The music from the calliope trailed us down the midway as we hurried to meet the guys at the beacon, but they were nowhere to be seen. We walked on past the little kids’ Merry-Go-Round and pony rides. Past the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Bullet. Past the balloon game and shooting game and ring game. We ended up at the far end of the midway where most of the side shows were set up.
Grandma had warned us those places were just as crooked as a rattlesnake and we had no business whatsoever going anywhere near them and she’d better not hear tell that we had or we would be plenty sorry and we should mark her words because we’d have her to deal with when we got home and make no mistake about that.
So that’s where we headed.
We walked past gaudy signs advertising the Fun House and Freaks of Nature and the Tunnel of Love before Vonnie spotted Hursey and Billy standing in front of a rickety stage gazing up at hoochie-coochie girls. The sign overhead said “Ooh La La Ladies, Fresh from Paris, France.” The women wore skimpy skirts and fishnet stockings with holes in them and sequined halters on top. They had painted their shoes with gilt, black streaks showing through the brush marks on their skint-up high heels. Puckering their lips and making kissy sounds, they gyrated to music that thrummed through big loudspeakers that crackled and buzzed. One girl tapped to the front and did a routine to “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy,” spreading a mouth smeared with red lipstick in the direction of the men, her tongue licking out around bad teeth.
The record got stuck on “choo-choo,” repeating it over and over.
The bad-teeth girl kept right on dancing to the “choo-choo choo-choo choo-choo” and pretty soon the men were egging her on.
The barker, sensing the excitement, shooed the girls into the tent behind the stage and began his pitch. “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Come on inside where the real show is about to begin. It’s gonna be the best two bits you’re ever gonna spend. Yes sirree, you’ll be down on your knees thankin’ me, and that’s no lie. Last call, gentlemen, show’s gonna start in two minutes.”
The men and boys swiveled their heads as they snaked hands into pockets to fish out a quarter. Seeing hoochie-coochie girls wasn’t anything I was interested in when I could see a real live alligator man and a two-headed chicken right down the midway. Hursey bought tickets for him and Billy, making me pinky swear I’d never tell. And I wouldn’t, because that would be the end of us ever going anywhere with him again.
My brother and sister were always saying I was dumb, but I wasn’t that dumb.
Vonnie and I bought cherry snow cones piled high with ice and drenched with sticky red syrup that dripped onto our shoes. We spent what was left of our money to buy tickets to the Oddities of the World freak show which promised not only the alligator man and the two-headed chicken, but a half-man, half-woman, who was pictured on one of the huge, hand-painted posters hanging behind the stage. The painting showed a figure that was split down the middle from top to bottom, one half of it a man and the other half a woman, with words that said:
SEE A GREEK MYTH COME TO LIFE
HERMAPHRODITE
GOD AND GODDESS IN ONE BODY
Holding hands tight, Vonnie and I walked down boards laid for a ramp into the tent. A huge woman lolled in a chair, her natural bulk made bigger by horsehair padding you could see a little of poking out of her sleeves. Sweat teared down her face, washing tracks through her makeup. Her hand, white and bloated as a dead fish, waved back and forth.
The two-headed chicken walking around in a cage and the scaly alligator man both looked real enough to me, but I didn’t know how to tell if the coal black figure stretched out in a coffin was a genuine petrified man.
A midget dressed in a red and yellow checkered clown suit ran around in the audience doing handstands. Sometimes he bent down and looked up the women’s dresses, honking a horn and covering his eyes every time he did it. One woman squealed while another cussed at him and kicked him in the knee. He laughed and pretended it didn’t hurt.
The man-woman walked to the front of the stage, keeping its face turned toward the naked bulb that hung from a cord in the center of the tent. It lifted its skirt to expose a fingerling of pink flesh dangling from a furry nest. A flash, then the skirt dropped. When it spun around and walked away, a sign on its back declared, “I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT I AM.”
A few hoots and catcalls started up and died away.
Vonnie and I turned and clambered back up the ramp as fast as we could, the uneven boards bouncing under our feet. I stumbled and fell, Vonnie still clutching my hand and dragging me along before I regained my footing. I hadn’t even felt the splinter pierce my knee, but when she pulled it out, bright red blood and cherry snow cone juice mingled on my white Easter shoes and anklets.
Hursey gave the kewpie doll he won at the carnival to Vonnie so she wouldn’t tattle to Grandma about the hoochie-coochie girls, and he talked Billy into giving me a yoyo, for the same reason, I suspected. He gave Grandma a green glass bowl. She served potato salad in it that night and from then on.
I’d always believed Grandma had eyes in the back of her head. Like the portraits of ancestors hanging on our walls, her eyes seemed to follow me all the time. I convinced myself she could see right through my sorry skin and bones to every sin I had hidden deep in my darkest corners.
Like the time Lohny Pemberton tried to get me to pull my underpants down.
Although I knew it was wrong, I might have done it anyway just to show off the lavender ones I had on, the ones with Thursday on them, but it was Friday and Lohny would say I was dumb for wearing the wrong day. But I’d done it on purpose. The Thursday ones were my favorite color so I’d worn them two days straight, putting the clean Friday ones in the laundry hamper so Grandma wouldn’t catch on. Somebody came out of the house and let the screen door bang shut. Grandma hollered after them to not be letting that door slam and Lohny took off like he got shot. And he might have if Grandpa had known what he was up to.
I had a bunch more sins to worry about.
I’d rolled dried corn tassels in a piece of dampened husk and smoked the pretend cigarettes, coughing and hacking at the harsh scrape of smoke in my windpipe. Sometimes Sissy and I stayed up all night gambling with real playing cards. I’d lied when I didn’t need to, claiming I’d already brushed my teeth instead of saying I was fixing to. When I spilled Vonnie’s Blue Waltz perfume, I denied knowing a thing about it even though Uncle Ed, who’d served in France during World War I and had a picture of himself in Paris with a French girl to prove it, said the whole house stunk like a French whorehouse. Grandma said she wouldn’t allow him to be a corrupting influence.
But I was already corrupt.
My face flushed every time I thought about what I’d seen at the carnival, and I thought about it most of the time. To tell the truth, I worried myself sick about the particulars of that peculiar body. Was it called a he or a she? How did it sound when it talked? Would it have a husband or a wife? Would it be a mommy or a daddy? Which bathroom did it use?
I still called the man-woman it in my head.
Although I knew in my heart that was wrong, I didn’t know what was right. Grandma might know, but I couldn’t ask without telling on myself, and Vonnie refused to talk about it at all. Thinking about it made me uneasy, so I decided to put it out of my mind, and for the most part that worked. An occasional image resurfaced, not of what I’d seen, but of something else, some disturbing thing I could not name. Confusion and shame and a vague sadness writhed in me like a tangle of fishing worms.
From my bed I watched the beacon wag an accusing finger across the dark heavens outside my bedroom window. I got on my knees and said, “Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep if I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.”
I had crossed some line that was invisible, and it was too late to turn back.
A picture in my brother’s geography book showed a map of the world in ancient days. There were known countries and
continents—the rest of the map had the words BEYOND THERE BE DRAGONS.
There was no warning sign, no caution light, no line drawn in the sand.
I had wandered into dragon territory.
23
Mr. Pursley’s World
Grandma didn’t know about the carnival sideshow, but she still noticed I was acting a little mopey. Vonnie too. That wasn’t like us at all.
“Piano lessons!” Grandma announced, after luring me and Vonnie and Mother to the table for just-baked molasses cookies. “It’s high time these girls had piano lessons. They need something to get them out of the doldrums, and I expect that’s just the thing to do it.” Grandma said if Mother bought the piano, she’d finance the lessons from her butter-and-egg money.
Although I campaigned hard for dancing lessons, Grandma wouldn’t hear of it. “You don’t need to be wringing and twisting around calling unnecessary attention to yourself.”
“How come playing the piano isn’t calling attention?”
“That’s a cat of a different color. You’d be playing for the glory of the Lord.”
No matter how I pleaded my case, she could not be persuaded. Grandma most likely had visions of me and Vonnie playing duets at Sunday services, her nodding up at us from the front row. “My oh my, Sister Cales, that was a fine rendition of ‘Whispering Hope,’ ” the church ladies would say. Mother shopped the classified ads in the Raleigh Register until she spotted a Baldwin upright advertised cheap. When it took its place at the far end of the dining room, even our untrained ears could tell it needed work, so she found a man to come tune it.
When he saw our piano, he let out a whistle. “That’s a mighty fine piano you got yourself. You gals been playing any piano rolls?”
“No sir, not a one,” I answered, although I didn’t have the faintest notion what a piano roll was.
“Well, I’m going to show you how to play this piano without ever taking a lesson. But you’ll have to wait until I finish the tuning, and it’s sounding like that could take a fair amount of time.”
We watched him plunge his arms deep into the works of the piano, fiddling with pins and strings and tuning hammer until each key sounded perfect.
When he finished, he called us over.
“You got yourselves a player piano,” he said, sliding two small panels back to reveal a hidden compartment. “Stick a piano roll in there and the song will play itself as long as you keep pumping them big pedals. They’s a bunch of rolls in the bench—let’s load her up and see how she sounds.”
The man clicked a roll in place. As he pumped, “Tea for Two” played, the keys moving up and down without anybody touching them.
We had us a magical piano, and I couldn’t wait to show it off.
“I can’t play a lick with you staring so hard it’s boring a hole in my back,” I said to Sissy. “Turn the other way, but first pinky swear cross your heart you won’t peek.”
She gave me a look that meant she’d do it, but she wouldn’t like it. Although we were best friends, I knew she was getting tired of me bossing her, so I started playing the minute she turned her back. I didn’t want to lose my audience. Stretching my legs to reach, I pedaled hard, managing to play “You are My Sunshine” all the way through without a hitch.
“How’d you learn that so good?” Previous dealings with me had led to her suspicious nature.
“It’s playing by ear,” I told her. “At least that’s what Grandma calls it. That’s when you hear something once and sit down and play it good as it sounds on the radio. Soon as I sat down I started playing songs front to finish just as pretty as you please.”
Grandpa called that a gift-wrapped lie. He was against lying in all its forms, but he thought a half-lie was about the worst kind. Folks, he said, didn’t expect to find a lie in the middle when you wrapped it up in the truth and tied a big red bow on it.
It was the kind of lying I did best.
I got away with it several times before Sissy broke her vow not to look and caught me red-handed changing the piano roll. It was quite a while before she believed a word I said.
And I didn’t believe her pinky-swear-cross-your-heart promise either.
Mr. Pursley, who lived on the second floor of a fancy house on Woodlawn Avenue, came highly recommended, so Mother took us to meet him and make arrangements for lessons. Holding his hand out, palm down and fingers extended, he looked more like he expected my mother to kiss his hand than shake it.
He offered her the chair to his right and motioned me and Vonnie to a small settee, while he arranged his slim body on the tapestry fainting couch. I fought to keep myself from brushing the city bus off my behind before sullying the needlepointed tapestry I was about to sit on. Glad I had on my best Sunday dress, I tugged it over my scabby knees.
“I’ve prepared a light tea,” he said. “You and the young ladies must join me.”
Heels barely touching the floor, he glided out, reappearing in a few minutes balancing a tray laden with a silver teapot and china cups as thin as painted eggshells.
Mr. Pursley leaned forward. “Would you care for a watercress sandwich? And a petit four, perhaps?”
I had always taken my chances with food, so I took one of each.
Mr. Pursley leaned a little more toward Mother. “If I may, I have a few questions regarding the young ladies’ lessons.”
Mr. Pursley wanted to know what day and what time and how long the lessons would be and would we come to his studio or prefer he come to our home and by the way did we have a piano suitable for practice? It was decided we would go to his studio every Wednesday afternoon from five to six for one half hour each, and yes, we certainly did have a piano suitable for practice—then, and only then, Mr. Pursley accepted us as students.
And so began our foray into Mr. Pursley’s world.
Each week Mother sipped cups of oolong tea in the parlor while he played for us before we began lessons. Hands arched over the keyboard with the tension of a small animal set to strike, he announced the piece and the composer before he began. The opening of “Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1” filled the room—soft slow, louder faster, soft again. Then, as the crescendo built, his fingers blistered over the keyboard, his eyes closed, and perspiration misted his upper lip.
One day Mr. Pursley told Mother we were to perform at his annual recital concert at Memorial Hall. He never asked if we wanted to be in it. To be fair, he never said we had to either. It didn’t matter. There was no getting around it with Mother and Grandma all atwitter.
It rained a gully washer on recital day, threatening to ruin the dress Grandma made me from a silk World War II parachute Mother ordered cheap from the back of a magazine. She made Vonnie a parachute dress too. Then she made bedspreads for every bed in the house with some of the leftover silk. When I sat on my parachute bedspread in my parachute dress, I almost disappeared.
By evening it had almost rained itself out, so we arrived only a little damp and a little late. When it was my turn, I walked across the stage beaming my best Lana Turner smile. Not watching where I was going, I tripped and fell flat, catching my heel and ripping my new dress. Although I didn’t break anything, my pride was bruised to the bone. I made it through my piece, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to go home. I wanted to cry. I wanted to start all over.
But most of all, I wanted to play in another concert.
And next time I wouldn’t fall on my behind.
Grandma got it into her head that if we could play good enough to be in a concert, we could assuredly accompany her and Grandpa singing a duet for Sunday services. The fact that she could not sing a lick was just a bothersome detail she felt she could overcome with practice and the help of the Lord. And if Grandma thought Grandpa could sing, well then, he would just have to oblige her.
She borrowed one of the red hymnals from church and sat at the kitchen table leafing through to find the right hymn, finally deciding on “Amazing Grace” because it didn’t have too many highs
and lows. We each learned our part, Vonnie on the bass and me on the treble, but for the life of us we couldn’t put the two together. We would get a few notes in and I’d be going too fast or she’d hold the half note too long or we’d find some other way to mess up.
Grandma determined one or the other of us would have to play both parts.
Vonnie backed out, but I was getting a little taste of show business and liked it. Every evening I plunked and plinked until I got a barely recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace” going. Grandma managed to hit a good note every now and again, and Grandpa did his best to sing bass, but truth be told, they sounded awful. And while we’re truth-telling, so did I.
Before we took the show on the road, Grandma decided to hold a rehearsal. Sister Wood was at the house visiting, and so was Sissy, and we recruited Mother and Aunt Lila and Vonnie from the kitchen where they were making crepe-paper flowers to take to the cemetery for Decoration Day. Red bandanas tied around their heads Rosie the Riveter style, Mother and Aunt Lila came in and sat cross-legged on the floor, still rubbing at crepe-paper stains on their fingers. Vonnie tagged along behind, wearing a bandana like theirs.
We had our audience.
We managed to start pretty even, me playing and grinning and Grandma opening wide and warbling toward the ceiling. As for Grandpa, he had his mouth twisted peculiar, trying to reach the bass notes. It didn’t matter, me and Grandma drowned him out anyway. I expect Grandma thought we’d get better as the rehearsal went on, but I was tired and had slowed down like a music box needing a wind-up.
Running on Red Dog Road Page 14