morgantown, West Virginia, they circled us like prey, then entered the gates and were delighted.

I learned that in each town, each city, we were the same and they were different. Until the lights came up, until Ken Sparks, the ringmaster, began his trembling
Ladies and gentlemen!
Until the clowns tumbled out of their tiny car and the Genershes flipped from each other's shoulders high up on the wire. Until Roscoe Kryzyzewski flew from the cannon and Rapunzel Finelli spun from her hair. Until Bluebell and Olivia stood on their hind legs, one foot each balanced above delicate things—a china tea set, a balloon, a lone kitten—and didn't crush them.

But the final symbiosis belonged to Mina the Ballerina. When she ascended, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, church groups and first dates, school classes, foster homes, and orphanages—the entire tent full of people breathed together and leaned forward in their seats. As Mina swooped and spun, whirled and then pretended to fall, catching herself with one hand or the tops of her feet, we moved as one. We gasped, we
ooohed, we aahhhed as one. We clutched each other and covered our eyes, peeking through the slits our fingers made.

Her sister and brother-in-law warmed the crowd up, but nothing competed with that moment the net was removed, when the roustabouts scurried to the tune of the ringmaster's booming voice:
“Ladies and gentlemen, at the terrifying height of almost one hundred feet above the cold hard ground, Miss Mina the Balleriiiiiiiiiiiiiina of the Air will tempt fate and embrace destiny as she dances through the heavens for
your
entertainment!”

We couldn't tear ourselves away.

 

And in each town there were policemen who stopped by to scan the crowd or were hired to manage the audience, to keep the peace. And in each place I was afraid of being recognized and careful to keep my distance. If anyone noticed, they didn't say anything. Circus people seemed especially able to let one another harbor things. I held it all close, certain that I could be undone quite quickly if I wasn't careful. But I became more and more comfortable with myself, as Annabelle. Gleryton began to feel like a movie I'd seen, a book I'd read. A sad story about some girl I'd barely known, some scared little girl who couldn't take care of herself. And I wasn't like that at all.

 

By then I had come to know everyone better. Even Wilma, still as secretive as ever. I came to know that she was complicated, fickle. That she was prone to fits of sleeplessness, that she resented the life as much as she clung to it. That she preferred to live far away, alone in her own mind.

Somewhere along the way she and Jim reconciled. One evening I came back to the trailer and he was there, his arms around her waist, their sudden silence a signal to grab what I came for and get out.

But the best thing, the most surprising thing, was that Rod Genersh and I became cautious friends. He liked to visit Bluebell and Olivia and the horses, and could explain things to me without making me feel foolish. He told me his mother had been a trick rider when she met his father and it was something that he missed, watching her gentle way with horses. She rarely rode once she'd learned the high wire, but in every show they'd been with she'd visited the horses and brought them apples, as he did now.

I enjoyed Rod's quiet company. I liked having him around and I'd begun to trust him. He didn't ask questions, he didn't invite the condemnation of the fat girl, and his presence was comfortable, easy. Hugo's light still lured me, but I'd quickly given up hope for any sort of heart-pounding attention from him.

I learned to live in the present, which meant shoveling shit and riding out the minidramas and scandals that were always erupting on a circus lot. It meant watching allegiances and working hard. And it meant keeping myself beyond scrutiny. I learned to keep Gleryton and all its secrets locked away.

Whatever vague notions I'd had about going to find Charlie, about trying to help him, dissipated slowly until they were gone. When I thought of him, it was as part of everything else I'd lost or left behind. It was as a piece of my former life. But I no longer thought of him often.

And then one day I was wheeling elephant shit down a hill towards a gully in rural Ohio, and the landscape was wide and clean and open and I felt, deep down, that things were about to be different.

I had this nagging feeling all day long; I couldn't put my finger on it, couldn't say exactly what I meant, just that I was sure. Change was coming. Or something was.

 

Once, in Phoenix, the fat girl suggested I introduce myself to the aerialists, but I was too shy to speak to them.

“Oh please,” I'd said to her. “How am I going to do that?”

We were alone in the trailer in the early evening. It was a night off for everyone and the dry heat had left me sapped and too thirsty to do much of anything. I'd seen Wilma head for Jim's place. The fat girl had seized the opportunity to try on wigs.

“You just say hello, tell Mina you like her act.” She flipped strands of long yellow hair over one shoulder. “How does this look?”

“I can't just say that. I can't just walk up to her and say that.”

“I'm sure they know who you are already. It's just a formality.” She gave me a measured, pointed look. “I thought Annabelle could do anything.”

But she couldn't—I hadn't been able to do it. I'd been with the show long enough to understand the circus hierarchy a little. As Benny had said one night:
“The closer to God they are in the rafters, the more snobbish they are to us mere mortals.”
Which seemed to be true of everyone but Rod.

I felt ridiculous, as though even talking to them, even saying hello to
Mina, would reveal everything about me. Instead I watched the aerialists stretching out near their trailer or securing their rigging in the big top, and tried to seem cool.

 

And then it was late spring and we were set up in a picnic grounds near Scranton, Pennsylvania. I still had the strange tingling sensation deep in my blood that something was afoot, but no idea why or what. I was bone tired from the months of climbing hills with my heavy wheelbarrow, but I was also stronger now. Sometimes, alone in the trailer, I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to understand how this new body, with its new shape, belonged to me. My arms and shoulders had grown ropey with shoveling and lifting. My face was angular, my waist narrow, my legs sinewy. In Tulsa, Wilma had cut all my hair so it was very short but would grow in evenly. We'd washed it blond again, banishing the orange, and though roots had returned more than once, I had come to appreciate this spiky light version of myself, had grown used to the reflection that found me in the mirror. Now, before the show, I put on my own makeup, applied long Mylar eyelashes, and liberally sprinkled glitter. All by myself, I transformed into that sparkly creature that danced in front of the crowds. I'd even begun to like her.

And the fat girl?

The fat girl was petulant, lonely, sad. She disappeared for whole days at a time and I fell completely into the rhythm of circus life, the monotonous drudgery of it, the familiar exhaustion. I never knew what to expect when she reappeared. Sometimes she was full of kind advice. Sometimes she was angry, or in a sour, bitter mood, and wanted to make sure I understood what danger I was in.

I had pushed it all away, and she knew that.

I had packed all images of Tony Giobambera and the others into a small room with a door, which I'd shut. And except for the occasional lightning bolt of memory, I didn't think of them, or of what we'd done, and the fat girl didn't like that at all.

But we were coming full circle, slowly and surely heading back to the mid-Atlantic, to Tennessee, North Carolina, the whole route refreshing itself. It would happen, the fat girl liked to remind me. Not tomorrow, but someday: we would play Gleryton. It was only a matter of time.

 

In Scranton, I left the elephants and walked past the aerial encampment on my way to our trailer to change for dinner. Victor and Mina ignored me, but the other half of their team—Victor's brother, Juan, and Juan's wife, Carla—sometimes said hello. I liked watching them use the trampoline, the way they flung themselves in the air, bouncing higher and higher and higher. I liked that before trying anything they hung upside down like enormous possums from bars they set up, and I liked the easy way they had with one another.

And after watching them, and the Genershes, for so many months, I'd taught myself to do a handstand by balancing against the side of the costume trailer. It had taken a little while. At first I'd seen stars, but as I did it more often—at least several times a day—my arms had grown stronger and the stars took longer to appear. By Pennsylvania I could do it easily, keeping steady with one foot touching the trailer and the rest of me extended into the air. Sometimes, for brief moments, I could balance without the wall of the trailer, but I wanted to be able to walk on my hands, like I'd seen Jenny Genersh do, as balanced and poised as if they were feet.

Scranton was wide and green, and everyone, the entire circus—performers, roustabouts, gamers, even Wilma—was gathering in the parking lot to eat together before the evening show. Rod Genersh caught me upside down when he came to get me for dinner.

“How long have you been at that?” Rod asked me.

I kicked down and stood. “A while.”

“You look pretty good.” He cracked his fingers and then his neck. He didn't cover his mouth around me anymore, so every sentence had a flash of gummy pink. “What made you start doing handstands?”

“I saw Mina and…it's stupid.”

“No it's not.”

I looked up to see if he was making fun, but he didn't seem to be. “I saw them do it. I don't know. I just think their act is amazing, you know?”

He nodded, solemn. “I know.”

He watched me for a minute and then crossed his arms. “The next step is push-ups,” he said. “You want to build strength and balance. Do a handstand and then do push-ups upside down so you're using your body weight. That's what the aerialists do. You ought to talk to Mina.”

I glanced at him, grateful my face was already red. “You can talk to her,” I said. “I'm just an elephant groom.”

“So, I'll introduce you,” Rod said. “All that status stuff. It's such bullshit anyway. I don't care.” He squared his shoulders. “You just stick with me.”

I didn't know how to say anything else without betraying how much it would mean to me, so I just watched my feet carve a circle in the dirt and shrugged.

“It's like this,” Rod said and popped onto his hands. He didn't need a wall to balance. He looked completely comfortable upside down, and began to rise and fall, his arms rippling with the effort of it.

“Okay, already,” I said. But I was watching.

 

“Get some food and then we'll find Mina,” Rod said. He had already heaped his plate with potato salad and pickles. It was cool out and I wished I'd tied a jacket around my waist. Most people already had food and were sitting in small groups at picnic tables or on the grass. Across from us, Grouper and a skinny pale girl stole things from each other's plates and giggled. Wilma joined us in line. Her dark hair was twisted off her neck and her glasses hung from a chain around her throat. She was flushed and giddy.

“Hi,” she said. “I haven't seen you in days.”

It wasn't true, but Wilma seemed given to odd exaggeration lately, so I just smiled my reply. “Hi,” I said.

“Your friend is back,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder.

I glanced up expecting to see the fat girl strolling down the line the wrong way, snatching potato chips off people's plates. I looked at Wilma in confusion.

“The Digestivore,” she said. “And that fucked-up boyfriend of his.” Wilma put a hand on her hip. “They're joining up again,” she said. “Go figure. Elaine rehired them.”

 

What to do with that? When I was little and overwhelmed, there were songs to sing or my dad's lap in which to bury my face. In the picnic line of the circus there was nothing.

“Cool,” I said. Inside I was trembling.

Charlie? I froze at the thought of him screaming my real name across the parking lot. I didn't realize I had dropped my plate until I felt something cold on my shin. I was standing in potato salad. It didn't matter. I had to find Charlie before he found me.

I stepped out of line and made my way across a stretch of blacktop. Had Elaine said anything to them? Or to Sam? Had Elaine told Sam my real name? I was stopped short by the weight of one dark shiny thought.

How on earth could they recognize me?

“They won't.” The fat girl had caught up. “They couldn't and they won't. But you still need to find them first.”

It was as though it was the first time I'd seen her in a while. The fat girl looked haggard. Her skin, usually so pink and round, hung off her in gray lumps and sags.

“You need to be very careful, hon.” Her voice was soft. I felt sorry for ignoring her so much lately, for mocking her whenever I saw her. I had the urge to take her in my arms but instead I just stood there.

“I've never trusted him,” she said. “Remember that. That's all I'm asking.”