The Greatest Show

by Michael Downs

  Chryssie, who was two and a few months, lay in the middle of the living room carpet on her belly, scribbling with crayons on construction paper. Suzanne said hello to everyone, but only Karen replied. Suzanne said to Chryssie, “What about my kiss?” and Chryssie said, “No.”

  In the kitchen, Suzanne poured her morning Mr. Pibb. “You came in late,” said Karen, walking near. Gently, she turned Suzanne by the shoulders, peered at her pimple, and put cool fingertips against the skin. Suzanne thought again of Mrs. Liszak and realized she remembered no time when she and Karen had kissed, not even a cheek peck. Now she jerked forward and kissed her sister’s lips.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Karen said. She laughed and looked as if a dog had licked her face. “What’s that all about?”

  “It’s too quiet this morning,” Suzanne said. “Are you and Howard fighting?”

  “No. There’s just little to say now.” Karen examined the pimple. “This one looks ready to pop.”

  “You’re thinking of going to California,” Suzanne said.

  “Howard’s going, not me or Chryssie.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You made me choose,” Karen said. “You better appreciate the choice I’ve made.”

  “Howard’s the one who chose.”

  It was cruel to say so, and not even true, really, and Suzanne wanted to take it back. They had often all three talked about California. Jobs paid more, Howard said. He wanted to raise Chryssie in a place where the sun shined. Karen wanted California, too. But Suzanne refused to leave Hartford. When she thought of leaving, her insides felt strangled. She had the sense California would shrink her to invisibility, make her impossible to find among all those people and lanes of traffic and that relentless good weather. She could not abide the idea of never being found.

  Now Karen turned her back, and Suzanne felt selfish, and she felt worse when Karen reached in the fridge for an orange, which she handed to Suzanne. “Enjoy breakfast,” Karen said.

  On the back porch, rain pop-popped on the roof. Suzanne sat on a rusted lounge chair without a cushion, and the springs squeaked. Howard had left another ashtray there, and she moved it to the top of some cardboard boxes filled with empty cans and bottles, saved for the nickel deposit. She checked out the neighborhood. Her new habit involved spying on neighbors from the porch. Most seemed harmless or dull. But there was also the bald man who lived alone and sat on his porch at night without any lights on. And the young woman who wept with her curtains wide and windows thrown open. And the olive-skinned couple who sometimes had visits from the police. Suzanne had not had a porch like this in the house with her father, and they hadn’t lived near so many neighbors. She never knew this pleasure until she moved to Hartford, but now it seemed necessary that she spy on customers from inside her glass booth, that she watch fellow students and teachers from the back rows of her classrooms, that she see the neighborhood from her high perch. Suzanne spied on everyone and drew their faces in her sketchbook, which she kept with a box of colored pencils and a sharpener in a satchel that had been her father’s in the army. She drew half a dozen faces a page, or one on a page, and sometimes she drew people with photograph-like reality and other times if it seemed more real she turned them into Nile Queens or Mongol warriors or zoo animals—baring their lips to show fangs, or making them howl. She drew Chryssie and Karen and Howard, too, sketching them from different perspectives: Howard’s lollipop face from the right and above; Karen’s with its too apparent skull straight on, but from below. Suzanne filled pages of spiral-bound pads with people: crowds and crowds as ugly and beautiful as she could make them, and when she couldn’t make them beautiful or ugly she added word bubbles so her badly sketched faces could admonish her: “Draw, you lame weasel!” She never shared her drawings, and at school her “No, you can’t see them” ended all overtures of friendship. So what. Friendship meant less to her than the faces; she feared that students who saw them would talk about them, and their words would rob the faces of their magic. She could not say why, but she knew she depended on them. When not drawing in the book, she paged through it, recalling the attention she’d given each face, the decisions she’d made as she captured it. This felt to her something like love. Now she sharpened a lavender-colored pencil and brushed away the shavings, then found an empty page.

  Suzanne sketched a tiny Mrs. Liszak. Then another. Small versions, trying to get the face right—its majesty, its helplessness—trying to remember the scar. From one angle, she drew it like a kidney. From another like a splash of ink from a leaky fountain pen. Once like half a butterfly.

  She was scheduled to work Monday when Howard meant to leave. She had been glad to get out of the apartment because he wouldn’t speak to her, and Karen was red-eyed and busy telling him what he needed to pack (“Do you have your umbrella?” she asked. “What about your mustache trimmer?”). Business at the gas station was slow, so Suzanne sketched more Mrs. Liszaks and worried that Howard might after all take Karen and Chryssie with him. She thought about Howard so much that afternoon that she wasn’t surprised to see him park his Chevy Impala at Pump No. 8, regular. She put her pencil on the register and watched. He wiped his forehead and retied his shoe as he waited for the tank to fill, then topped it off for an even six dollars. Suzanne waved as he approached the booth, but he ignored her. She said, “Hi, Howard.” He only slipped the money through the cashier’s well. He never blinked. As he backed away, he looked at her, then saluted with an “Adios, pardner” kind of wave that made her mouth go dry.

  Once, months before, as she climbed the stairs to the apartment, glad to be home from work or school (she’d forgotten which), Howard had stumbled past her, his face red and twisted, Karen’s sobs trailing after him. Howard paused only long enough to say, “You’ll wreck our marriage.” Then his boot heels pounded the stairboards and the downstairs door slammed shut. When he was gone, Suzanne could still see the hate in his face, more powerful than anything she’d known, greater than what they taught at church or school, passionate enough to engulf the stairwell with fire. Now, from the glass booth, as she watched him drive away from his wife and daughter, those words returned (You’ll wreck our marriage), and they echoed over the hours even as she slipped her time card into the clock and heard the mechanisms punch.

  In the apartment, she found Karen yelling at Chryssie to stop screaming, to stop making so much noise, that if she didn’t stop making so much noise Mommy would be very angry.

  Suzanne waited by the door. She waited for Karen to say something.

  “Please take Chryssie out of here,” Karen said. “I can’t stand it right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Suzanne. She lifted Chryssie, whose shoes were untied. Chryssie kicked-kicked-kicked, and one shoe fell off her foot to the floor. “I wanted him to change his mind,” Suzanne said.

  “If she’s here and she’s screaming I can’t talk to him,” said Karen. “He’s supposed to call when he reaches Pittsburgh.”

  Suzanne searched the phone book for Lishack. Then for Lyshack. Then for Lichack. Then for Lisiak. Nothing in the phone book resembled the name, so she called the Eagle Scout to ask how to spell it or if he knew where the woman lived, but he said he couldn’t talk to her anymore, not since his old man found him asleep on their stoop that Saturday morning, smelly and sick and still wasted.

  She looked for Mrs. Liszak at Mass. In the glass booth at work, she waited for Mrs. Liszak’s face to appear. On the way to the park with Chryssie, they sometimes walked blocks out of their way to read mailboxes for names that might be Liszak. She knew what the school counselor would say: “You think about this woman all the time because you want her to be your mother.” But that wasn’t true. Suzanne wanted to watch Mrs. Liszak. She wanted to study her. There was something in the way Mrs. Liszak had moved through the night; she seemed only to gain things, she lost nothing. Eventually, in August, on the way to work, Suzanne stopped at the local Polish deli and said to the woman behind the count
er: “Do you know a Mrs. Liszak?” The woman laughed. Charlie’s wife, she said. They live on Barker Street.

  That night was damp and dark. Suzanne carried her satchel, and she walked slowly enough to count the address numbers on houses. A nearby streetlight and the moon shone on the Liszaks’ house, which itself was lit by a porch light. Suzanne could see the house clearly. It reminded her less of a city house than of those in the suburb where she and her father and Karen had lived. It was two stories, with decorative shutters and shiny windows and a trimmed lawn. An apron of marigolds encircled an oak tree. A bird feeder shaped like a steepled church stood nearby, along with two painted roosters. The property was bordered by rose bushes and a waist-high chain-link fence. The gate was latched. No car sat in the driveway, and the sidewalk mailbox sported stenciled letters spelling out the family name. She thought it must be the house of a retired man, and in fact Suzanne saw an older man sitting alone on the porch. She noticed him only when he waved—the friendly wave of a retired man—and she nodded by way of returning the courtesy, then hurried away, embarrassed to have been caught spying and disappointed that she couldn’t have lingered.

  From California, Howard sent packages with money. He sent Polaroid photographs. He wasn’t a letter writer, and long-distance cost too much. Instead he recorded himself on a cassette tape, and he and Karen mailed it back and forth. Karen would take the tape player and lie on her bed to listen—sometimes cuddling with Chryssie, sometimes alone. She listened to the same recording twice, three times. The voice that haunted the apartment was not Howard’s, but a robot’s, full of clicks and scratches, careful and distant, unlike what they remembered and too much like it. This voice tried to assure Karen, and she listened over and over as if waiting for the assurance to take hold. “I’m making a bundle out here, you wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “In California, sweet girl, the sun shines, and you can buy Coors, and the Raiders are on TV all the frickin’ time.”

  The apartment had never been comfortable; it grew worse. Karen stopped at the laundromat less often, and she never folded, just took clean, wrinkled clothes from the basket as she or Chryssie needed them and told Suzanne to do whatever. She threw fliers away without cutting coupons. If Suzanne didn’t wash the dishes, they stacked in the sink and on the counter and stank and lured cockroaches from the drainpipes. When light bulbs burned out, they stayed that way. The four chairs around the dining room table became three when a chair leg broke and Karen left the pieces on the sidewalk with the trash. Every weekend, Karen took Chryssie for drives in the Z-car. At first they left and returned before lunch. But then they stayed away past lunch and then past dinner. And then it was not just the weekends, but also after work.

  Each time Suzanne came home and found the Z-car missing, she locked the front door behind her, then searched room to room for what might have vanished while she was gone. She made a checklist of things Karen might take should she leave: the framed Sacred Heart that had been their mother’s; high-heel shoes stacked in apple crates; a Polaroid on the kitchen bulletin board of Suzanne and Karen at Misquamicut beach the day they traded bikini tops; Chryssie’s polyester quilt of pastel tulips and daffodils. Only when Suzanne was satisfied that everything was in its place could she relax and paint her fingernails or watch game shows or sit on the porch, drawing faces and spying on the bald man who sat in the dark or the young woman who wept. She ate bags of noodles that cooked in five minutes, and she drank Mr. Pibb.

  When Karen and Chryssie came home, Suzanne tried to sound nonchalant, said, “Hey strangers, how’d the day go?” Karen shrugged her answer, and Chryssie wanted to play with dolls. Then the two would go away again.

  A golden dusk in late September and once more the Z-car was gone. Suzanne, off the bus from work, turned away, unwilling to face the empty apartment, to count proofs of Karen’s presence, then wait to hear Karen’s key in the lock. She walked instead, envious of people she passed: a pair of joggers, girls jumping rope, a family she spied through lit windows who fought with gestures and loud words even as they shared a spaghetti dinner. Halfway to Barker Street she wondered whether she should have left a note for Karen but decided Karen deserved none.

  She rang the Liszaks’ doorbell, and Mrs. Liszak’s husband answered. He was flat-faced with horn-rimmed glasses and brown eyes that suggested a practiced capacity for patience. He stood stooped but strong, his fingernails thick and his hands scaly, coarse hair graying on his knuckles. He wore suspenders with his pants and an old dress shirt with the cuffs tucked inward once, as if he wanted them out of the way but not rolled in the manner of a cowboy or tough guy. Suzanne smelled something sweet coming off him, perhaps pipe smoke. She asked for Mrs. Liszak.

  “Ah, the girl who thinks Sister Katherine is a bitch,” said Mrs. Liszak. It sounded funny, hearing an old woman say bitch, and Suzanne wanted to hear Mrs. Liszak say it again. Karen, playing mother, had always said Suzanne was too pretty to let such ugly words cross her lips.

  The porch light shone, and for the first time Suzanne could see clearly Mrs. Liszak’s face. Suzanne hadn’t gotten it all wrong in the sketches, but she had concentrated too much on the scar, drawing a gargoyle rather than a woman. She could see now that the scar wasn’t so pronounced. Instead she noticed that Mrs. Liszak’s face had been pretty once, perhaps even beautiful, and she decided to draw it that way next time. Sketching an old person, she had learned, meant drawing two people at once: the aged one and the one hidden by age. The scar, she guessed, had in Mrs. Liszak’s youth enhanced her beauty. But now the scar mattered less when matched against her yellowed teeth or the lines notched over her upper lip.

  “What brings you to my door?” asked Mrs. Liszak as her husband stepped back inside. “Would you like to come in?”

  Suzanne chose between truths and said, “I want to see the Rat Queen.”

  “Ah, no,” said Mrs. Liszak. “A waste of time.” She stepped onto the porch and leaned low to read Suzanne’s name tag on her work uniform. “Suzanne,” she said. “I’d forgotten your name. Sit, Suzanne,” and Mrs. Liszak eased herself into a rocking chair webbed with neat, taut nylon.

  “Really, I’d like to see the rats,” said Suzanne.

  Mrs. Liszak again waved Suzanne toward a chair. “Do your parents know you’re here, asking an elegant woman to take you to see rats?”

  “Yes,” said Suzanne.

  “Liar,” said Mrs. Liszak. “No parent would agree to such a thing.”

  “They’re out of town,” said Suzanne.

  Mrs. Liszak pulled her shawl tight against the cooling evening. She wore high heels now, as she had at the movie, and a skirt with a lacy hem that frayed.

  “Who takes care of you when your parents are gone?”

  “I have a sister. But I’m sixteen. I can handle things.”

  “The largest rat had testicles,” said Mrs. Liszak. “It wasn’t a woman after all. I was very disappointed. Where are your parents visiting?”

  “California.”

  “We have a son in North Carolina,” said Mrs. Liszak. “What shall we do instead of the rats?”

  Suzanne reached into her satchel and brought out her sketchpad. “Let me draw you,” she said.

  “What a tremendous idea,” said Mrs. Liszak.

  Mrs. Liszak turned off the porch light, then faced the windows that cast brightness from inside. “This is better lighting, don’t you think?” she said. She hummed again the out-of-key melody from the night of the movie. Suzanne thought of carousel horses limping toward the end of a ride. She began to shape the face, but right away saw that she’d made a mistake. She turned to a new page.

  “In the movie we saw,” asked Mrs. Liszak, “did it scare you when the baby monster exploded from the man’s chest?” She sat with her back straight, her bosom lifted and out a bit. From inside, the television made sounds of gunplay and doors smashed open and screams.

  “No,” said Suzanne. “It was the coolest part.”

  “Did any part scare you?”
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  “It was just a movie,” Suzanne said.

  Now and then she noticed Mrs. Liszak trying to hold her pose and at the same time watch Suzanne work. Suzanne decided not to turn again to a new page, but to push through her second effort, which was failing, too. In pencil, Mrs. Liszak’s earrings looked to be hanging from the ends of green onions.

  Mrs. Liszak’s husband opened the porch door, bringing a tray of sodas and a bowl of potato chips. “Chef Charlie at your service,” he said. “Everyone wants to capture the woman with the scar. Drawings. Paintings. Photos.” He laughed. “I’ve got a scar, too,” he said, and he lifted his shirt so high it covered his face. Blind, he traced with one finger a pink welt across his abdomen. “Appendix,” he said. “I’ve also got a ripper on my calf from a rock that shot out of my lawnmower. Wanna draw that?”

  “There’s room for only one star on this stage,” said Mrs. Liszak, “and one face on that page. You are dismissed, Kazimierz.”

  “Madam,” he said and blew her a kiss before exiting.

  So Suzanne was not the first. She wondered if others had this much difficulty. How had they re-created Mrs. Liszak? She imagined sketching her with a willowy face, like those of the ballerinas painted by the man obsessed with dancers. She imagined her as a Virgin Mary from the Renaissance, a radiance from heaven sanctifying her scar. Suzanne played with the colors, trying with purples and oranges to capture the energy around Mrs. Liszak’s eyes.

  “How did you get the scar?” Suzanne asked.

  Mrs. Liszak stopped humming her out-of-tune melody. “I do not like to tell the story,” she said. “I don’t even tell my son, and he was there.”

  “So make one up. Like the Rat Queen.”

  When Mrs. Liszak spoke, her voice was conversational, matter-of-fact, as if she had told this tale a thousand thousand times. But Suzanne heard something like pride, too, at owning a story so much in demand. “No,” she said. “This one is true.”