by Amanda Davis
I took a deep breath and Juan boosted me to the net, just as he had Carla. I pulled myself on but had difficulty getting a footing. Then I tried to stand and fell over.
“Did you see Carla stand?!” Victor shouted. “No! You must do exactly as her. This is practice. The true test you must do exactly also. Pay attention.”
I lay on my stomach. Eleven feet looked surprisingly high from up here. This is nothing, I told myself. I can do this. I scooted forward and hung down, then reached around and let my legs flip over my head until I was hanging. I dropped to my feet with a thud.
It wasn’t so bad at all. It was easy, just as she’d said. “Hey, that was kind of fun,” I said.
Carla smiled at me. “Good,” Victor said. “Now you watch.”
Above us Juan was halfway up the rigging, climbing towards a second platform, slightly lower. From where we stood, this one was the size of an index card.
“You watch what he does,” Victor said. “This is like the high diving board. You stand and put your arms out and then you will fall and the air will catch you. You will fall slowly and you will turn over and land on your back. It is not hard. Just keep your head slightly tucked. You will land on your back and bounce a little bit, and then someday you will be able to train with us. Do you see?”
I nodded, but it was very high. Very far away from the earth, that platform. I made my hands into fists and thought of Mina spinning and spinning. Didn’t I want that?
As Juan spread his arms and jumped forward, I wasn’t so sure.
He fell, feet down, for a moment and then flattened, arcing beautifully in one simple, wide rotation. The net bounced him twice, and then he flipped himself free and came to stand beside Victor. Carla was already above us.
When she reached the platform, she raised an arm to signal Victor, then she jumped. I watched as hard as I could, memorizing the way she leaned forward ever so gently, falling with her arms straight out, tucking her head and landing, to be coughed back up by the net.
“Now it is your turn,” Victor said. Carla climbed down and stood by him.
“Now?” I said. All three of them nodded. “I could get really hurt doing this, couldn’t I?”
“Do not worry,” Victor said. “Carla is going to attach a safety wire. If it looks like you might land terribly, Juan won’t let you land.”
I nodded. I felt very far away from everything. If it isn’t so dangerous, I thought, as I followed Carla, then why did you drag me out of bed in the middle of the night to do it?
Carla fit me with a harness that looped snugly around my legs and waist. She braced herself against me and tightened the straps, then clipped me to a thick gray cable. I followed it all the way up until it disappeared into the glare of the lights.
“You can do this,” the fat girl said. “Just don’t look down.”
I started to climb the ladder. It was a ropey material, but the rungs were hard. I climbed with my face aimed at the rigging high above. Maybe this is a dream, I thought. But the people below me got smaller and the fear inside me grew and I was pretty sure it was all happening for real.
About halfway up I grew tired. My hands were slippery with sweat. My whole body was suddenly so weak that I almost lost my grip. I rested for a moment, but then thought of falling off the ladder with no net below to catch me, and adrenaline powered me the rest of the way.
When I came to the platform I stopped. I didn’t even know how to get off the ladder and climb around the tent pole and onto the platform’s surface without falling, though somehow, blindly, I managed. It was the size of a kitchen table.
And then, holding myself very steady, clutching the cables around me, I allowed myself to look down.
I couldn’t breathe. Below me the net was so small, I realized I could miss it. I could sail over it and crash to the ground. Or maybe be carried by a great wind and fly through the side walls and out over the compound. The people below me were tiny, I could barely see them, but I knew they were watching, waiting to see what I’d do.
There wasn’t enough air. The lack of oxygen made me dizzy. Oh my God. I didn’t want to fall, but I felt weak. What had made me think this was my calling? This? I was a fat girl. Fat girls belonged on the earth.
“You’re not fat anymore,” she said. She was standing beside me with a cupcake.
“You said once a fat girl, always a fat girl.”
She peeled the paper down and took a bite. “I did,” she said. “But I was wrong.”
“I am not this brave.”
“You are. Besides”—she licked her thumb—“how else do you think you’re going to get down?”
I looked behind me at the stairs and knew with great certainty that there was no way I could climb down them backwards. Not all that way.
“This is easy,” the fat girl said. “Just think about how far you’ve come. If you can do this, what can’t you do?”
“Oh God,” I said, and closed my eyes.
“Really,” she said. “I think this is it.”
“Oh God!” I said.
And jumped.
Falling.
Falling.
It felt slower than it should have but was easier than I’d thought. I was weightless and my descent was gradual. I remembered to tuck my head. At the last minute, Juan kept me from landing, tightening the safety cable so that I jerked, rolled, and then swung, back and forth, suspended above the net.
Juan let me down gently, and I flipped my way out of the net, though my hands were shaking so badly that I almost fell. I felt like I had snorted fifty cups of coffee, like there was lightning in my blood. I stood before them, my legs shaking, my hands jerking. My whole body trembled.
Victor said something, but I couldn’t listen. I looked up and saw that platform again, empty now, and noted where the Genersh high wire was. My teeth began to chatter and Carla put her arm around me.
“…it’s okay,” she was saying. “This happens to many people.”
That was when I noticed that I’d wet my pants.
When I woke something was different. Something had changed and it wasn’t just my trailer. I’d slept late, very late. Skip was at the kitchen table watching soaps on a small black-and-white television and eating a sandwich. “Hi,” I said.
She looked up and smiled. “Annabelle, right? You slept late. Welcome to the flophouse.” She went back to staring at the TV. “I hear you’re joining with the aerialists.”
“Yeah,” I said, and shook my head at the rush of memories from the night before. “I…I start this afternoon.”
“Well, I hope you still remember to talk to us little people.”
I gave a short laugh. “Right. I’ll try.”
She looked up again. “I mean it,” she said, and I could see she did. “The farther in the air they go…” She gestured with her potato chip. “The smaller we seem.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly going to be a problem,” I said. I dangled my legs off the side of the bed. I didn’t think I liked her very much. “I’ve spent the last nine months shoveling elephant shit. I’m not going to turn into a snob all of a sudden.”
“Sure,” she said, and shook her head knowingly.
“What do you do?” It came out a little harsher than I’d meant.
“The books,” she said. “And I coordinate some of the publicity stuff, but mostly I’m just the little numbers gal.”
“Ah.” I could tell that she didn’t like me either. She returned to her show and I went back to my locker and changed into a dirty T-shirt and shorts, making a mental note to retrieve my soiled jeans from the night before, which I’d rinsed and left out back to dry. I could see through the ruffled yellow curtains that it was bright out, and looked warm.
“See you,” I said.
“Right,” she said, and turned up the volume.
My legs felt stiff. In front of our trailer I stretched as best I could and then I went to the cookhouse and conned Stanley into giving me a cup of coffee.
&nb
sp; “I hear you’re going to give up the shit business,” he said. “Good for you!”
It was muggy and hot. The air felt like a solid thing, and the coffee didn’t help much, but it cleared my head and I could think. I found some shade near the ticket wagon and sat.
I had done something amazing in the middle of the night. It seemed like a dream, but it wasn’t, I knew. The jeans had been there in the morning, just where I left them, and the glass of water I’d gotten before I went to sleep at the crack of seven or so.
I had done something I was proud of, something that made me feel strong.
And then I realized what was different, what was missing. Who was missing.
I scanned the horizon but I didn’t see her. And I didn’t feel her either. Was it possible? I didn’t feel her. For the first time in forever I felt self-contained.
And I was able to make a little sense out of stuff. And I thought about how there was something I’d been wanting to do for so long now. Something I needed to do.
I picked up a hose near the tiger truck and sprayed myself and drank as much as I could. Then I headed to the blacktop, the parking lot. There was a pay phone there, I’d seen it, and I had a phone call to make.
Enough already, I figured. Enough already, I said to myself as I dialed the operator and had him place the call.
Someone answered. “Collect call from Faith,” the operator said. “Will you accept?”
There was a pause and I held my breath. I watched the flags on the big top wave in the breeze.
A familiar voice said, “Yes.”
Then: “Where are you?!” my mother said. “Honey, sweetheart, where are you?!”
“Mom,” I said. “I’m fine. I miss you. I wanted you to know I’m fine.”
“I’ve been so scared,” she said. “But I just knew you would call today. I was thinking about you all day. Tell me where you are. Where are you, sweetheart?”
“I’m okay. Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.”
“Are you coming home? Please come home.”
“Oh, Mom,” I said. And swallowed. “I will. At some point.”
There was silence.
“Mom?”
“How could you do this to me?” she said, angry now. “What have I ever done to deserve this?”
“No,” I said. “Mom, I didn’t want to hurt you—”
“You didn’t want to hurt me?! You didn’t want to hurt me?! Well, I guess you weren’t thinking of me then, were you?”
“No, I—” I felt myself growing more lost by the second. “I just wanted you to know—”
“How could you, Faith? How could you do that to that poor boy?”
“Oh…poor boy! Mom, that poor boy…” I stopped. I ran my hand through my short hair. It was all I could do to remain standing. “It’s a long story, Mom,” I said, my voice quivering. “I just wanted to call.”
“Faith, you come—”
“I love you, Mom,” I said. “Take care.”
I hung up the phone and sat down on the pavement. I was rattled but I didn’t cry. I was done crying for right now.
I looked around, at this craziness that was passing for my life. For a minute when I picked up the phone I had thought about going to see her. I had thought that when we pulled into town, I could take a bus through Yander and just look. Just look at how everything was exactly as I left it so long ago. And maybe I’d just wind up at my house.
I put my chin on my knees. But I wasn’t going to do that. Tomorrow the circus would load out and move to Gleryton and I would go with the show. And if someone managed to notice the strong blond girl lugging equipment for the aerialists, then so be it. Whatever was going to happen would happen, but I didn’t want to be afraid anymore. Let them judge me for what I did. I could pick out every one of those boys, and turn them in. Every one.
I walked, dazed, back to my trailer. I showered and changed. At three o’clock I learned how to pack the rigging and unpack it. I learned how to roll the net, how to take apart the frame of the trampoline, the skeleton of the practice trapeze. I learned how to wrap things up and unwrap them. I learned where everything was stored.
“There will be more,” Victor said. “Tomorrow you will show all of this to me. And you will do some push-ups, we will train you. It takes a long time. Many years. You will not be up high again for a long time. But you will see.” He patted me on the back. “It was good last night.”
I ran a hand through my hair. I was exhausted. Tired in my bones and blood. “I’m going to work hard, Victor. You’ll see. I just want to learn.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. He looked sad.
It was that night, my last night with the bulls, that Gerry finally sang. We all gathered because we had a show to do, but there was a feeling in the air that everyone knew something special was about to happen, and that made me think Charlie had been wrong. It wasn’t that the performers wouldn’t deign to walk the midway, they just didn’t get around to it. I mean, look how excited they were to hear Germania Loudon perform. They seemed thrilled.
I held Bluebell and tried to keep her calm. I felt the whole world unfolding in front of me, minute by minute, and I was ready for it. I could tell she sensed something was up because she kept shifting back and forth and tossing her trunk and Olivia was doing the same in front of us. I heard Jim murmuring to her and I whispered my own things to Bluebell.
It’s going to be okay, I said. You are so beautiful. Do you know that? You are such a big lovely sweetheart, Blue. You have such a good nature. Don’t let them tell you different.
She seemed to be listening, though maybe she just liked the sound of my voice. Never you mind, I told her. I won’t be too far away. I’ll look in on you. I’ll make sure you get enough carrots, that they’re treating you right. I don’t want you to forget me, okay?
I pointed at the rigging, at Mina the Ballerina’s trapeze, tied back and idle, waiting for her ascent.
I’m going to do that someday, I whispered, and rubbed her enormous flap of an ear. I’m going to climb up there and fly.
And I knew it was true, that my words were made of stones, that they would last and I would climb them.
I’m going to fly and flip and twist, I said. And you know what? If I fall, someone is going to catch me.
Bluebell tossed her head and shuffled her feet. I kept a calm hand on her neck, my tail shimmering behind me. In the dark, nearby, Grouper twisted his hands. Rod blew me a kiss. The clowns were still. Amos Ruble loomed above the Genersh boys. Even Lily VonGert was there, standing by Mr. Genersh’s wheelchair, with Gina Block, the rubberboy’s mom, beside them.
There was a moment of silence. Even the crickets were still. We held our breath and watched her round radiant face lift to the rafters, and then the world filled with the clear, sweet, and glorious voice of Germania Loudon.
AN AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL CHABON
Only dead writers get afterwords. Among all the hateful consequences of the early death of Amanda Davis on March 14, 2003, both to those who loved and miss her and to lovers of contemporary American fiction, this particular one—the words that you are now reading—is probably the most minor. I have spent the past five months or so hating every thing, and there have been so many that have come along, or popped up, or appeared in a magazine or the day’s mail, to remind me that Amanda is dead. And now here I am, creating my own black-edged reminder. I guess that it’s a cliché to write “it saddens me to have to write these words,” but if so, the sentiment expressed is one that I have never truly experienced in my life before now. Every word that I string along here is bringing a cliché lump to my throat and a cliché tear to my eye. Every one of them is like each day that has passed since the fourteenth of March, a wedge driven into the crack that opened that afternoon, leaving Amanda forever on her side, back there, in the world that had Amanda Davis in it. There was no place, no need, in that world, for an afterword.
My wife, Ayelet Waldman, met her before I did—roped by A
manda and her golden lasso into a friendship that while heartbreakingly brief was one of the truest and fiercest I have ever stood next to and admired—and one of the first things she told me about Amanda is, I think, the most germane to my purpose here. “I just finished her book,” Ayelet said, referring to the novel that you, too, have presumably just finished reading. “She’s the real thing.” Or maybe what she said was, “The girl can write.” I’m not sure, anymore. It’s only after your friend’s airplane has crashed into a mountain in North Carolina—killing her, at the age of thirty-two, along with her mother and her father, who was flying the plane—that everything she ever said to you, and everything anyone ever said to you about her, takes on the weight and shadow, the damnable significance, of history.
At the time all that really registered, when I heard about Amanda from Ayelet, was the rare note of true enthusiasm in the voice of my wife, who reads almost everything, and in particular everything by youthful female novelists, and in particular those novels that treat in some way damaged girls with body-image problems, of which, God knows, there have been many, with doubtless many still to come. Some of these novelists, some of whose books she admired, she had also met, and liked, as she had instantly liked Amanda. Never had she pronounced this judgment on any of them. It was obvious to her that Amanda had the goods—maybe that was what she told me—and then, when I read Amanda’s books, it was obvious to me, too. Her sentences had the quality of laws of nature, they were at once surprising and inevitable, as if Amanda had not written so much as discovered them. As the catcher Crash Davis said to his wild and talented young pitcher, Eppie LaLoosh, “God reached down from the sky and gave you a thunderbolt for a right arm.” Amanda had that kind of great stuff.
It’s unfair, as well as cruel, to try to assess the overall literary merit, not to mention the prospects for future greatness, of a young woman who managed to produce (while living a life replete as a Sabatini novel with scoundrels, circus performers, sterling friendships, true love, hairbreadth escapes, jobs at once menial and strange, and years of hard rowing in the galleys of the publishing world) a single short-story collection, the remarkable Circling the Drain, and a lone novel. I would give a good deal of money, blood, books, or years to be able to watch as Amanda, in a picture hat, looked back from the vantage of a long and productive career to reject her first published efforts as uneven, or “only halfway there,” or worst of all, as promising; or to see her condescend to them, cuddle them almost, as mature writers sometimes do with their early books, the way we give our old stuffed pony or elephant, with its one missing shirt-button eye, a fond squeeze before returning it to the hatbox in the attic.