We ate lunch in the cookhouse, tired and sweaty, having helped to remake the lot until it seemed like that land had always had a huge blue tent rising out of it, a Ferris wheel whirring next to the sky.
“So,” Lollie said, setting down her fork, “Tessa is going to show us her trapeze skills a little later. In an hour, maybe?” She looked at me. “That should give us time before the show.”
I could feel my face turn red, feel all their eyes on me.
There was silence, and then Mauro was the one who spoke. “Great,” he said, winking at me. The rest of them kept eating. I glanced up and saw both José and Ana look quickly away.
I would later learn how opposed they all were to letting in someone new, how they saw themselves as inhabitants of the air and everyone outside the circus as rooted in the earth, like vines.
That hour crawled by. I locked myself in my compartment and stretched my legs and torso, moved my arms around to get them loose and burning. For the first time, I wondered what I would do—what I could possibly do—if I failed. I thought of all the months I’d wasted in Kansas City, and cursed myself.
When the time came, I changed into the leotard Mary had given me and entered the big top.
The trapeze swooped up above me, right in the center of empty space. I would have to climb a long ladder to a platform to reach it. I was used to Mary’s trapeze, hanging from a beam in a jam-packed library, and the length of rope hanging from a tree by the river—not this elaborate contraption made of metal and pulleys, stretching down from the top of the tent, swinging in empty space. A gleaming silver net stretched out underneath like something hauled up from the sea.
My whole body was shaking. I looked up at Lollie and all her brothers, and noticed then how many more people were gathering close to the tent.
I had to do it, to go up there. If I could just catch the bar, I’d be fine.
Lollie looked at me. “Go on. You can’t be shy here,” she said.
“Privacy is something you have to give up,” Carlos said, winking at me. “Especially if you come as a friend of Marionetta’s.”
Outside, I could hear the midway starting up, the people beginning to come in. The air had that electric quality, and I could hear the buzzing of the lights, the Ferris wheel spinning round.
This was my one chance.
The bird girl Clementine was in the tent now, I saw, talking to Mauro. Ana and her family stood huddled on the other side. I caught Ana’s eye and she waved, just as the Kriminov Twins, a brother-and-sister team from Romania, slipped in and sat on the bleachers.
“Don’t worry,” Paulo whispered, leaning down. “They’re all curious because of Marionetta. Just show us what you can do.”
I breathed in. I went to the ladder and climbed up, feeling as if someone else were navigating that thin, narrow contraption instead of me. Slowly, rung by rung, I watched the ground pull away, woozily.
As I stepped onto the platform, I swooned for a second, with nausea.
Paulo climbed onto the platform opposite. He reached out and grabbed the trapeze. “Hep!” he called, throwing it out to me.
His voice was the first thing that threw me off. I reached for the bar, leaping out a second too late. For a moment there was nothing in the world but that bar looming in front of me—until I looked down at the net. I hesitated again, froze, and when I lunged for the bar, I was several seconds too late. My hands stretching out, I fell down to the net, which reached up and smacked my neck and face and legs.
“Are you okay?” Lollie rushed over. “Are you hurt?”
The ropes burned and slashed my skin. I couldn’t think.
Mauro pulled the net back and leapt into it, then swept me up and into him.
“Can you move your neck, Tessa?” he whispered, looking right down at me. Even in a state like that—burning with shame, bruised and cut—I was taken aback by him, his beauty. When I didn’t answer, he cupped his hand under my neck and pressed his fingertips into my skin, cradling my head with his other hand. He gently moved my head back and forth, then reached over and patted down my legs. The only man I had ever been that close to was my father. I stared up at him, confused.
“She’s fine,” he pronounced, looking down at everyone to the sides. I didn’t realize then how badly the net could hurt you, if you took a bad fall into it. Coming at you in the wrong way, the rope could feel like tiny knives. If you fell at the wrong angle, it could break your neck.
At that moment I could barely feel anything but his palm under my skin.
“You’re okay, Tessita,” he said. “You want to get out of this thing?”
I nodded, and with one long shift of his body he moved both of us to the side, then held me to his chest with one arm as we jumped down to the ground.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lollie said, comforting me. “You’re not used to the big top. You can try again in a few days.”
But I saw that their anticipation had waned. The twins had already left, along with Carlos and about half of the Vadalas. They had expected a pupil of Marionetta and had seen a girl who couldn’t even catch the bar. “I want to try again now,” I said, staring straight at Lollie.
She looked surprised but nodded.
They have no idea, I thought, what this body can endure.
Paulo ascended again and threw out the bar to me. This time I leapt out and grabbed it, even managed to pull myself up into it before being hit with the empty space around me. From the air, it was even worse than from the ground. Nothing could have prepared me for the way it felt being suspended over nothing, for that one bar to be the only thing in the world keeping you up there. The bar scraped under my legs where the net had cut into me.
Stop being a coward, I said to myself. Stop being such a freak. But my hands would not let go of the ropes on either side of me. I could feel every pair of eyes on me, pinning me to the spot. I looked down at the net and felt my eyes fill with tears.
“Let’s get her down from there,” I heard Mauro say.
Without even hesitating, Paulo leapt out onto a second trapeze and swung out to me. I winced as he approached, but then I felt his arm wrap smoothly around me, whisking me off the bar and into the air. As I heard Lollie yelling for him to be careful, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to cry.
When I opened them, I was on the ground, shaking with shame and confusion. I looked up at the bar swinging over us, and then, just behind it, I saw a rope hung up in the top rigging.
My heart leapt desperately. “That!” I said, pointing, hearing the crowds outside, seeing almost everyone else leave. “Let me try that, just for a minute.”
Paulo rolled his eyes. “We’re out of time,” he said. “Just try again another time. Get used to the feel of it.”
“We have to get ready now, really,” Lollie said.
“Just for one second,” I said. “Please. You’ll see.” Tears ran down my face.
It was Mauro who shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Why not? Let’s go.”
He unpinned the rope that was hooked into the ground, then maneuvered it down, the way the roustabouts did during the shows. It unfurled, then dropped to the ground like a woman’s braid.
I walked purposefully to the rope. I looked up into Mauro’s black eyes, then over at Lollie’s hazel ones. I blocked out everyone, everything else but Mauro, Lollie, and the rope in front of me.
I grabbed it and shimmied my way up. I could feel the air in the room change as I stopped with my feet about five feet off the floor, as I released my body until I was dangling from the rope by one hand. I twisted the cord around my wrist once, then flung my body up into one of the windmills I had perfected by the river alone. The swing-over.
I was reduced to one motion, over and over. I poured all my rage and sorrow and hope into that one motion: the swing up and back down again, the rotation of the shoulder as it moved out of its socket and back in again. Excruciating, but not the worst kind of pain, not by far.
I did twenty swing-over
s in a row. When I dropped to the ground and looked up into Lollie’s face, and then Mauro’s, I was stunned to see that they were in tears.
“My God, Tessa,” Lollie said, after a few minutes. “Where did you learn to do that? Did Mary teach you that?”
I shook my head.
Mauro just stared at me. I could still feel his palm on my neck, and I looked down, embarrassed.
My shoulders felt like they’d been hacked through. The cuts and scrapes pulsed all over my body, from the net.
Mauro looked down at me. His face lit. “You know how beautiful that was, don’t you? You are weightless, a blur of light. And the strength you have in that tiny body of yours. Unbelievable.”
I blushed down to my toes, beamed in spite of myself.
We could hear the crowds outside, pressing up on us, anxious for the show to begin. The roustabouts started coming into the tent then, cleaning and prepping it, while the concession-stand vendors started setting up the carts that sold popcorn balls and cotton candy and sweet fizzling sodas. I felt like everything about the circus that night reflected the excitement shooting through me. I was an electrical current, one of the lights popping on and off along the midway.
Lollie whispered something to Mauro, then smiled and hugged me. “Wait here,” she said a moment later, running off and leaving me alone with him.
“What’s she doing?” I asked.
“I think she wants to get the others,” Mauro said. He looked in the direction she’d gone. “But we’re incredibly late already. So impatient. She doesn’t want to wait till later. We’ve been working on the aerial acts for a while, Tessita.”
A moment later Lollie rushed back into the tent—still in her pants, without makeup—with her brother Carlos and a tall, thin man I hadn’t seen before.
She was almost breathless as she introduced the man. “Jorge Velasquez,” she said. I knew who he was instantly; once a world-famous acrobat, he was now the manager and owner of the Velasquez Circus, founded by his grandfather. He looked delicate and shy to those who didn’t know better, but, I would learn, he was as tough as they come.
Mr. Velasquez looked me over suspiciously as he took my hand. He had to dip down so low he was almost squatting.
“This can’t wait?” Mr. Velasquez asked, annoyed, standing up and glancing at Lollie. “I’ve got a sick clown and a goddamned lazy fucking ringmaster I’m red-lighting after this show, I swear to Christ. And now my knees are going to fucking give out.”
Carlos was half in his makeup and half out of it. He had on his sparkling performance tights with a T-shirt over them.
Lollie gestured to me, exasperated. “You have to see this, Jorge,” she said. “Now.”
Turning to me, she softened. “Can you do that—just the exact same thing—one more time?”
I looked up and saw the concession girl staring at me. I turned to Mr. Velasquez and, for a moment, thought of my father.
“Yes,” I said, feeling rage bubble up in me.
I shimmied up and did it again—only fifteen this time, but enough. I’m not sure I could have pulled off any other trick at that moment, but the swing-over was mine, the trick that cleansed and renewed me, that pushed me past the filth of the world and into a place where I could forget. After each turn I clenched my teeth and thought, “One more. Just one more.” I pushed and fell and turned, not caring if my arm ripped from my shoulder at the socket. I just went and went. By the time I dropped to the floor, I was exhausted.
Mr. Velasquez simply looked at me and nodded. “Can you do that again in one hour?”
Before I could answer, Lollie stepped forward and said, “No.”
Mauro nodded his head in a agreement. “Look at her,” he said. “She’s exhausted.”
“She’s not ready,” Lollie said. “Look at her wrists.” She took my arm gently and lifted my burned, bloody wrist into the light. “I thought she might be, but she’s not. Not yet. We’re going to have to fix this, fix up the rope with some padding and loops so she doesn’t knock herself up so much.” She turned to me. “How long have you been doing this?”
“A while,” I said. “I just started again last spring.”
“With just a rope?”
I nodded.
“Crazy chica,” she said, shaking her head.
Mr. Velasquez sighed. “Can you do the trapeze, ladder, rings, silks?” he asked.
“Everything,” I lied.
“Next season, then,” he said, turning to Carlos before abruptly leaving the room. “Make sure she’s ready.”
Lollie laughed out loud and hugged me then.
Carlos reached out and took my hand.
Mauro leaned in and whispered in my ear. “That trick will make you famous,” he said.
After that it was a mad dash back to the train cars, for them to get ready before the show. Lollie grabbed my hand and I sat with her as she slipped on a soft purple costume that caught the dim trailer light and cast it about the walls.
“You’ll need to dream up some costumes now, too,” she laughed, as she streaked her eyes with pencil and glitter.
I caught a glimpse of myself in her mirror. With the Ferris wheel lit up behind me and Lollie in front of me, as glamorous as a movie star, I looked radiant. My eyes were bright blue and my face flushed and pretty.
“Thank you, Lollie,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Thank you. I had no idea.”
When I ran out with her toward the tent, the show was already about a third over. We ducked through the opening in back and stayed behind the main curtain, along with the other performers who had yet to go on. I noticed then how everyone was looking at me and whispering. The brothers all walked over together and shook my hand, and even Geraldo gave me a short nod. Ana ran up and wrapped her arms around my waist.
“I’m so happy you’re staying!” she said.
It was an unreal feeling, and I just let it wash over me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everything seemed to change after that. Every morning I sat up in the train car and looked around, astonished that it hadn’t all vanished as I slept, the lot swarming with life outside my window, the Ferris wheel and the banners. All of it. I could step from the trailer and be in this world that was so ragtag and so glamorous, everyone spread over the lot, talking and laughing and working and cooking and sewing, and then, beyond it, the sideshow, which was its own separate world, equally wonderful. All these things that seemed so unreal were just how I lived now, I realized. I was constantly feeling like I was in a dream, like I was a character in a book I’d read. I thought of the poem Mary had read me once, “The Lady of Shallot,” and how I had felt that river, that look of Lancelot, while the rest of the world had slipped away. I walked slowly, feeling the sequins on the costumes hanging in Lollie’s closet, leaning down to touch the grass on the lot, the sawdust in the tent. I’d walk into the menagerie, smell the thick scent of animals, feel the fur through the steel cages.
No one would ever have believed it, that little Tessa Riley could be part of such a world, or that I would heading to Mexico for the winter to train with the rest of the circus folk. There were only two weeks left until the end of the season, and the new one wouldn’t begin until spring. Some of the performers left for other shows and returned the following spring, Lollie explained to me, while others stuck around, performing in the scaled-down winter shows throughout that part of the world. From December to March of each year the circus worked that way, with most of the performers using the time to settle down into normal lives and prepare themselves for the next season. Many of them met each day at the tents to prepare new acts or perfect old ones before the next season began. The Velasquez Circus holed up in Mexico City, while the Ramirezes retreated to their family villa just outside it and rode in each day to practice. Mary had never explained the intricacies of circus life, and I listened carefully.
There was much work for me to do, Lollie said. The trapeze was the main act of any aerial troupe, so it wa
s important that I become as comfortable flying as I was on the ropes. There were several other aerial acts I could probably master in time for the next season, she said, if I were willing to train with them through the winter. I tried to wrap my mind around it, the idea of living in Mexico, another country, with these people who glittered and shimmered as they moved and spoke with strange lilting accents that seemed to dance on my skin. For my first sixteen years I hadn’t left Oakley even once, and now here I was traveling every day, about to go make a home, however temporary, in an exotic, faraway place. I felt astonished all the time at the idea, and couldn’t ask Lollie enough about it.
“How long has your family lived there?” I asked one night before a performance, as I watched her line her eyes with thick black pencil. I thought of Riley Farms, the name marked out on our gate and windowsills. My father was so proud of that land and would tell anyone within hearing distance about how his great-great-grandfather had bought it in exchange for a blind cow and a bucketful of seed.
“Our villa has been in the family for hundreds of years,” Lollie said, never taking her eyes off the mirror yet making me feel like she was whispering in my ear, “ever since our ancestors set down roots and planted a thousand fruit trees, selling the fruit throughout Mexico. They grew rich and fat until a terrible case of wanderlust afflicted the sons and daughters and almost wiped out the whole line. That’s how we became a circus family. Our ancestors took to the roads and learned the gypsy arts. They beat on pots for money, hammered out necklaces from bits of silver, and learned to bend and tumble. When one of the sons married a girl from a Russian circus, they finally organized enough to form their own show, the Fantastic Ramirez Circus.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said. I mouthed the word: wanderlust.
“They wandered and performed and made men, women, and children fall in love with them, setting up the circus in the centers of big cities and tiny villages or performing in countries so vast and spread out that people would travel on donkeys or by foot for miles to see them. Oh, they were something, Tessita. Devoted fans wrote so many long letters to them that the poor local postman had to carry two sacks on his route each day—one for my family, and one for everyone else. And though my ancestors went as far as Russia and China, they always found themselves returning to just outside Mexico City. It became habit for them to return to the villa every winter and take off with the circus again in the spring. They sold off all of their land except for the villa we have now. You can still see the last of the lemon and orange trees there. Every day we drink the fruit for breakfast, and I used to pour lemon juice through my hair to make it lighter.”
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