I saw her looking in the mirror, tracing her fingers along the lines that outlined her mouth and eyes. I sat next to her sometimes and just gazed at her, at how wonderful she was. So glamorous and rounded, so sexy and soft. Her light-brown wavy hair and hazel eyes.
“I’m old,” she said once. “Too old for this, for babies, for love. You are lucky, Tessa, to be young.”
“Lollie,” I said, “you are so beautiful. How can you say that?”
She turned to me. “Men used to line up to meet me after the shows. They used to send enough flowers to fill the villa with roses and tulips. Now look at me. All used up.”
“But you’re only forty,” I said.
“In the circus,” she said, “I am ancient. And it is too late for me. I never had a normal life. No family, no babies, no husband.”
“You can still be married,” I said. “Why don’t you and Geraldo marry?”
“He will never marry, and I will never leave him.”
“But why?”
“Let it rest,” she said, turning from me. She stood up and angrily reached for her bag. “Do not judge me, chica.”
She left me sitting there. I looked at my own face in the mirror. My blue eyes and pale skin, my small features. I held my hands up under the light and thought of what Mauro had said just a few days before.
“Your hands are beautiful.”
“They are starfish hands,” I had said.
“Tessita, what you see is all wrong,” he had laughed, picking up my hand and holding it out in front of both of us. “These hands are not fish shaped like stars. Why do you say these things?”
I was surprised to learn, slowly, that Lollie was like me. That she hated herself sometimes, felt ashamed the way I did.
To me, she was perfect. I never understood her self-loathing, or what it was about love that could reduce a woman like her and keep her tied to a man like Geraldo, who was nowhere near her equal. Lollie’s love for Geraldo pressed down on her like a sieve, but it was only later that I understood how painful it was for her to bear. I did not know back then about how much she had longed for children with Geraldo and how she had been betrayed by her own barren body, while he had fathered at least a dozen bastard children over the years.
Still, I don’t think Lollie minded so much that I could not do the flying trapeze. As attractive as it would have been, from a business standpoint, to include me and Paulo in her act, it was only on the flying trapeze that Lollie had Geraldo all to herself. There, under the lights, drenched in glitter and feathers, she could live out the love story she could not seem to have in real life. All his flaws fell away and it was just him, flying to her, cradling her as if she were the most precious woman in the world. Before every performance Lollie had a glow about her, an anticipation, and afterward it was always as if she had fallen to earth. It was a strange thing, how the air and the lights could seduce you like that, making you believe that what happened up there was more real than anything else.
Paulo was the one who wanted me to fly. “It’ll come,” he said. “In time. And when it does, there will be nothing like it in the world.” He was endlessly patient with me as I fell and fell and fell.
I knew his fiancée back home, Serena, had recently sent word that she was pregnant, that it was important for Paulo to make my act first-rate—for the Ramirez act in general, for me, and for the baby growing in Serena’s belly. I wanted to master the trick so badly I could taste it, but the fear was bigger than my want. When it came on, it just swept me down to the net like I’d been caught in a waterfall. I looked down at the ground and saw only empty space.
“Concentrate,” Paulo would say, but in truth I was concentrating so hard I’m surprised I didn’t start levitating.
Despite my frustration, the air gave me a confidence I’d never had before. The deeper we went into the heart of the country and the more times I went into the ring and performed, the more a confidence grew in me, straight out of bone and muscle and blood. It was larger than anything I’d experienced before, even the shame that came over me sometimes, the jealousy I felt when I glimpsed Clementine from the big top, when I sat in the train car and tortured myself with images of her and Mauro in the same bed. It was larger than the corn-clawed moon that never quite left the periphery of my dreams. This was something from deep within my body. A surety, a calmness.
I walked arm in arm with Mauro and felt proud. I found myself in restaurants reaching for salt or butter and realized I wasn’t curling my palm over to conceal the shape of my hand. I found myself looking strangers straight in the eye, hugging the fans who pushed through the starry curtain to say hello.
I found myself feeling that I had a presence and a shape that were only mine.
It was only my jealous heart that threatened to unmoor me, for a time. In Mexico I had imagined that Clementine would be there every day, taunting me, but in reality the sideshow could have been a hundred miles away from the big top. As it was, I only caught glimpses of Clementine. I’d see the white flash of her hair and wince. I’d see her hauling pails of water or wandering through one of the towns we stayed in, and every vein in my body would grow cold. If I was with Mauro I’d squeeze his hand and look at the ground, without saying a word.
“What is wrong, Tessita?” he asked. “Qué pasa?”
And the words burned on my tongue: What happened with her? Did you love her? How can you even look at me?
They crowded my brain, stuck through me like pinpricks. And yet I didn’t say anything. Even over the countless hours in the ring, on the train, and wandering over the lot, even as Mauro told me stories about his life and I told him about Oakley and Riley Farm and the factory. Even when I sucked in my breath and told him about the day in front of the courthouse, the endless afternoons in the library, Mary’s rich, raspy voice and card games and her penchant for cataloging and reading out loud and cooking pots of soup and tea. Even when I told him about the hair that curled wetly around her neck and the opal that glittered spook-ily from her breast. The story had been beating within me like a heart. If I had tried to tell it before, it would have stayed buried in my throat, bound up in grief.
But I could not ask him about Clementine, and I could not tell him that when I saw Clementine’s perfect starlight hair, I heard my father’s voice again in my ear: Barely even a girl, he had said, as the dirt and rocks pressed into my skin. I felt ugly and ridiculous, the way I had then.
I waited for Mauro to bring up Clementine himself. I walked hand in hand with him to the cookhouse or to watch the Kriminov Twins practice in the late afternoons, after I finished with Paulo and showered in preparation for the show, waiting. Mauro loved watching the twins. People said the earth had disappointed them so much that they chose to walk in the clouds, on stilts. One afternoon that first summer, I sat with Mauro and watched Sergei balance Masha on his shoulders so that her head nearly grazed the canvas top. The words and questions beat in my head, but I wouldn’t ask him. Instead I asked him about the sideshow, about performers like the fat lady, Josephine, whose skin fell from her bones and just kept right on falling, like huge sails.
“Jo is a great lady,” Mauro said. “The daintiest woman you’ll ever meet. You could scoop up her hands and eat them for dessert.” He laughed and pulled me close to him.
I leaned in. “Mauro,” I said, “how can you be so close to the people in the ten-in-one? Lollie and your brothers never go near it. The twins and Ana don’t.”
“Oh,” he said, laughing, “they’ve always been that way—circus folk, that is. It doesn’t mean anything. They just have to believe the people come here for them and them only.”
“Don’t you think they’re horrible, though?” I asked, holding my breath. “With their tattoos and scales and wings?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Why, do you?” he asked.
“No.” I whispered it, staring at my hands folded in my lap. I stretched my feet till they tapped the bleacher below. “But I’ve heard Geraldo call them al
l freaks. I’ve heard others say it, too.”
He laughed. “Geraldo! Who could be more of a freak than that guy? He’s probably got ten children in every town we pass through.”
His voice was so loud, I looked around the tent to see if anyone had heard. The Kriminov Twins were still practicing—Masha flipping from Sergei’s shoulders to the floor. It was beautiful. There, a perfect moment, right in the middle of a long afternoon. Why wasn’t I happier than I was, surrounded by such things?
“Ana told me that we don’t mix with them, that her family never does,” I said.
Suddenly I heard Ana’s voice that first day: Aren’t you in the ten-in-one?
No! I thought. Clementine is the freak. I thought of the wings stretching out of flesh and bone. The disgusting fusion of feather and bone and blood and flesh.
Mauro turned to me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Why do you care what the Vadalas do? They think their Italian blood is more pure than our blood.”
“I’m fine,” I said, but could feel my face scrunching up and tears burning at my eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, taking my hands in his. “Why don’t you talk to me?”
I just stared at the twins, at Masha practicing the stilts while Sergei watched. The words beat at me, but I could not say them. I looked up at his beautiful face, his black eyes.
“Why do you like me?” I blurted.
“What do you mean?” He was genuinely shocked. “Tessa, I love you. You know I love you.”
“Don’t you think I’m a freak?” I asked, without even thinking.
“Why would I love a woman I thought was a freak? What are you talking about? I don’t even think that way in the first place.”
I could feel my face flushing. “What about Clementine?” I whispered. “Isn’t she one?”
Mauro’s face eased. He laughed out loud and pulled me to him. “Eres celosa! Jealous!” He leaned back and looked at me. “Please do not be jealous of her,” he said. “That was long ago and so unimportant. Not nearly so important as what we have. I am proud of you, Tessita, how beautiful you are, how talented. You are small, sí. Perfectly so, like a piece of embroidery. Clementine was not for me. If she had been, we would have married.”
“Married?”
“But I didn’t marry her. And not because of people like the Vadalas. Because it wasn’t right; she wasn’t right for me.” I looked up at him. His face shifted and got soft. “And besides, I want to marry you.”
I was suddenly aware of the landscape outside, the lush green grass and the mountains hovering around us on all sides. I could feel the hazy summer air, the trees and grass. The sharp scent of the sawdust.
“What?” I whispered, foolishly.
Mauro cleared his throat. “I planned to do this later this week, Tessita, but now how can I wait?” He smiled. “You’re lucky I don’t trust anyone enough to keep this on the train.” He pulled a twinkling diamond ring from his pocket and slipped it on my finger. “Will you marry me?” I saw that his hands were shaking.
“Yes!” I cried. “Yes!”
The Kriminov Twins stopped and looked up at us. The lion tamer looked up. Carlos, standing near the opening of the tent with the elephant girl, looked up. So did Ana and Bici the clown and a Polish contortionist with fake yellow hair, Petra.
The whole day turned dizzy and light. Mauro leapt up the bleachers and balanced himself on the outer edge. He shifted back and forth on the ledge and shouted down, for all the big top to hear: “TESSA RILEY IS GOING TO MARRY ME! WE ARE GOING TO BE MARRIED!”
Mauro rushed down and scooped me up in his arms, then flipped me up in the air. I had never seen him so silly. Within minutes word had gotten out, and Lollie was there beside me, roused from a lazy game of cards in the cookhouse, along with other friends.
That night we celebrated after the show, dancing around the fires outside the train car, opening bottles of champagne that Carlos had run into town to get. The corks popped off and the champagne shimmered down into our plastic glasses. Lollie raised her glass again and again to us, getting more misty each time. Had I been more grounded that night, I might have paid more attention when Geraldo didn’t even show up, and I might have seen how sad Lollie was, underneath the surface of things.
The next morning it was in all the local papers, and there we were, in a photo someone had taken: Mauro and I, side by side, he towering over me as I sparkled up at the camera in my rhinestone leotard. Circus Royalty to Wed, a headline read. “Tiny Tessa, 18, famous for her one-arm swing-over, and Mauro Ramirez, 22, of the Ramirez Brothers tightrope act, announce engagement.”
There we were. I thought for a moment of Mercy Library, all the newspapers and documents stored in the file cabinets downstairs, where I had first seen my name in print alongside my mother’s, father’s, brothers’ and sister’s. This photo seemed to blot out all of it. With a fluttering heart, I clipped out the article carefully and put it into a file alongside all the other articles from that first season, when, for me, the whole world was remade.
We were married the following winter in Mexico City. Returning to the villa was like coming home. I hugged Luis like a long-lost brother—my real brother, not the ones I’d been born with. I embraced Mrs. Ramirez as if she were my true mother. Paulo’s Serena and baby, Pilar, had moved into the house earlier in the fall, and we all rushed to see the beautiful fat baby with tiny gold hoops dangling from her ears.
Mrs. Ramirez and Victoria oversaw the design and making of the intricate lace dress I wore at our wedding, and Mauro and I were married before a gold-covered altar with the Virgen de la Macarena in front. Carlos gave me away. Lollie and Serena and Mrs. Ramirez stood in a line next to Mauro as I walked up to him, a bouquet of white gardenias in my hand. The other brothers formed a line on the right.
As I walked toward Mauro, so handsome in his traditional black suit, I had to force myself to walk in long, graceful steps, to keep my veil and train in place and not yank off the lace and run, laughing, right into his arms.
I was happy, happier than I’d ever been. For the first time happiness was a condition of my world, not a moment that sparked and burned away. I loved being married to Mauro. During my second season, when the Velasquez Circus grew even more popular and well loved, he kept me centered. He formed a cocoon around me as reporters became more and more common on the lot and people began waiting in lines that wrapped three times around the tent to get in.
The years passed in a dizzying array of colors, a thousand colors flashing and sparkling along endless horizons. I practiced less and less and spent more time with my new husband, my family. I continued to work on the rope and hoop. I increased the number of swing-overs I could do at one time to nearly two hundred and began working more on the rope ladder and silks. As for the flying trapeze, I just let it go. I worked so well alone in the air, it didn’t seem necessary to punish my body and heart anymore, to fling myself into empty space again and again and feel that cold fear erupt inside me. I was happy now; I didn’t need to claw my way through whatever it was inside me that would not let me just go.
Paulo didn’t mind by then either. He married Serena and brought her and Pilar on the road with us. Before long they had a second child, Eduardo, born my third winter in Mexico. Lollie doted on Pilar and Eduardo, who seemed to calm her anxious, starved heart, and Paulo and Serena seemed to be made for each other, always laughing as they wandered the lot with their toddling babies. Even José found happiness with Ana’s older sister Bettina Vadala, who confessed her attraction to him one night after too many glasses of homemade sangria by the fire.
So time passed, and though I still woke sometimes certain that I could smell Mary’s scents of clove and cinnamon, calling me to the past and the future, I just let them sweep by.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
One night during my fourth season with the circus, a knock came at my door as I prepared for an evening show. We were somewhere in the middle of the country, outside Kansas City—close enou
gh to Oakley that I probably should have been a little nervous, but I had begun to feel immune to the outside world by then, I guess. If not for my name emblazoned on the door and the sheaf of articles that had been printed about me in newspapers and magazines, no one would have recognized me as the same Tessa Riley who had scrunched down into knots and crept through the fields of Riley Farm.
I opened the door and thought I was looking into a crazy funhouse mirror, the kind that could shrink you down to one foot or stretch you out to the size of a building, depending on your angle. There outside my door stood a girl with my face—the same rounded eyes and bow-shaped mouth, the same sloping nose—but about three times my size, as if I’d expanded overnight.
The girl looked at me with even more shock than I felt.
“Tessa?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, looking at her.
It hit me like a slap. It was a moment I’d dreaded ever since I’d first seen my image on the posters that were splashed through every town on the circus’s route. She was different and yet the same as I remembered.
“Geraldine?” I asked, my mouth hanging open.
And I had the sudden, sinking, grief-stricken sense that all of life had passed me by.
She had come to make peace with me, she said. We sat in my dressing room, I on the chair by my vanity and she on the tiny sofa shoved against one wall. She had slimmed down over the years. I was surprised at the delicacy of her fingers, fine long fingers that cultivated orchids and other blooms in a flower shop in Kansas City, as she later told me.
I could not believe it. Geraldine grown, sitting in front of me, an almost elegant woman with long-fingered hands that would never spoon sugar straight from the bag and into her mouth.
“You left Oakley?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “as soon as I could. Not too long after you left, Tessa.”
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