He seems lost to me, deaf to my issue as he stares into space. “What’s it like in California now . . . I wonder. That’s about as west as you can go without leaving the States.” Puff, puff.
When Ringmaster isn’t paying attention, I throw the remainder of the bubble tea into the trash and cover it with my half-empty takeout container. The food was cold yet hot, a lot like me today. I’m ready for my nightly freezing shower. I’ll find The Scarlet Letter on the internet, if I can keep my eyes open long enough. I hate reading on my laptop. Books are meant to be breathed onto paper, real once-upon-a-time trees chopped up, ground up, watered down, and baked into sheets.
The boss grunts and tosses his cigarette into a random vase. He lights another. “Why don’t we stay up and talk for a while, Scotch? We never talk anymore.” We don’t, and there’s a reason for that, I’m sure.
With a yawn I get to my feet. My red vintage heels were discarded hours ago. I’d even peeled off my nylons and let my feet enjoy the cold linoleum. It almost feels like autumn in the shop. I take a seat on the floor, my skirt splayed out around me. “What do you want to talk about?” Probably about my behavior today. But was it such a crime to mention going outside? I shove the negative thoughts back down my throat and swallow, hard.
He is thoughtful for a moment, so thoughtful I think he might be falling asleep. His head tilts forward, and he jerks, having almost fallen out of the rocker. Ringmaster looks at me like he’s seeing me for the first time, and snorts. “You shouldn’t be sitting on the floor, kid; you’re going to catch a cold. Who’ll run my shop then, huh?” Orange light blares off his scalp, and his penciled-in eyebrows are melting. “Did you lock up already?”
Wincing, I nod. I’m always doing something too soon or too late it seems.
“You shouldn’t have. We still have five more minutes until closing time. What if there’s a late-evening rush for tacky French vases?” He nods to the French vases, which we both hate, and laughs when I get up to unlock the shop door. “Don’t take me too seriously, kid. We’ll never have any customers here.” He wipes the sweat from his brow, his eyes unfocused. “And that’s how it should be.”
What kind of an antique/figurine shop doesn’t want customers? Ringmaster is an oddity, for sure, but I don’t dare bring this to his attention. Like ancient French vases, we all are a little eccentric in our own ways. Before I can think it through, I confess, “We had two customers today.”
He freezes. “Did they leave their cards?”
“Of course they did,” I lie, remembering how upset he got yesterday. “They’re on the countertop.”
That’s enough to satisfy him. He settles back down in his seat and crosses his fat ankles. “Did they buy anything?” Puff, puff.
I wave away the smoke wafting in my direction and cough. “Leo got his antique pipes.”
Ringmaster nods. “Who was the other guy?” He gives me a shrewd look I don’t like. “It was a guy, wasn’t it?”
Again, I am nodding. “Yes.” A handsome guy, but I leave that bit out. “He didn’t sound like he was from around these parts.” I smother a foolish smile by biting my lower lip ‘til I draw blood. Ringmaster’s fumes must be getting to me.
My employer is agitated by this, sitting up in his seat, his bad eye twitching. “What do you mean? Not from around these parts? Where does he sound like he’s from?” The half-smoked cigarette follows the fate of the previous one.
I blink, trying to place where in England he might be from...not that I’ve ever been, but I sometimes watch British sitcoms late at night. “I think he’s from across the pond.” I am missing the bottle. “England, you know.”
This relaxes Ringmaster. Nodding, he sinks back into his seat. “Ah, our good old—er, neighbor.” He looks away.
“Neighbor? What kind of neighbor?”
“You sound stupid, kid. Stop asking questions. Go to bed.”
I frown. “But I thought you wanted to talk.” Not that I need or want to. The fluorescent bulb flickers overhead with a light buzzing sound Ringmaster always claims I alone can hear. And I am walloped with the first day-mare this year:
Needles in my skin. They prickle, and I try to scream but can’t. The pain is nigh unbearable now. I am losing my grip as I slip down, down, down into a deep, dark slumber that smells of bleach and blood . . .
He snaps his fingers, and I jolt back to an upright position. “Stop mumbling nonsense. You’re making me lightheaded.”
Was I mumbling? I don’t remember saying a word. I totter and wobble, and Ringmaster is yelling something about not wanting me to pass out.
He is still talking as I wave goodnight and make an unstable retreat. I start stripping as soon as I’m in my close quarters, and then pull out my laptop. “Distract yourself.” I’ll read in my underwear. It’s too hot back here for clothes.
Shaking off the waking nightmare, I search for The Scarlet Letter on the internet. I don’t know why I’ve chosen this book. Maybe because it’s by an American, so it’s bound to be more New World than those French horror novels of mine. I read the blurb for the book and pause. The story sounds depressing. Good. If alcohol isn’t available, at least I can have a good cry over something. Only, I don’t cry anymore and haven’t done so in years, which Ringmaster says is unnatural for a female.
Five hours later, I am quite a ways into The Scarlet Letter, and I am angry. No, not angry: furious. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this—this monstrosity Nathaniel Hawthorne had the nerve to slap together.
Hester Prynne I feel little sympathy for. But she’s not what has me seeing the toreador’s cape. The child, Pearl. The unnatural child. Why? Why does no one seem to love her? Why is she a mistake? I don’t understand. People are stupid. Nathaniel Hawthorne is stupid if he actually thinks the child shouldn’t have ever been conceived.
A memory of an old man, perhaps my grandfather, comes to me. In the past I have striven to suppress these things: names, dates, facts. It’s too painful. I think I might’ve suppressed the reason as well. But as I run a hand down the silky smoothness of my just-shaved leg, a memory bursts forth and it’s all I can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel.
I sat at a large dining table. The table was laden with foods of all kinds: roast beef with a rich gravy, corn muffins, biscuits, and homemade black raspberry jam, fresh corn on the cob. The dressing is what I had my eyes on, so crispy and buttery, seasoned to perfection. I could smell it from where I sat, and as a now-faceless woman passed the pink bowl of it to me, some gravelly voice said:
“What a tragedy.” It was an old man who said this, wanting the whole table to hear.
“Mm, my favorite,” I said, piling my plate high with the dressing.
“What’s a tragedy?” someone asked at last.
The old man shook his head. “The Brookes’s daughter. She’s having a baby.”
The table went quiet. The much younger me did not. “What’s bad about that?” I shoveled the buttery goodness into my mouth and gummed it. My mouth still hurt from losing my fifth baby tooth.
“She isn’t married,” said another young voice, duh-ing me.
“Tragedy,” was muttered again and again, and many stern eyes looked at the originator of the giggles.
I am sitting on the edge of my bed, groaning. My stomach hurts. I shouldn’t have had that bubble tea. With a burp, I shut down my computer, shove it into its leather case, and reach for the pink stomach medicine. I don’t bother to use the included measuring cup, which is gathering dust on my makeshift nightstand, but chug down what I think is a serving straight from the bottle.
For the first time in a while, it feels safe to turn off the light, which still has my green shirt draped over it. I remove the garment—there is a round, brown mark where it had rested over the light bulb—and flip the switch.
Darkness overtakes me, and it is not unwelcome. Everything is still and peaceful until there is a heavy rapping at my door. “Scotch, someone’s at the front door. You mind gett
ing it?” Ringmaster sounds panicked. “They can’t see me like this. Where is the new air-freshener? The kind you had me buy for the bathroom? You know, it smells like some sort of fruit?”
I stare at the dark ceiling. Why does he care what the shop smells like? Something is off. But sleep is tugging at my eyelids, and I decide he’s just being his usual strange self.
He coughs. “Scotch?”
He’s not going to let me sleep until I answer. “The citrus one?”
I can feel his relief seeping in under my door. “Yes. Where is it?”
“Under the counter.”
“Thanks.” Silence. “Aren’t you going to get the door?”
I frown in the darkness. “Why don’t you get it? It’s probably just Leonard wanting to brag about his latest one-night stand.”
“No, it’s not Leonard. I don’t know who it is. He’s too tall. I don’t know many people who are tall, Scotch.” Yes, all his friends are shorter, fatter, and furrier. Well, even I am furrier than Ringmaster. Doesn’t take much. “What if it’s a cop and he thinks I was smoking something I shouldn’t? Please answer it? I’ll get you anything you want! Another gift card. Twenty bucks. What do you say?”
I don’t say anything. I am still digesting the bubble tea.
He takes my silence for a no and threatens, “There are many people who’d love your job, you know. Maybe I should give one of them your position. How do ya like them apples?” Silence. “Scotch, the knocking is getting louder. They might break down the door. What do I do?” He is a frightened child.
What can I do? Panic has crept up on me. “I’m coming.” I feel around for the robe I never wash because it smells like someone else, pull it on even though it is way too warm for today, and patter barefooted to the front of the store.
When I reach the door, all is quiet and no one is there. But there is something, a sheet of paper taped to the outside of the glass door. The words have been written in bold, heavy strokes, and they read: “U owe me big. Won’t wait 4ever. – D.A.R.”
Chapter Three
Skip
1984
“All the world’s a stage, all the men are merely players, and all the women are angels behind the scenes making everything happen,” Mama once told me. On her lap, I learned to distrust male role models and to all at once adore and hate the female species.
“Skip,” she said one day after knocking down half a bottle of cooking sherry. Dad had hidden her liquor cabinet key . . . again. Smart move on his part—I was five going on six and even I knew Mama needed to lay off the juice. She belched, her eyes focused on something in the near-distance. “I have good news and bad news.”
My small frame cringed. Tomorrow was my birthday; had she spent all the gift money? I needed a real fireman’s helmet, and she’d better deliver or a category six tantrum was in order. “Yeah, Mama? What’s bad?”
Mama cracked a rusty laugh that warbled in her chest. “Well, your good-for-nothing father ran off again. This time with the help.” She hiccupped and downed the last few drops of sherry. As she always said, “Waste not, you sot.”
. . . whatever that meant to my developing brain.
Ran off with the help? “Mm.” I wasn’t sure why Daddy would run away from home, or why the housekeeper would either. I didn’t know grown-ups ran away, too.
My mama, she was quick to reassure me, though I wasn’t real worried. “Oh, don’t worry, the jerk will be back.”
“Is that the good news?” I hoped not. I hoped the good news was a trip to the local theme park. My visit was long overdue.
“Well, it’s not all the ‘good’ news.” This time, Mama laughed for real and pulled me into her lap on the floor. She was getting fatter than she had ever been in my short memory. And she had stopped shaving her legs, so they were all prickly like two ivory cactuses with bluish purple veins. “No, the good news is that you—that is to say, we will be getting a new family member.” She squeezed me tight as I attempted to look up at her face. Maybe she was what Daddy always called “tipsy.”
I wrinkled up my nose. A new member didn’t sound good, not in the least. “What’s a member?”
Mama bit down on the corner of her mouth. “You know how you wanted to join that boys club? Well, once you join you’d be a member. Get it?”
I leapt out of her lap and tore around the kitchen like a superhero. “I’m gonna be in the club. Woo-hoo!” Finally! I’d only asked her fifty times that week. Sheesh.
Mama, she patted the cold floor next to her, not quite meeting my eye as she took to tracing patterns in the lemony linoleum. “No, Skip, sweetie, we don’t have time for that.”
After throwing several pots at a wall and breaking a mixing bowl, I sat in the corner and watched my half-laughing, half-scolding mother stumble around, sweeping up my mess. This was the end of the world. The end of the line. How much could my little heart take? “I can’t join? You said I could. Mama, that ain’t fair.”
Mama’s chest heaved and sank like two water balloons. “Let me try again,” she said, getting back on the floor. She wobbled like gelatin, and her voice wasn’t steady. “You’re gonna have a baby brother—”
I froze. “A brother?”
“—Or sister. We—I mean, I haven’t found out yet.”
I blinked and tried to process the information. “A sister?” My face crinkled up like a pug’s; I could see my image reflected in the black oven’s door. I started to howl, big raindrop tears rushing down my puffy red cheeks.
Mama nudged me in the ribs, and I pushed her away. How could she do this to me? What use was there for a sister? This day kept getting worse and worse.
“Aw, Skip, come on. Don’t you want a little sibling?”
I crossed my arms with a huff. “No, and I don’t want a little sister either.”
Mama, she looked at the empty sherry bottle sitting next to her, as if asking for parental advice. When it gave her none, she asked me, “Why not?”
I wrinkled my nose at her, disgusted. “Girls are yucky.”
She stroked a hand down my messy brown hair and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Skip, I’m a girl, and you don’t think I’m yucky, do you?” When I didn’t respond, she grabbed me in a bear hug. “Besides, we don’t even know if it’s a girl. Could be a little brother.”
“Yeah.” I took an angry swipe at my nose with the back of my hand. Life wasn’t fair. It was my birth month, after all; shouldn’t I get a say in whether or not I got a sibling? I began to wonder if the stork accepted returns . . .
“Let’s choose a different way of thinking about this little bundle of joy, okay?” Mama let go and got to her knees. “You’re the man of the house now, aren’t you?” She had red patterns on her hands where the skin had been pressed against the floor. I stared at those as I tried to process what was going on.
“Daddy’s coming back . . .”
“Yes, of course,” she was quick to assure me. “But he’s old. This little baby is going to need a big brother to look up to. Someone to show him or her the ropes.”
I thought about this for a moment. It sounded like an awful pain, having to teach some dumb little kid everything. But that wasn’t my biggest concern. I managed to meet her unsteady gaze this time, and whispered my deepest, darkest fear: “Do I gotta share toys?”
Mama shrugged. “Not if you don’t want to. We’ll buy him his own toys.”
I stroked my little chin. Hmm. Didn’t have to share toys with him? This could be good. “He’s gotta do what I say?”
Mama hiccupped. “Whatever you say, baby. My tummy’s feeling kind of iffy. Why don’t you watch TV and color while Mama gets herself a ginger ale, okay?”
I started watching my mother. Well, more like her stomach. It bumped into things . . . a lot. It took out one of Daddy’s favorite bottles of cologne—though the older I got, the more I wondered if that was a casualty of a different war. Her stomach even knocked the piece of birthday cake right out of my friend Julie’s hands.
“I am so sorry, Jules.” She paused for a moment, rag in hand, smiling as if she had thought of something clever. She repeated the word once, paused, and laughed to herself.
Julie started crying. I guess her mint-green jumper was new and her mama had warned her not to get it messy “or else.” All our friends were rich, so the threat was most likely a veiled “I’ll have the maid take your pony away.”
After my birthday gifts were opened and the guests had collected their party favors and beat it, Mama left the new maid to clean up and took me to the doctor’s office. On the way over, I watched her stomach, imagining I could see it expanding before my eyes.
Mama caught me staring and laughed. “It isn’t going to bite you, Skip.”
“I know,” I said, embarrassed because she was making fun of me. “We gonna find out today?”
“Mm-hmm. Bummer, I missed the turn. Hold on, sweetie.” Mama bit on the corner of her mouth as she turned around in a random driveway and corrected her course. When she spoke again, her bright white teeth were etched with ruby-red lipstick. “Yes, we’ll know soon whether you’re getting a little brother or little sister.”
I nodded, still staring at her teeth. She looked like she’d had a glass of red pop, the stuff I wasn’t allowed to have because it was bad for my teeth and temperament . . . whatever that meant. My next question came from seeing an Army chopper flying overhead. “Cool! Can we name him Army?”
Much to her credit as a mother, she hummed for a minute and said, “You know that is a nice name. Why don’t we add it to the list?”
“Okay.” We were quiet for a moment as we came up to a set of railroad tracks. Buh-bump, buh-bump! “Hey, what about the purple dog?”
“Who?”
Did she know nothing about Saturday morning cartoons? Maybe I didn’t know my mom as well as I thought I did. “The one in the cartoon? Mom?”
My mom’s lips twitched, but she didn’t smile with her lipstick-y teeth this time. “We’ll see.”
Circus in a Shot Glass Page 3