by Amanda Davis
“Remember to ask if you don’t know something,” he said gruffly, as we were leaving the horses. “You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks.”
“Indeed.”
Benny called his dogs and they rallied around him, a wriggling mass of enthusiasm. They picked up their red balls and followed him back to the Winnebago.
I checked in with Jim, who sent me to Wilma. “After tonight you’ll help us with the show,” he said. “You’ll help set up and you’ll help us after. Tonight you’d just get in the way, so stay with Wilma, see what she needs. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
He gave me a mock salute, which I returned, grinning the stupid stiff smile I’d worn all day. As I walked away, my face ached from focus and good cheer, my body from all the lifting. I could barely raise my arms, and my shoulders were tight, my hands blistering and sore. I could tell it would all be worse by tomorrow.
Back at the trailer, Wilma squeezed her nose between two fingers and made me take off my jumpsuit and hang it up outside. She gave me a pair of slippers to replace the brown boots, which were also left outside the door. Then she offered me Band-Aids and dinner, and explained that I should stay on my bunk, out of the way, during the evening’s show. “You just watch,” she said. “I’m sure Jim and Benny exploited the hell out of you and you won’t mind sitting still anyway. But try not to fall asleep. And don’t get down, no matter what. There really isn’t enough room.”
I agreed, and gobbled the food gratefully. It felt wonderful just to sit and space out while Wilma spun around the place humming to herself and preparing for onslaught.
I jumped at a knock on the door and looked to Wilma, who stopped what she was doing and checked her watch. She made a curious face, and the person knocked again, louder this time. I stood up and she went to open it. It was Sam.
“Didn’t you hear me knock?”
Wilma’s easy mood disappeared instantly. She blocked the doorway with her arms crossed, looking like she might kick him in the face.
“What the hell do you want?” She spat the words like they were little knives, but they didn’t seem to hit their mark. He gave her a slow dark smile and then pushed past her, through the doorway, and turned his attentions on me.
“You, Miss Annabelle Cabinet”—he pronounced it like it was French—“need to come with me.”
I stood, my legs rubbery, and followed him outside.
It was dusk and the light was dim. The outline of Sam’s tiny figure was illuminated by the big top ahead of us, until he turned off on a gravel path and led me to the campground picnic area, out of earshot of the trailers.
“Have a seat.” Sam gestured with his clipboard.
I chose a picnic table and sat. When Sam hoisted himself up onto the bench across from me, we were almost eye level.
My mouth was dry. I swallowed. Sam didn’t look at me but over my shoulder at something beyond me. He ran his stubby fingers through his dark tangle of hair.
“Annabelle,” he said, finally. “Do you know what it means to make a promise?”
I nodded. I knew. I had made promises. I had kept them; I had broken them. I remembered Starling, remembered one moonless night with only her words in the dark.
Hey, she’d whispered. Promise me you’ll be all right.
“Annabelle?” Sam waved his hand in front of my face. “Stay with me, here, okay?” He cleared his throat and offered me a cigarette. I took one and lit it.
The smoke came in sharp, delicious. I tried to clear the heaviness in my chest by shaking my head, but I felt myself floating. Drifting away.
Promise that from now on you’ll tell me if something’s wrong, my mother had whispered in the dark, late on the night that she’d delivered me from Berrybrook.
Promise you won’t forget me, Starling had said.
I forced myself back to Sam, who didn’t meet my gaze.
“I’m here.”
“You didn’t report to Jim yesterday. It was your first day and you didn’t show up.” His voice was tired. Behind him, the lights of the lot pulsed with energy. Voices drifted in and out of the trees.
“I fell asleep,” I said. “When I woke, Wilma told me she’d spoken to Jim. I worked all day today.” I offered up my blistered hands.
“I know,” Sam said, and blew a stream of smoke from the side of his mouth. “Jim says you did a good job today, but I still have to give you a warning. My mother is watching you. I’m watching you. I haven’t spoken to Benny yet, but we pull out the day after tomorrow. Keep your word.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then thought better of it.
“Okay,” I said. “Won’t happen again.”
This seemed to satisfy Sam. He exhaled. “Good. Now there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
I settled myself attentively. Sam seemed to have a hard time finding the words. He scratched the back of his neck and sighed.
“It’s Wilma,” he said finally. “We can’t go on like this.” A pained expression crossed his face and he pursed his lips. “It’s unacceptable.”
Bit by bit he told me. Sam and Wilma had been good friends since they were kids. Yael and Wilma had become fast friends as soon as she’d joined the show. Sam fell hard for Yael but she wasn’t interested in him. She began carrying on with someone else and Sam grew crazy with jealousy. “I loved her,” he said. “You have to understand.”
What I didn’t understand was why he’d chosen to unburden himself to me, but I kept quiet and nodded and he continued.
Wilma got caught in the middle, he explained. Sam wanted to know who Yael was seeing, he knew it was someone, and Wilma tried to persuade Sam to let it go, but he wouldn’t. Wilma told him it was a gamer named Frank and Sam forced Grouper, who ran the midway, to fire the guy. But Wilma had lied. It wasn’t Frank that Yael was carrying on with. It was Marco Klieboski.
“Marco?”
Sam stopped his story and squinted at me. “You know Marco?”
I took a deep breath and smiled. “Sorry to interrupt.”
“Anyway, Yael was having this thing with Marco and then this jerk, some friend of Marco’s, shows up determined to do anything to travel with the show and Grouper convinces Mom to hire him. In two weeks Yael goes nuts. Bonkers. Knocks the friend out with an iron skillet and goes after Marco with a knife.” He paused to light another cigarette and thrust the pack towards me, but this time I refused.
“She set his trailer on fire. We had to leave them all with the cops in Georgia.”
He looked past me, and his eyes were bottomless and sad. “I’d like you to talk to Wilma. Tell her I’m sorry for everything, I really am. Tell her that you think she should give me a break. I know you’ve only known her a little bit but she might listen to you, and I’d really appreciate it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I swallowed and gave Sam a bewildered look.
“I would really appreciate it,” he said again, and this time he met my gaze. “I’m sure the show would benefit from having someone with diplomatic skills come along with us.”
I understood.
When I got back to the trailer, Wilma was pulling wigs and arranging shoes in rows. She didn’t ask about Sam’s visit, but pointed and I crawled up onto my bunk.
I was unprepared for what followed, couldn’t possibly have imagined the lunacy she’d warned me about. For the next two hours there was a near-constant flood of people in and out of the trailer. Each performer entered frantic and speedy, tossing off one costume in favor of a new one, reapplying makeup, trading off headdresses and wigs. It was very crowded, but they all seemed expert at dodging one another. I watched a woman bend over to tug on a new leotard, just missing the arm of a guy pulling on a sequined jacket. Centimeters closer and I was certain she’d have lost teeth.
Wilma couldn’t hang anything up fast enough. Some things she dumped in a bin, with headdresses tossed on her bed, or, when that became a jumble, on mine. Some she draped over one arm and ignored, lugging them aro
und until she was nearly buried by a mound of sparkly, colorful cloth. With her mouth full of pins, she made an exasperated face and tossed the costumes aside, continuing the whirlwind of dress, undress, and redress, stitch and fix, until the finale, when the trailer abruptly flooded—the height of the chaos—and emptied. There was a sudden silence, with me on my bunk, in awe, and Wilma spitting pins and exhaling.
“I cannot believe you do that every night,” I said, finally.
“Twice when there’s a matinee. Thank God the clowns have their own dress tent.”
“Holy shit.”
“I know,” she said, and laughed. “One day off, one half-day of performances. That’s the life I’m used to.” She emptied the last of her load onto a trunk and reached below the wigs for two glasses, which she filled with whiskey. She offered me one. I hesitated.
“Oh, come on,” she said, leaning against the mirror. “You’ve got to grow up sometime.”
I smiled weakly, climbed down, and took the glass. The first sip made me wince, the taste was harsh and it burned going down, but then it warmed me, belly to fingertips. I sat across from her at the table.
“I can’t believe I slept through that yesterday.”
“Honey, you slept through that twice.” We both laughed and then sat quietly for a while. I was exhausted, my whole body heavy and sore. I wondered how to bring up Sam.
“How’d you get those bruises?” Wilma said.
I smiled and rubbed my knee with the palm of my hand. “I walked into a door,” I said. “I fell down.”
Wilma swished her glass around, then refilled it.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” But it didn’t sound fine. My stomach began to tighten. The lie escaped before I had time to think of Elaine.
“This boyfriend…He’s a long story that I’m glad is over.”
This seemed to brighten her; she clucked her tongue and nodded. “Well, you’re here now, where the creep won’t find you.”
I swallowed and tried to smile. Blue caught my eye. The fat girl stood in the doorway. “What a fucking mess,” she said.
She was right: the trailer was a wreck. I looked around, but ignored her. I set my glass down and began to put stuff away, resigning Sam’s problem to a later time. I had to ask Wilma where each gown or leotard or shiny, sequined top went, so it took the two of us almost an hour to return things to exactly where they belonged, preparing them for the grab of tomorrow’s desperate hands. Wilma coached me the whole time. On a matinee day, she told me, the turnaround would be very quick and such straightening up was essential to a smooth run.
“If they can’t find something, all hell breaks loose,” she said, shaking out a pink sequined tailpiece and clipping it to a hanger. “And that, let me tell you, is a nightmare.”
There are all kinds of nightmares. What about the one where you’re onstage in front of hundreds of people but you’re not sure what play you’re in or what the lines are and you look down to discover you’re naked? Or there’s the one I used to have after a busy night at Clark’s: where an ever-spreading kudzu of tables demanded water, but each time I went to fetch it there were no clean glasses, or the glasses were hot and had to be rinsed before they could be used, and then once the water was presented there were twice as many dirty tables that needed to be cleared and twice as many again that needed water.
That night I had a new nightmare. I walked down the midway looking for Charlie, for Marco, but they weren’t there, and when I turned to the big top it had disappeared. I began to run but when I reached the place where the tent had been, it wasn’t there, replaced instead by an indoor flea market, a car show. When I turned back to the midway there was only an empty field, a parking lot.
I woke sweating, hands clenched, breathing a swift staccato.
If they left me I had nowhere to go.
“They won’t leave you. Christ, you worry a lot.” The fat girl stood by my bunk with a fist full of macaroons.
“What if I don’t get Wilma to forgive Sam? How can you be sure?”
She talked with her mouth full, crumbs spitting every which way. “Because you’re smarter than you think you are. And you’ve been playing your cards right.” She extracted hay from my hair. “Plus you’re working like a dog for no pay. Why leave you?”
TWELVE
BY 9 A.M. we were standing by Bluebell. The fat girl wouldn’t stop yawning. Jim and his lawn chairs were nowhere to be seen. Olivia sucked water from the trough and sprayed it into her mouth. I looked Bluebell in the eye, as best I could from far below it. “Hello, old girl,” I said, then thought about how she was actually a little younger than me, and tried again. “Hey, Blue,” I said. “How’s it going?”
She swung her trunk around and combed some hay from the ground into a little pile. Then she swept it up in her trunk and deposited it in her huge mouth, keeping a watch on me the whole time. Her movements were smooth and nearly dainty, but her footprints were deep in the slightly damp ground.
“Hey, baby,” the fat girl called suggestively. “Hey, good-looking!” I told her to cut it out and she told me that I was no fun. We’d left the trailer while Wilma slept, and I was grateful not to have to decide again whether or not to bring up Sam’s request. I’d taken a muffin and eaten it while we walked towards the menagerie. Now I offered Bluebell what was left. She eyed me skeptically. I wondered if it was too small an offering of food, but soon her trunk swung towards me with its wet pink tip and swept the muffin away, dropping it into her cavernous mouth.
I looked around for more food. The fat girl pointed out a sack of potatoes near one of Jim’s tires. I assumed it was for Bluebell and Olivia, but before I could do anything about it, Jim showed up with the lawn chairs under one arm. His hair was wet and he had dark circles under his eyes.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Hi.” I scrambled to find the shovel and wheelbarrow and began to go about the task of collecting both elephants’ night deposits. Jim set up the chairs, greeted first Olivia and then Bluebell, rubbing each on the trunk and murmuring something. Then he crossed his arms and watched me. The fat girl sank into one of the chairs.
“I want to show you where the feed is,” Jim called before disappearing into the truck. When he came back he had an enormous bag slung across his back, and I found myself watching the way the muscles of his arms bulged to hold it up. I swallowed. Olivia reached her trunk out towards Jim, and Bluebell shifted her weight excitedly, back and forth, back and forth.
He gave them the feed, then went to the hay truck for hay and spread some of that before them as well. I made a mental note to retrieve Wilma’s army blankets.
“So, Annabelle,” Jim said. “Where are you from?”
My blood froze. I leaned on the shovel. “Oh, around,” I said, trying to sound casual, to keep my voice light. “You know, here and there.” The fat girl rolled her eyes at me.
“Right,” Jim said. “Well, that’s surely got the ring of truth to it, eh, Blue?” He reached up and rubbed Bluebell’s forehead while she scooped the hay into her mouth.
I continued my collection and kept quiet, my cheeks burning. When the wheelbarrow had a solid, hefty load I dropped the shovel in the grass and headed towards the trees. The fat girl followed.
“Hi,” she said, her voice high and squeaky. “I’m from around. You ought to visit sometime!”
“Shut up and lick that,” I said pointing at the vanilla soft serve dripping down her hand. I was in no mood for her mockery or her coaching.
“Spontaneity is not your strong suit,” she said, tending to the drips. “Thought you’d appreciate a little lesson on lying while we’re out of earshot of the elephant man.” She took a step away and looked anxious. “I, uh…” she stuttered with an exaggerated look of sheer panic. “I ran into a door. I fell down.”
“Give me a break,” I said. “I wasn’t ready. It’s okay. Wilma didn’t press i
t. I was just trying to be careful.”
“Careful.” She gave a snort. “Jesus. You’re so careful that you’re a danger to yourself. Now, come on. Where are you from?”
“Gleryton?”
“No, you idiot. Pick somewhere else. And make it somewhere you’ve actually been once or twice so you don’t make an ass of yourself.”
I thought about New York City. I’d been there once with my parents when I was a kid.
“You’ll get caught in that one in about four minutes,” she said, biting off the bottom of her cone with a snap. “Choose somewhere smaller and stay South for Chrissake, you don’t sound like a Yankee.”
“What about Charlotte?” I said. “Or Raleigh? Those are big places, but I’ve been there.”
“You think those are big places but you were going to say you’re from New York?” She giggled, shook her head, and sucked at the bottom of her cone. “How about Asheville,” she said when she’d drained it dry. “Or Nashville? Somewhere you’ve actually been.”
“I’ve been to Raleigh. And Chapel Hill.”
She started to walk away, kicking up the brown grass. I watched her go, then dumped the wheelbarrow and shoved it ahead of me, leaping to catch up with her.
“What?” I was out of breath.
“You seem to think you have it all under control,” she said, waving me away. “And I don’t need to hang out where I’m not needed.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Don’t go getting pouty…” But she put her hand up and strolled off like a diva.
When I got back, Jim was reclining in his lawn chair reading the paper. I wheeled back to the truck, only to find that more large smelly gifts from Bluebell and Olivia had been added to the pile. I shoveled and removed, shoveled and removed. My arms and shoulders ached, but I liked the senseless rhythm of it, the feeling of my muscles ripening, the world waking up.
And it was. All around, trailer and truck doors opened and slammed shut. Screen doors creaked and people shouted to one another.