Webern knew bits and pieces of the history that swirled around the photograph like gritty black smoke, and he guessed the rest. When Willow and Billow were born, they left a deep empty place inside their mother. After she came home from the hospital, Webern imagined she had wandered the house, looking for what she had lost. She moved her hand over the shelves, the counters, the shiny surfaces of the appliances, but in all her searching, it never occurred to her to pick up the red, wrinkled infants, squalling and rollicking in their terrycloth straightjackets. Three times a day, she fed Willow and Billow condensed milk, tilting the bottles through the bars of their crib. Then she retreated to the living room, where the roaring vacuum she pushed almost drowned out their wretched, persistent wails.
One day, arriving home from work, Webern’s father Raymond found Shirley slumped on the floor of the kitchen, her head resting on the open oven door. A greasy toothbrush dangled from her hand. Had she been out to hurt herself? Or to clean meatloaf drippings from the burner? After the paramedics resuscitated her, her answers flew out, frantic and contradictory, but in one general direction: she did not want to go home any more. So she went from the emergency room to a different kind of hospital—one with locked-up windows and plastic knives and a special machine that buzzed louder than any appliance, that crackled like lightning, that made all the hall lights dim.
Back home in their crib, Willow and Billow began to babble to each other. Their mother was a strange, unloving woman, whose hands smelled of cleaning fluids; their father was a blunt, strong man whose false, hearty laugh sent them into fits of crying. So, whom could they trust? Only each other, only each other. Their babbles were a pledge of loyalty to each other and no one else.
When their grandmother Bo-Bo flew in under the black bat wings of an umbrella, they vowed not to trust her, either. When she entered the room, grimly brandishing rattles or pacifiers, the twins fell silent; when she reached to pick them up, they lay stiffly in one another’s arms, not allowing her to pry them apart. Their grandmother wondered how her daughter-in-law would handle the stubborn, unreachable girls; but when the young Mrs. Bell returned, twitchy and shivering but with a determined smile, the old woman had no choice but to shake the rain from her umbrella and take again to the skies.
Over the years, as Webern pieced together this story, inventing some parts, seeing glimpses of others in nightmares and in life, it became clear to him that his mother, despite her contrition and sack lunches, had never been able to penetrate the fortress the girls had built for themselves in those early days. They rejected every gift she gave. The twins had strung the backyard trees with imitation pearls; they had sunk an Easy Bake Oven in a ditch. And they had brought their wildness into her clean house. The crushed birds’ eggs and dead fireflies, the cardboard box caves and the necklaces of dog teeth scattered around the girls’ room all served one purpose for Willow and Billow: to shut their mother out. Webern had only realized later—too late—that inside those fortress walls, the girls were also plotting against him.
CHAPTER THREE
What’s funny
is the way they laugh.
Maybe only I really see: you
tightrope walk, they knock
you down, you explode
out of a cannon’s mouth,
you ask for help, they punch
you out, you tumble down
some makeshift stairs.
Sure, it’s all an act this time,
but that doesn’t mean you
don’t feel the cuts
and scrapes from practicing—
your backbone bent
like an old man’s. Dummy,
anyone should know
you had to learn to fall.
—September 13, 1962
Nepenthe clicked her ballpoint pen, examined the last few words she’d written, and nodded with satisfaction. She tore the page out and folded it neatly, then dropped her notebook on the floor and sighed.
“Why am I such a goddamn genius?” she asked her empty tent.
Nepenthe lay in a blue-green inflatable kiddy pool, surrounded by ice cubes that floated in the water around her like tiny glaciers. Her hair hung in a limp, messy ponytail, and her grey skin glistened. She yawned and reached for a fashion magazine. Sandra Dee grinned up from the cover at her, an enormous sun hat encircling her head like a halo. Nepenthe snorted. She opened the magazine at random to a fall fashion spread, clicked her pen again, and began to draw scales on the exposed skin of all the models. After a moment, she spat a peach pit at the green canvas wall. It stuck.
Nepenthe was gouging holes in an article titled “The Girls I Go For” when she heard a sound outside: a sort of scrabbling, hesitant and sideways, like a crab through dune grass. Immediately, she hurled her magazine at the front flap of her tent.
“Go away, Bernie! I’m not decent!”
“Dr. Show sent me. They need you for a lighting check.”
“Well, I’m not going.”
“What?”
“Hang on a second.”
Outside her tent, Webern shifted from one foot to the other. It wasn’t even noon yet, and already he felt dazed and sweaty. They’d just finished putting the big top up, and his job had been driving tent stakes into the ground with a mallet. Now his hands were so mottled with bruises, they felt like tenderized meat. He’d have to wear gloves to cover them in the show tonight.
In front of him, the tent flap rapidly unzipped, opening to reveal Nepenthe in a ragged pink bathrobe. She’d combed her hair down over her face in a makeshift veil.
“Hi, Nepenthe,” said Webern. He looked from his hands to hers. For once, she wasn’t wearing gloves. Beneath the rough grey scales, her fingers curled inward. He glimpsed the deep lines that riddled her palms before she pulled her fists into her robe sleeves. “Oh, Dr. Show wanted me to give this to you.” He pulled a crumpled envelope out of his back pocket. Her name was written on it in flourishing script.
“Finally!” Nepenthe ripped around the wax seal and quickly counted the bills inside. “This is it? You have to be kidding me. After two weeks?”
Webern shrugged. “Returns’ve been lousy. We’re lucky to get that much.”
“He tell you to say that?”
“So, anyway, we put a new gel on your light, and Dr. Show wanted . . .”
“Wanted me at his beck and call? Listen, you can tell Dr. Show something for me. You can tell him I don’t get paid to do him favours in the middle of the afternoon. I don’t get paid to help him install lights. Jesus God.” She shook the envelope in his direction. “I mean, look at this. Lately, I barely get paid at all.”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape.” Webern rubbed his hump; his back was killing him. “It’ll take five minutes. What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s the principle of the thing. All morning, he had us running around, pitching tents, escaping doing God knows what. Now I’m finally getting some time to myself.” Nepenthe softened a little. “Boy, you look spent. What does he have you doing over there? Running sprints?”
Webern wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
“It’s not so bad.”
Nepenthe reached down and took the glasses off his face. She stood a foot and a half taller than him, and as she cleaned the lenses on her robe sleeve, Webern felt uncomfortably like a little boy on his way out the door to school.
“Give them back. Please?”
“Just a second.” Nepenthe held the glasses up to the light, checking for smudges. The frames were round, brown tortoiseshell. Impulsively, she put them on her own face. Strands of hair caught between the lenses and her emerald eyes. “How do I look?”
“Beautiful,” Webern said. “Now will you quit horsing around?”
Nepenthe seemed hurt. She pulled the glasses off and handed them back.
“See yo
u later, Bernie.” She disappeared into the tent, zipping the flap shut behind her.
Webern paused, shook his head, then started walking back across the beach toward where the orange big top stood high on the dunes. He always moved with an uneven gait, as if he were carrying an awkward load that threw him perpetually off balance. But today he walked even slower than usual. He’d begun to hate delivering the pay envelopes. And why did Nepenthe always act so cranky before the show? She almost sounded like Brunhilde sometimes, talking about the indignity of this and that, the “principle of the thing.” Earlier that day, when they’d pitched the tents only to discover they had to move their campsite to another part of the beach, those two had been whining the whole time, talking about how any sane company would just check into a hotel. Always with the hotels. And before that, Nepenthe had hissed at two terrified sunbathers, who’d run away screaming. It had been funny, sure, but maybe not the best way to sell tickets. Didn’t Nepenthe ever think about anyone besides herself?
Of course she did. He wasn’t really being fair. He just wasn’t in the best humour himself today. It was his birthday—his sixteenth birthday—and although he hadn’t told anyone it was coming up, he still expected the day to seem special, somehow. Even when he’d been living at home with his dad, he’d always gotten some reminder of the occasion: a store-bought cake in the refrigerator; a new football on the living room floor; a ten dollar bill, left like a tip under an empty highball glass on the kitchen table. But today, everyone was just bossing him around. A piece of green glass by Webern’s foot caught his eye, and he kicked it through the sand.
Webern arrived at the entrance to the big top, but before going inside, he turned around and looked back down the beach, toward the water. The sea shone blinding white. He looked at the campsite, clumsily thrown together near the shore—the patched-up, tilting tents, the hasty pile of driftwood for tonight’s campfire, and some yards away, the big-finned Cadillac, trailed by the tracks it left in the sand. Brunhilde had placed her sitting pillow atop its yellow hood, and she posed there now, tatting lace with a pair of glinting needles. They had a permit for the big top, but not to camp here; still, it occurred to Webern that maybe they could pass the extra tents off as a sideshow if any authorities came prowling around. He’d have to mention that idea to Dr. Show.
On the other side of the big top lay the boardwalk, with its booths of penny games and its herky-jerk rides: Tilt-a-Whirl, bumper cars, the Inverter. An intricately wrought Ferris wheel stood silhouetted against the sky, slowly turning now, Webern noticed, with one or two baskets already laden with early riders. Before too long, it would be showtime.
He hurried back under the big top, where Al and Explorer Hank were hammering together the bleachers. Dr. Schoenberg stood on an enormous ladder in a corner of the tent, tightening a spotlight on its mount. He was in his shirtsleeves, an ascot knotted around his neck. Sunshine seeping through the canvas made his face glow orange, and beneath his curled moustache he was smiling—he hadn’t looked this cheerful since before the swordfight. Webern grinned back up at him, but he couldn’t help feeling suspicious. He wondered what Dr. Show had up his sleeve this time.
“Bernie!” Dr. Schoenberg waved exuberantly with the screwdriver in his hand. The ladder creaked. “Was our young lady indisposed?”
“Sort of.”
“Ah, no matter—but perhaps you can lend some assistance.”
“Sure.”
“Just take her place on that rock. I need to see what this new lighting does to a complexion.” He looked down at Webern critically. “You’re not quite the right shade, of course, but you’ll do.”
Dr. Schoenberg gestured to the plaster-of-Paris rock that stood to the side of the tent’s centre ring. Webern approached it. Though he’d seen Nepenthe on it dozens of times, he’d never really paid much attention to it before. Mounted on four wheeled legs, it now reminded him of the many examining tables he’d seen in the doctors’ offices of his childhood, where he’d gone again and again for doomed procedures designed to straighten out his hunchback or help him grow. He hoisted himself up onto it and sat on the edge, remembering the backless robes he’d had to wear, the crinkle of butcher paper under his legs. He almost wished he was still driving in stakes with that mallet.
“This good, boss?”
“Recline, my boy, recline!”
Webern stretched out over the uncomfortable plaster-of-Paris crags. Once, a doctor had fitted him for a back brace, measuring every inch of him with steel instruments that opened like jaws. Now Webern could feel their cold points pressing into his skin all over again. At the top of the ladder, Dr. Schoenberg switched on the light, and suddenly, a warm emerald radiance enveloped Webern. He shut his eyes, but even inside his lids the world glowed green.
No wonder Nepenthe was always so out of sorts before the show; she had to lie here for nearly ten minutes while Dr. Schoenberg circled her, pointing with his cane and telling the tale of her unholy origins in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, where he claimed to have rescued her from a giant python. It was one thing to go out in a clown suit, disguised in makeup and a false nose. . . but to lie here practically naked, with eyes all around, glittering in the darkness? She was right—she deserved a raise.
Dear Bo-Bo,
I bought this postcard back in Vermont, before we had to clear out in a big hurry. The place where I found it, they sell guns in the gas station and rabbit skins on a clothesline right outside. It made me think of you. Say hi to Marzipan for me.
Love, Bernie
Webern licked the stamp and stuck it, upside down, onto the corner of the postcard. Then he flipped it over and looked at the image on the front. The sun-bleached paper showed a cartoon moose eating a platter of flapjacks; a tap in a nearby tree poured genuine maple syrup onto his breakfast. Over the last few months, Webern had become quite adept at writing postcards that conveyed as little information as possible; even though he didn’t want his grandma to worry, he didn’t exactly want her showing up at one of his performances, either. He carefully tucked the postcard inside the cover of his clown notebook, to protect it while he walked to town.
When Webern first joined the circus, he had expected to spend his days like a young man on vacation, wandering the sun-drenched boardwalks, gazing out at the world through the smoky haze of dime store plastic sunglasses, maybe even finding time to catch a movie matinee in the afternoons. That was before he learned exactly what kind of an operation Dr. Show was running – how much each and every one of them was expected to “pitch in.”
“A company such as our own cannot afford to delegate even the simplest of tasks to the uninspired,” Dr. Show had offered by way of explanation. “Our work is too important to entrust to roustabouts, those crude mercenaries of the arts.” Which was why members of their circus pitched their own tents, raked their own sand, sold their own tickets, and, on those chilly mornings-after, picked up their own litter from the stake-scarred camping ground.
Webern didn’t have it too tough—his size and shape prevented him from doing the heaviest labour, which fell mostly on the hands of Enrique, Hank, and Eng—but he still sometimes resented that, by default, he’d become everyone else’s errand boy. Al had poor circulation and fell victim to fainting spells, Vlad and Fydor moved as slowly as children in a three-legged race (Webern noticed their coordination fell off sharply whenever he asked for their help), and of course Dr. Show couldn’t be bothered with too many trivialities. When the ringmaster wasn’t fussing over lights and costumes, he passed many hours in his director’s chair under the big top, a red bullhorn dangling from his hand while his eyes grew soft with daydreams. Webern was less sure how Nepenthe and Brunhilde spent their time, but he’d figured out right from the start that he couldn’t foist any of his chores—no matter how small—off onto them. It wasn’t because they were women, not exactly; rather, they were ladies, the aristocrats of the circus. No matter how many
locks Nepenthe picked or how many peach pits she spat, she still thought like the daughter of a tycoon.
So Webern’s days overflowed with a million little tasks: stapling together makeshift sets, feeding the tiger cubs, washing clothes, tacking up posters, and gathering twigs and cardboard boxes to burn in the campfire. He didn’t mind any of it too much, except for the shopping. Every two weeks or so, the entire crew would go into town to buy groceries and other supplies, then parade about the streets, their canned tomatoes and bottle of rum held aloft like trophies. At those moments Webern had no trouble laughing at the chumps they shouldered past, the open-mouthed rubes who gaped from the windows of slow-cruising cars or ogled them from behind the handlebars of zigzagging bicycles.
But in between these big trips, little disasters happened all the time—nylons snagged, cage latches snapped, salt spilled onto the ground—and Webern never felt quite the same walking into town by himself, especially not when he was going to buy a girdle for Brunhilde or a magazine of pistol blanks for Explorer Hank. Sometimes Webern suspected the others of sending him off on these errands out of spite, or using his trips into town as a means to scare up curiosity for their acts. Still, he always gritted his teeth and set off down the dusty road by himself.
Webern tried to practice his clown acts when he could, but it was a lucky day when he could get an hour or two to himself, let alone a whole afternoon. Sometimes he half-hid, riding his unicycle around the barnacled stilts of a deserted pier at low tide or practicing a bit of mime around the plywood back of a little-visited hot dog stand. Other times he stayed in his tent, trying to ignore all but the most urgent requests shouted in his direction. Every once in awhile, he lost himself in the rhythm of clowning, delighted himself with a new walk, a new face, a new way of holding himself, but other days he found himself knotted up, jumpy and agitated with frustration. If only he had more time! It was bad enough using the same costumes and makeup show after show—greasepaint and burnt cork could only do so much—but to hurry like this, that was the worst constraint.
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