by Amanda Davis
But it was the aerial act that got me. A trapeze artist—THE TALENTED MISS MINA BALLERINA DANCES THROUGH THE AIR!—stood perched atop a high platform in a sparkly gold-and-purple leotard, her black hair pulled tightly back from her face. She clutched a rope with one hand, which she used to swing through the air to a trapeze that hung from the center of the tent. She flew lightly, gracefully, as though it were perfectly natural to trust her entire body to this single thread. When she grabbed the bar of the trapeze and let go of the rope, her body jerked, leaving her hanging by her other hand, and the entire crowd gasped.
She held the weight of her whole body with that one arm, legs in an elegant leap, head back, spinning this way and that, and then slowly she lowered her other arm and in another abrupt move she was hanging upside down from the trapeze by one knee instead, and again the crowd gasped. Now people leaned forward in their seats. She kicked her other leg over and pulled herself into a sitting position. She began to swing the trapeze back and forth lightly, back and forth, until she’d built up momentum and was moving quickly, hanging and swinging. Then with a dainty flourish, she let go and began to fall, catching herself with only the tops of her feet.
My heart pounded. Below her there was no net, just sawdust over hard ground. Charlie leaned close and I almost jumped out of my skin; I had forgotten he was there. I had forgotten there was anything else in the world besides the talented Mina Ballerina.
“She’s pretty good,” he whispered.
I realized I’d been holding my breath. “She’s fantastic,” I whispered back. “I mean just amazing!”
Mina swung up and instantly was standing on the trapeze, leaning backwards, so that it began to really move. She wrapped herself in the ropes, she suspended herself horizontally in a twist, this way and that, and the whole time she swung nearly the length of the tent, back and forth, high above the sawdust floor.
She slid to a sitting position again, then spun backwards, around and around the narrow trapeze, then forwards. The lights caught her leotard so that she was a sparkly blur. When she stopped spinning she pushed herself up on her arms slowly until she was in a perfect handstand. By now the trapeze wasn’t swinging quite as much, but it was moving and she balanced perfectly still and straight, adjusting with the trapeze, as though being upside down was natural. And then she flipped around the bar some more, a windmill, a propeller, a whirling flash of gold and purple high above the rest of us.
A dark-haired man in red tights hung by his knees from another trapeze that swung down towards Mina and away. The whole crowd murmured. Mina came out of her spin and let go of the trapeze altogether, plummeting in a rapid somersault so she was just a moving ball plunging towards the earth.
But he caught her.
Just at the last minute, she extended her arms and he caught her.
We were late for work.
“Hey, Chiquita,” Charlie said to Angelique, the sous chef, when we walked in. She glared after him, then turned to raise an eyebrow at me. Charlie’s heavy footsteps thumped down the stairs and we could hear him whistling.
“You guys are in for it,” she said under her breath, but I heard her.
I tied on an apron. I hadn’t ever been late to work and I was nervous. I didn’t have to wait long.
“Faith!” Emily’s voice crackled over the intercom from the manager’s office.
I jumped, then put down the trash bag I was trying to open and made my way through the kitchen, past the tiny door marked PRIVATE, and up the narrow stairs. Emily sat at her desk. I knocked on the open door to the office and she swung around with crossed arms and narrowed eyes, and launched into a tirade without taking a breath.
“I took a chance on you,” she said. “And you’ve been doing a good job, I’ll give you that, but when you’re late you throw everything into chaos. Then you don’t have time to set up, to restock, so the wait staff isn’t well attended to, which means the customers get spottier service, which means we make a less than perfect impression, so that people don’t come back and we go out of business.” There were pink spots high up on her chalky cheeks; her eyes bored a hole through me.
“You are never, ever to be late again. Am I understood?!”
I nodded meekly, burning with the shame of letting her down.
“Good.” She turned back to the papers on her desk. “Send Chuck up here immediately.”
I backed out of the office and tore down the stairs and through the kitchen, determined to set up in half the time, to do a spectacular job so Emily would forgive me.
Charlie had changed into his white oxford and apron and was drying the silverware.
“Emily wants to see you,” I said.
“Yates!” the intercom crackled again.
“Shit,” he said, and headed for the office.
By the time he returned, I’d set up the entire bus station myself. He looked paler than normal, shaken.
“Well…?”
He motioned towards the back of the restaurant and I followed him until we were out of earshot. “They are really fucking mad at me,” he said in a low voice. “I tried to talk my way out of it, but I can feel it.”
“For what? For being late?”
“Never mind,” he said. “Listen, I can’t…” he looked around then shook his head and walked back towards the kitchen. Then we got busy, but unlike usual, we didn’t talk.
“I’m sorry, doll,” he said a little later that evening when we took the trash out back after the first rush had died down. “I just have a bad feeling about this place. And you don’t want them deciding they don’t like you just because they don’t like me, so we just have to be careful about hanging out for now.”
I didn’t say anything, just listened and nodded.
“Hey,” he said. “That you knew Starling…” He gestured at the sky and the surrounding darkness. “I mean, this has been really great to have met you, you know. Fate and everything. It’s like the ice cream.” He smiled and thrust a piece of paper at me. It had a phone number on it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “But, listen, if it comes to it, fuck these people with their small minds. You come find me.”
I folded it and tucked it away.
“We can talk more on Tuesday,” he said. Then he put his finger to his lips and slipped back inside.
Walking home I kept asking myself why, after a day like this day, when he had taken me to see Marco, when he’d found me at my house and taken me to see the circus, to show me something that made him so happy, why did it feel like good-bye?
Halfway home the fat girl blocked my path. She was in a mean mood. “Let me see what he gave you,” she said.
“It’s just his phone number.”
She began to skip ahead, taunting, “Faithy has a new best friend…”
“Jealous?” I called.
“Ha!”
“Where were you all day?”
She wouldn’t answer, just gave me an evil look and fell into step beside me.
“Fine,” I said. “Fuck you if you won’t talk to me.”
I wanted to tell her about the woman on the trapeze. How I’d held my breath and how my heart had pounded. How I’d seen a whole world up there in the air, and the one down here had disappeared. But I didn’t say a thing.
FIVE
AT school on Monday I passed Tony Giobambera and Number Three having a laugh by a locker. I couldn’t breathe. Fuckheads. Assholes. Laughing. Three’s name was Jim, the fat girl whispered. There was no air. There was no place to go. I thought about skipping my next class and calling Charlie, leaving school to go hang out at Marco’s if Charlie would come get me, but I dug around in my bag and realized I’d left his number at home. I had an appointment with Fern after school. By the time I got home he’d be at Clark’s.
I didn’t call.
Then on Tuesday, when I next showed up for work, there was a new guy named Frederico with soft brown eyes who didn’t speak much English.
I hung my coat up down
stairs but Charlie’s coat wasn’t there. “Where’s Chuck?” I asked Angelique, but she pretended not to hear me. No one in the kitchen said anything and I didn’t see Emily anywhere, though I wasn’t sure it would be wise to ask her anyway. I headed back out to the dining room. The wait staff had started to arrive. They intimidated me, and I didn’t usually talk to them, but everything had changed. Now I didn’t care. I charged towards the front of the house.
“Where’s Charlie?” I asked a redhead named Meg who had just come in the door. Frederico trailed me like an eager shadow.
She looked blank. “Who?” she asked, taking off her coat.
“Chuck Yates.” It came out sounding more annoyed than I meant. She raised an eyebrow.
“He walked out in the middle of a shift, the bastard,” Marybeth called from across the room. She slammed down a pepper shaker and the girl to her right refilling the salts laughed.
“When?” I said, but they ignored me, folding back into themselves, engaged in their own chatter, the cluster of other wait staff.
I turned around. Frederico stood watching me, expectant. I showed him how to wipe down the tables and then left him to do it himself and went out back.
Light was fading. The sky was pale. I leaned against the Dumpster. There were cigarette butts on the ground, most likely at least some of them Charlie’s. I kicked at them with the toe of my shoe. I told myself it was silly—we didn’t have to work together to remain friends, we would see each other outside the restaurant like Charlie said, but something felt wrong. In my gut I just knew it.
When I walked back in the restaurant, Frederico had finished the tables and seemed to want another assignment. I found him a clean bar mop and showed him where the utensils were, then closed myself in the old wooden phone booth. I held my breath while I dialed. Something told me that I wasn’t going to find Charlie on the other end of the line and I didn’t. The phone just rang and rang.
I heard it all eventually, in bits and pieces that fit together. Some from Angelique, from Meg and Marybeth, from Ernie, another sous chef.
On Saturday, Emily had told Charlie he’d better watch his expendable ass. They thought he was a negative influence, that he was overstepping the boundaries of his profession, not aware of his place. They’d thought he was too casual about his duties, about his timeliness, that he was disrespectful to the staff. And more importantly, there was money missing and she had a hunch that he was responsible.
Sunday was a slow night, slow enough to require only one busperson, but not slow enough for none. In the middle of the first rush, Charlie took off his apron and walked out. The wait staff was still pissed, which was what he had probably wanted. “What’s the point of leaving if no one notices?” I could hear him say.
Towards the end of the evening Emily called me to the office to make sure I understood how much they trusted me and how confident they were in my abilities. They might need me to pick up a few extra shifts here or there. I nodded and smiled.
But without the magic of Charlie the evening took hours and hours. The job was drudgery; there was nothing to redeem it. Even the pleasure I’d taken in my own invisibility disappeared without Charlie there to see me. Waitresses barked their orders at Frederico and me, and we hopped around, doing their bidding. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was hard, nasty work.
The next day the fat girl was watching Tony smoke. “How can you?” I asked, but she just shook her head like I didn’t know what she had up her sleeve and left me to my mission.
I made my way past the swarming crowds to the three pay phones in the lobby. There was a line for each of them and I waited, shifting from foot to foot. I had to pee. The bell was about to ring. Who the hell were these people talking to?
I was next on the middle pay phone. I watched a pimply girl to my left whisper fierce things into the handset. She kept looking over her shoulder at the line and wincing apologetically. Then I glanced at the phone on my right and recognized the caller. I didn’t know his name but I knew him. Seven. As soon as the fat girl had pointed him out, I’d remembered him. Fat girls are hungry.
My fingers were ice, my body so cold that my heart stopped beating.
“Yo, you’re up,” someone said from behind me, and the phone was free. I stumbled forward and dug around in my pocket for Charlie’s number.
Seven slammed the phone down, ran a hand through his blond hair, and walked off. He hadn’t even noticed me.
I dialed and it rang. And rang. I made a wish and waited.
On the sixth ring a man answered. He sounded confused, like I’d just woken him from a deep sleep.
“Hello, may I please speak to Charlie Yates?”
There was a long pause and then, “Who’s this?”
“This is…I’m a friend from work.”
He snorted. “Charlie’s gone,” he said. “Sorry.” But he didn’t sound it.
“Excuse me, sir, but I really need to—”
He hung up.
I stood holding the phone to my ear for what felt like a long time. Then I hung it up slowly and walked away in a fog, everything cloudy.
The bell rang, and the hall emptied quickly. I stood for a minute, then made my way towards math, my footsteps echoing, but when I looked through the tiny window in the classroom door and saw Mrs. Lemont’s arm and Missy Groski sneering in her seat, I knew I wasn’t going in.
I just kept walking. I went from hall to hall, towards the back of the school. The echo of the second bell seemed to linger in the air long after it had stopped ringing. I walked slowly, methodically, though I didn’t really know where I was going. I made my way to a small bathroom on the second floor and stayed there. I peed, then sat on the radiator under the screened glass window and tried to figure out what to do.
When the bell rang for lunch, I left. I didn’t worry about getting stopped. Nothing mattered. Outside the cold air felt like freedom.
The fat girl fell into step beside me.
We headed to the fairgrounds. We caught a bus and through its smoky windows I watched the world pass. We drove past the projects and then crossed the river into Yander, where each pastel house seemed to whisper. Any of them could have been Charlie’s. And Starling’s. I never knew exactly where they lived, but with each home we passed, I could see Starling standing in all her tiny madness on the small square lawn, eyes shining bright at me. But Starling was gone too.
“Maybe it’s enough to just leave this place,” I said, but the fat girl didn’t answer.
We passed a park and a playground, stores I had never seen before, or hadn’t noticed. The world had a sharp quality that made me want to memorize it, like everything was made of hard angles and primary colors. We stopped so often that by the time we began to climb Dawford Hill, I’d almost forgotten where I was going. The Gleryton Fairgrounds were at the top, on the very edge of town.
We got off the bus and I tried to get my bearings. Pretty quickly I realized where we were, but it didn’t matter. Where the green strips of plastic had been torn away, I could see through the chain-link fence that they were gone. The Fartlesworth Circus was gone. In place of the tents and trailers was a shabby flea market. FRIDAY BARGAINS! a sign said.
My heart was so heavy that my chest could barely hold it; I felt it falling, tumbling down inside of me. I pressed myself against the fence and closed my eyes, willing the flea market to disappear, but when I opened them again it was still there, small and sad. I sank down to sit where I was, on the cold sidewalk, and leaned back against the fence.
Gleryton spread down the hill, streets of houses and stores, churches and trees that had defined my entire life so far. Everything so familiar. Everything I knew.
Besides Berrybrook.
The fat girl stood by the fence, hands in her pockets, looking down at me. “I’m here,” she said. “I didn’t go anywhere.”
I went to work. I smiled and didn’t talk. I went home. Again and again. For a whole week. Then Thursday was Thanksgiving.
“I want
us to spend some time together,” my mother said. “Ever since you started working at Clark’s, I never see you.”
I set the table. We would eat in the dining room instead of the kitchen. How special.
I spread a white tablecloth, as instructed, got the china from its dusty cabinet, the good silver. “If you like,” my mother called from the kitchen in the strange singsong voice she’d taken to lately, “you can have a glass of wine this evening. I don’t mind, since it’s a special occasion. It’ll be a treat.”
Silence. I knew I was supposed to be grateful. To say something grateful or excited.
“Only one, though,” she called again; her disembodied voice was tinny. “Because, you know, those are empty calories, honey!”
Dinner was skinless breast of turkey. No gravy. Fresh cranberries. Microwaved sweet potatoes (four ounces each). Steamed spinach. And one cup of rice.
For a special treat, my mother had made a fat-free pie of some unidentifiable flavor.
She had three scotches while I sipped my wine.
“Isn’t this nice?” she said. “Just the two of us.”
Like it was unusual. Like we were bombarded with dinner guests, flustered with social engagements. I blinked. The sound of our utensils scratching the plates was excruciating.
Mom tried again. “Aren’t you hungry? You’re awfully quiet tonight, honey.”
I swallowed. What the hell was there to say? I haven’t been hungry in months? That cheerful voice you’re using freaks me out? I miss Daddy and you don’t have any idea who I am? I’m sick of tasteless diet food?
“Mmmmm,” I said. “It’s delicious, Mom.”
That night I lay awake in the dark and saw a tiny woman flipping through the air, flipping and flying and being caught by strong ready arms. I saw her hang by one foot and whip around, touch nothing for a moment, fall for a moment, then catch herself with one hand.