I left Riley Farm with a bag flung over my shoulder filled with clothes and books, my money and Mary’s ring sewn into the hem of my skirt. I wanted to have a life separate from everything that had come before, and back then I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Oakley and my family, as if I could slip out of my own skin like a snake. I imagined it was possible to have a life apart from Mary and what she had been to me, though I was heading toward a city she herself had created in my mind, and I was going there to find the Velasquez Circus, which I knew came through the city every spring. I was stepping into my future, though everything I knew of the circus was wrapped in Mary’s memory and stories, the smell of spices. Before I had simply dreamt that one day I too could work under those lights, unbound by normal laws of gravity and flight. Now I knew there was nowhere else for me, in all the world.
I was not prepared for the grief that moved through me as I passed the neighboring farms, as I cut through the town square for the last time, grief that went beyond Mary Finn. I knew my sister would wake up to find my bed and closet empty, that she would feel under my mattress and find it smooth and bookless, that she would find the small postcard I’d left on her dresser, a picture of a clown I’d found with Mary’s things. I knew my father would rage through the house, that the walls would sag and strain with his anger, that Geraldine and my brothers and my mother would have to tiptoe around him for days, eat with their heads bent over their bowls, not making a sound. When I got to the edge of town and the wide, main road that led to Kansas City, I started to run, tears streaming down my face, imagining him coming after me with legs that could run whole miles for every tiny step I took in the snow.
The faster I ran, the safer I thought I’d be, as if sheer distance could separate me from him, my grief, everything of the past. I walked for days and days, from morning till night, without stopping. It was as if stopping would whirl me back to Oakley and to the cornfields and to Mary, floating in the river, her body wrapped in leaves. And so I walked and walked, letting my feet crease and freeze and blister, until one day the city appeared before me, its spiked skyline outlined above the horizon. Mary had told me all about the clanging of streetcars and the grates that cut up the roads, about the laundry hanging from lines that stretched from rooftop to rooftop, and about the smog that curled around chimneys and the office buildings that stacked floor upon floor upon floor until you got dizzy counting them. Years before, she had followed Juan Galindo on the same roads until the icicles disappeared from the tree branches, the snow melted from the ground, and they reached the city that now glimmered with lights before me.
My heart danced in my chest as I gazed at the city; the skyline seemed like a cluster of gifts under a Christmas tree. As I walked closer, with each step the dry grass became sparser and the houses turned to buildings and then to enormous silver fingers that pointed to the sky. Men and women rushed by me dressed in formal clothes, and they would have trampled me had I not taken to moving from doorway to doorway, out of their path. The farther I went, the more the world closed down until I no longer had spaces to run and hide in. I walked until the city pressed into me so tight I couldn’t breathe.
The delicate streams that ran through Oakley, the swaying vegetables and buried potatoes, the weeping willows that fell over the river, the endless grassy fields—everything was blotted out by the city, by stark concrete and stone.
My head whirling, I stopped and sat on a set of stairs that led into a small building. I dropped my sack to my side and only then realized how tired I was, how hot and damp my face was despite the cold. A woman stepped out of the building and brushed past me, followed by a dog on a leash. I turned around and looked: it seemed unimaginable that life could exist inside buildings like this. A train whistled nearby. Cars clattered down the street. The air seemed to get chillier by the moment, as the sun fell in the sky. I couldn’t believe how a place so full could feel so empty. I pressed my palms flat against the stone of the steps I was sitting on, breathed in the gritty, smoke-filled air. I felt exactly as if I were a character in a book I’d read, and the idea was as weird as it was thrilling. In some ways it seemed unreal, all of it, like I was lying on my back in Mercy Library the whole time, listening to some story; in other ways it seemed like all I’d had to do, all these years, was walk right out of one life and into another. Like Oakley, my family, my past were all things I could have just blinked away.
I stood up. I pushed past people and ducked under railings, looking all around for some way in, some crack in the city’s ferocious, dirty facade. A few blocks later I saw a sign, and my heart leapt: Apartment for Rent. I had plenty of money. I took a deep breath, walked up the stairs, and pressed the doorbell. I’ll be okay, I thought. I patted my pink lace skirt, reaching unconsciously for the weighted-down hem. After several long minutes, an old lady opened the door and peered down at me.
“I’m here about the apartment,” I said quickly, before she could shut the door again.
She laughed. “Girl, where are your parents? Is this a prank?”
The woman slammed the door shut and did not open it again, though I stood on her porch for ten minutes more, ringing her doorbell and trying to hold back tears. For a moment I thought longingly of my bed in Oakley, my warm covers and Geraldine snoring across from me.
I turned back to the street. By now it was practically dark. All the streetlamps had snapped on, and the car lights bounced off the pavement, confusing me as I walked along, dragging my sack. Brightly lit stores lined the main streets, which swarmed with men and women who fell against me as they pushed past, on their way to the next place and the next. I glanced into windows to check that I was still there, that I was there at all. I cursed myself for having timed my arrival so badly and being so lacking when it came to understanding the world and its ways.
I walked on, past sleek silver buildings and squat brick ones, open-faced mansions and run-down tenements. Every single thing was like a new description from a book I’d read, come to life.
I turned off the main avenue and onto a narrow side street. After what seemed like hours, the city seemed to quiet down. The streets widened and turned desolate. The buildings expanded and blew smoke across the sky. I stopped suddenly. Factories. Sister Carrie. I smiled, despite myself, at the strangeness of it.
I walked past the first factory and then the second. My eye caught a flash of white to my right. I looked up, realized there was a line of row houses there, huddled together. In front of one was a small white sign. I crept up closer and saw that it said, “Rooms Available. Women only.” Please, I breathed. Please. My heart skittered in my chest as I climbed up to the door. “St. Mary’s House for Women,” I read, on a golden plaque outside the door.
I rang the doorbell and stood perfectly still, afraid to even breathe. It was pitch black outside by now, and the factories were spooky in the dim light of the streetlamps, the smoke ghostly as it rose to the sky.
A sturdy, middle-aged woman opened the door and squinted out at me. She looked me over and nodded at my sack. “I presume you are looking for a room?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly delicate for her harsh, thick looks, her sloppy hair stuffed into a bun.
I nodded. My mouth was bone dry.
“Well, let’s not catch ourselves a chill. Come in, and I’ll show you around.”
I stepped forward, let her lead me up a flight of stairs. “Two dollars a week for a room,” she said, turning back to me. “Three for room and board. The bathroom’s down the hall and the kitchen downstairs.”
“That sounds fine,” I said, trying to fill each word with a sense of how dependable I was, how responsible. I could hear my voice trembling and was surprised when she just nodded and led me into the dour upstairs hallway, with its gray carpet and walls. She withdrew a ring full of keys and picked through it daintily with her small hands.
“We abide by Christian rules here, though some abide better than others,” she said, turning to me.
“Yes, ma
’am,” I said, and she smiled for the first time, wrinkles shooting out along her cheeks. A minute later I was stepping into a tiny, musty, flaking room with a small dresser and bed, a closet and window.
My heart filled. A room of my own, I thought. No Geraldine. No father’s shadow in the doorway. No cornfields outside the window, trees like brushes against the white sky. I thought of the trinkets scattered across Mary’s desk in Mercy Library, how I had vowed to have my own things someday.
“It’s perfect,” I said, nodding, tears pricking at my eyes.
She smiled and raised her eyebrows, then made some quick movements with her hands and passed the key to me, hanging from a wire circle.
“Well, good-night, then,” she said, as I handed her three of the dollars I had stashed in my skirt pocket. “My name is Esther, by the way.”
“Tessa Riley,” I said, and the words felt strange and strong on my tongue, as if I were marking the letters into dirt.
She left, and I walked into the center of the room and just stood with my eyes closed, breathing it in. Letting my relief and sorrow and excitement slide into each corner, over each inch of carpeting and flaking gray-white paint. I looked out the window, at the smoke that seemed to hover above the buildings. I spread myself out on the lumpy mattress and stared at the shadows against the wall. I felt the exhaustion relax from my muscles and spread throughout my body, weighing down every inch of skin, every vein.
And then, without even meaning to, I thought again of my quilt-covered bed in Oakley, and I imagined my mother and father and Geraldine and my brothers, wondered if they missed me at all. If they were worried or sad. I pictured the fields and the wooden floor and the giant countertop covered in dirt and vegetables. A longing moved through me that I couldn’t understand. How could I feel homesick? What was wrong with me? They never wanted you, I told myself. I closed my eyes and thought of my mother with her face turned to the wall. I thought of Geraldine alone in our big room, the silence of it engulfing her. I thought of my father bending over me, and the ache went straight to my gut, as if I’d been stabbed.
The light from the streetlamp slanted in and illuminated my closet door. I tossed and turned. I longed for sleep, for peace, to just disappear. Stop, I kept thinking. The thoughts came, one after another. The images: Mary floating in the river, the corn and the moon and the dirt pressing into my back. Sitting cross-legged on the library floor as Mary rubbed glitter across my eyelids and cheeks.
None of it is real, I kept telling myself, staring at the outline of a smokestack outside my window. Only this is real, here and now. I clutched my body, imagined that spinning, gleaming girl above everyone, slicing the air right open.
The next morning I rose, showered quickly in the small bathroom, and walked across the street. I was determined not to think about anything but the task in front of me.
“Where can I apply for a job?” I asked a tired-looking woman carrying a smock. She pointed. A sign led to “Applications.” The place was desperate for bodies, it seemed, and within an hour a foreman was handing me a smock and a time sheet and putting me to work sewing school uniforms.
I was given my own little station, a chair with a spindly black sewing machine in front of it. I looked around at the other girls, but they all kept on working, their faces bent to the fabric. At first I had difficulty placing the fabric in the right spot, getting the machine to move the way it was supposed to, but by the end of the day I’d gotten it down well enough to keep my job, even if my hands were stuck through with pinpricks and bleeding. That night I went back to the boardinghouse, ate a bowl of soup and a hunk of cheese with Esther in silence, and fell into bed, dreamlessly.
After several more days I got used to the way the sewing machines clattered like teeth, the feel of the needles jabbing me when I made a mistake. I settled into a routine so dull it seemed to wipe out everything, both my past and my future. Every day I picked up the gray wool vests that prickled under my hands while one hundred girls did the same thing on either side of me, lined up in rows. Time stretched out in a way it never had before, until a minute seemed like an hour and an hour a whole day. My head pounded with the whirring of the machines, which strung vest after vest and skirt after skirt with the same dull thread. I returned to my room so wiped out that I did not even think about the circus or the trapeze, just the bliss of darkness and sleep.
But it was at night that everything returned to me, and I dreamt of Mary floating on the river, her hair coiled blackly and wetly against her forehead and throat, wrapping itself around her neck like ropes; of the opal that was all light, a million points of light contained in one small, swirling face glowing from her breast; of the letters and photographs she had left strewn across the library’s wooden floor, the papers she had let pile by the front door; of the leaves that had clutched her skin, the thin, narrow leaves of the tree weeping over her; and of her cat’s eyes opening under the water.
Sometimes I dreamt that the river was pressing down on me, too, pushing me to the bottom, where plants and reeds encircled me and my lungs slowly filled with water. I gulped the air, tried to remember how to breathe when I woke up. I cried so many tears into my pillow that I could not believe that my tiny body hadn’t shriveled into a dry husk. And for those moments the world was dark and hollow, inside out, until I rose from the bed, covered myself with a smock, and stuck my head under the rusted bathroom faucet. The dreams vanished like mist then. Outside my window, there was only concrete and steel.
On Sundays, my day off, I took to wandering the streets, hoping to spot some sign of the circus—some dash of color in the gray winter landscape—but there was nothing. The smoke covered my clothes with its scent and its weight. The feel of piles of buttons under my fingertips stayed with me even as I wandered the streets or lay on my bed in my room, staring at the ceiling. For weeks I couldn’t bring myself to think about the trapeze, and a heavy guilt settled over me, burying me in my new life. My only pleasure was walking to the five-and-dime on Sunday mornings and poring over the shelves for that one tiny, perfect thing, something new to set on the dresser in my room. I bought soaps shaped like seashells, mirrors with pictures of the Eiffel Tower on the backs, tiny figurines, boxes carved with dragons and fish. I could spend whole evenings just lying back on my bed, staring at my growing collection, rearranging the things I had bought.
I didn’t realize that I was grieving still, that the grief had exhausted me and wiped out all desire for the future. Often I thought of Riley Farm and the hedges that lined the front yard. What my father had been doing the day he’d carved that giant peacock with the leaves spraying out behind him. How it had taken weeks for the branches and leaves to grow back again, though they’d never taken on the same shape they’d had before. I thought of that feeling I’d had, crawling into bed each night and lifting the quilt to my shoulders, that feeling of being home, as terrifying and sad as it was. You can’t just shuck it off, I thought, just as Mary had said. I spent hours imagining my life, rewriting it, as I bent over the sewing machine, as I sat alone in the lunchroom while the other girls chattered, as I wandered the city streets and stared at the lit-up windows, wondering if I would always be alone, if there would ever be another person for me to love.
Slowly the winter gave way to spring, and then flowers burst out of the flower boxes hanging from every window. The trees that dotted the streets turned a bursting green. And after many weeks and months of the grief that clung to me like ice, I, too, felt ready to come back to life, and was able to part that dullness, pull it back ever so slightly and reveal something new, a longing that came from deep within my muscles and blood. One day in April, alone in my room after work, I placed my hands on my flat torso and realized it was mine, my own body, a body that could twist in the air and crumple into a box two feet wide. And then I missed the rope and the trapeze so feverishly that I almost cried out. I left my room and walked the streets until I found a hardware store, where I bought a length of heavy rope. Later that same n
ight I tiptoed down to the basement with a candle and hung the rope from one of the pipes crossing the ceiling, using a ladder I borrowed from Esther. For a dollar more each week, she said, she didn’t mind.
The first time I swung up into the air, my muscles ached and burned and my balance was so off that I kept slamming into the wall. But it didn’t matter. I worked hard, pushing myself. I returned to the basement after work each night, anxious to climb up to that rope and practice. With one turn after another, I forced my creaky muscles into submission. Seeing me huddled over those uniforms in the daytime, nobody would have guessed that I spent my nights flinging myself into one rotation after another, in the air.
The Velasquez Circus would come any day now, and I was ready.
But the circus did not come that spring, or that summer, and I began to get nervous. I worked and saved every penny I could, eating the beans and bread and soup Esther provided in the evenings and buying small containers of tuna in the factory cafeteria every day for lunch. I stopped visiting the five-and-dime, as if denying myself small pleasures would make the circus come faster. I began to wonder if I’d missed it—if the circus had come and gone without my noticing, if I’d been too lost in all that reflecting and wandering. I was sick of myself and my thoughts, and I couldn’t stand another year in the factory. If the circus didn’t come to me by winter, I decided, I would just have to set out once again and find it myself.
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