Circus

by Claire Battershill

  It hadn’t escaped Jake’s attention that, like her mother, Annie had shown no real interest in camping up to this point. He didn’t often compare her to her mother, since he hadn’t, truthfully, known her mother all that well in the first place. He could identify only a few traits that might be genetically inherited – the way she walked, for example, making a shape like the letter A, with her arms held slightly further out from her body than was usual, and the particular auburn colour of her hair. Otherwise, Annie’s self belonged just to Annie. This being the case, he hoped that camping could be given a fresh start for him, free of associations. Plus, with a tent so easy to work with and so light to carry, how could a person not want to go out and explore the big wide world?

  “Will you look at that!” he kept saying. He circumnavigated the tent once more, careful not to knock over the neighbouring side table and magazine rack, and examined the parts until he began to worry that he had said it too many times, had got too into the details, and that his daughter’s interest in her present was rapidly dwindling the more enthusiastic he became.

  “Let’s try it out,” he said, trying not to sound overly eager. “Just to be sure it’s good.”

  “Didn’t we just do that?”

  “To be sure it’s good on the inside.”

  “Shouldn’t we put the rain protector onto the outside first, like the instructions say?” Annie held up the single sheet and pointed to step number 3 of 3.

  “Forecast for our living room says mostly sunny, but I suppose there’s always the chance of rain.”

  “Dad.” Annie raised one ironic eyebrow and tilted her head.

  They slipped the rain cover over the tent and fastened it to each of the corners. When they finally crawled into the tent, they were surprised by how spacious it was inside. It was a three-man tent, and they were only two men, but it still seemed unexpectedly vast.

  “We could get everyone we know in here, practically!”

  “Yep. Come one, come all! Well, maybe everyone except Mrs. Mooney next door. She’s put on a bit of weight lately.”

  “Dad! You’re awful!”

  “No, just being realistic about the capacity of our dwelling,” Jake said, as he crawled out to grab the other wilderness supplies. They spread the sleeping bag out on the floor and opened the packet of freeze-dried ice cream, crunching the tiny shards of spumoni while they examined their surroundings.

  “Will you look at that!” Jake said again, under his breath.

  Annie was relieved that his present might actually work out. This time, she wouldn’t be obliged to pretend to like her birthday gift, although her dad always knew immediately when she was faking. In past years, she had always waited at least twenty-four hours (a suitably polite amount of time) before asking for permission to mangle her present in some way for use in the “found objects” sculpture project with which Miss Bee, her art teacher, begins every year. Annie gets an A+ for found objects each time because Miss Bee has decided that these annual installments are, collectively, Annie’s “conceptual autobiography.” Apparently, they “comment on father-daughter relations in a postmodern consumer-driven world in which the gulf between self and other can never be bridged by material objects.” Maybe this year, Annie thought, I won’t get my A+.

  “This is cool, Dad.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It feels like being inside a cathedral, almost, the way the ceiling is shaped.”

  “A waterproof worship-centre, assembled in less than five minutes,” Jake said, adopting an infomercial voice as he held up his fist to his mouth like a microphone.

  Annie lay down on the sleeping bag and looked up at the blue for the first time. As she tried to get space-worthy strawberry seeds out from between her teeth with her tongue, she felt, for a moment, as if the tent had become the whole world.

  They hadn’t meant for the tent to stay there. Jake was so excited that he had finally hit the mark, present-wise, that he hardly wanted to say anything when its continued presence in front of the pine bookcases and beside the living room set started to seem a bit odd. He knew he should probably exercise his parental authority at some point and insist that they tear down the camp; in truth, he didn’t want to take it down any more than she did. Before the tent, Annie spent most of her time alone in her room. He never asked what she was doing, because he has not forgotten how much he hated his mother’s constant nagging while he smoked pot in his bedroom when he was Annie’s age. He was always curious, though, and wished that she would come down and watch TV with him. Back when her pajamas still had feet, she would beg to do just that, to stay up that extra half hour and fall asleep in his lap while he watched the news. Now she was the one who stayed up late, and he found himself wishing that he could curl up and fall asleep in the chair in the corner of her room while she talked to her friends on Gchat. If she’d wanted to come downstairs, he would have watched whatever she wanted to watch, even if it involved style makeovers or reality shows about spectacular desserts. Sometimes he walks up to the top of the stairs and stands outside her closed door, willing himself to knock, but he always goes back downstairs without asking her to join him. The idea of her saying no, however gently, is somehow worse than not asking at all. Besides, she was diligent about her homework, and although he worried about the fact that she didn’t go out all that often or talk to him about her classmates, he knew she had friends at school. She went for a long run every other day and played field hockey, so really, how could he complain? She was basically the perfect kid, wasn’t she?

  In the weeks that followed the construction of the indoor campsite, two unexpected things happened: they began to spend their evenings together in the tent, and, to Jake’s surprise, Annie began to open up to him. Like a seedling at first, offering gossip about the new music teacher at school, or her friend Miranda’s constant battle with her sister over the use of their parents’ car. Then, over the course of the first month of tent evenings, Annie burst into chatter as bright and full as a garden of prize-winning chrysanthemums. Her voice took on a new, sweet pitch when she told him about Todd, the shy math genius who sometimes stayed with her after class to work on bonus questions. “He’s attentive, like he notices when I wear my hair up and stuff. And he’s so smart, like he was explaining projective space to me, which is basically when …” Jake relished the warble of excitement when she explained hyperbolic geometry problems he wasn’t sure he understood fully, even though he had learned the same things once himself. This was the first time she’d ever mentioned a boy, but Jake knew better than to say he was more interested in hearing about the boy than the math. He didn’t want to slow the bloom of her banter. Instead, he watched Annie’s face, relaxed and pointed up at the ceiling, bathed in the blue light. Then he closed his eyes and listened.

  Six weeks after they put up the tent, Annie brought friends over after school to see it. As they walked to the house, the girls were suspicious.

  “So, it’s just a tent,” said Miranda, checking her phone.

  “Yep.”

  “Like, in your yard?” asked Juliana, who had wanted to go to the boys’ soccer game.

  “Nope,” Annie replied.

  “Where is it then?” asked Abi.

  “You’ll see,” said Annie, fidgeting with her hair.

  When the girls arrived in the living room, they remained unmoved.

  “I don’t get it,” said Selisha, crossing her arms and looking at Juliana for support.

  Juliana shifted her weight to one foot and stuck out her hip. “So, seriously,” she said, “Kevin is playing goal today.”

  “Patience, grasshoppers,” said Annie, opening the flap and sweeping her hand across the interior as though she were presenting the Taj Mahal. In the girls went, and for the first time since they left school, they stopped checking their phones. Miranda even brought her chewing to a standstill and let her gum harden between her teeth. At first, none of the girls said anything at all. They didn’t quite know how to explain how
it felt to be in the blue together. Annie sat in the middle, cross-legged, and closed her eyes. Her friends had never been so quiet. After a few minutes, they started giggling. Leslie snuggled into the corner and gave Krista a cuddle.

  Miranda relaxed and blew a bubble. “It’s awesome!”

  “Thanks for having us, Annie,” said Selisha.

  Her father came home to find that there were eight girls inside the tent, and they didn’t even seem squished, just happy and giggly and tinted a luminous blue.

  “There’s room for one more!”

  “That’s okay. Would you girls like a snack?”

  “No food in the tent,” said Annie.

  “Except space food,” her father countered.

  “Not now, Dad.” Annie closed the door flap, but not before giving her dad a wink.

  After a couple of months, people in the neighbourhood started to ask questions. Mrs. Mooney noticed the tent through the living room window of the house next door when she and her husband were walking their dogs (she suspected hoarding), while the Jacksons, who drove past the plain brown house every day on their way home from work, wondered whether it was some kind of religious shrine. Some of the other neighbours started to ask one another if the tent had always been there and they’d just never noticed. No one knew Annie or her dad quite well enough to inquire.

  It was the mailman who finally investigated one afternoon after working up the courage to do so for a very long time. For months, instead of delivering the mail to the box, he rang the doorbell every day. When Annie answered, he’d open his mouth as if to say something, but would pause for too long before holding the mail out to her and asking “Your mail?” It took Annie a few weeks to catch on that he was angling not just for an explanation but for an invitation.

  “You’ve really got something here,” he said after his first tent experience, hoisting his bag of letters back onto his shoulder.

  “Don’t I just?” said Annie, avoiding eye contact so as not to seem too proud.

  The postman loved the tent so much that he brought his wife over the next day so that she could experience it too. It was a sensation. The postman told everyone he could about it, and in the days that followed, all of the neighbours came over to give it a try. Of course, Mrs. Mooney was the first to arrive.

  “I hear you’ve got ‘quite something’ set up here,” she said, miming air quotes with her fingers. “The postman won’t tell me what it is, so I thought I’d come see for myself. I brought chocolate-caramel-coconut squares.” She handed over a paper plate full of sticky confections and made a quick beeline for the tent.

  “Well, thank you, Mrs. Mooney. Come on in,” said Jake, shrugging at Annie as they followed behind her. When they peered in through the front flap, their busybody neighbour had plopped herself down in the very middle of the tent with her arms and legs crossed.

  “So?” asked Annie.

  “Well, I just never knew it could be so …” Mrs. Mooney spontaneously adopted a yoga pose, with both hands on her knees, palms facing up. “Actually, I would prefer to be left alone, if you wouldn’t mind, so that I can have an authentic experience,” she said, before zipping the front flap closed.

  The day after Mrs. Mooney’s visit, the Johnstones from #38 showed up on their doorstep with a fistful of freshly picked begonias from their garden, which they offered in exchange for some quality time in the tent. Even the neighbourhood curmudgeon, Drew Kendal, gave up on his reclusive habits and made the epic journey down the street on his walker, bearing chocolates filled with liquor. He spoke as if somewhere along the line he had been given lessons in elocution, and was always encouraging: “I’ve always thought exceedingly well of you, sir,” the old man said, peering up at Jake from beneath his tufty eyebrows, “but now I feel quite confirmed in my supposition that you have been an excellent father and a true gentleman all these years. My sincerest commendation on this triumph.” Mr. Kendal came back to the tent three more times and was not so cantankerous after all. Annie and her dad quickly found themselves surrounded by tokens of appreciation – bottles of wine, homemade pumpkin bread, and a frozen Quiche Lorraine – all within the first week. None of the neighbours had ever been inside their home before, so except for the fact that they had been living there for over a decade, it felt like a housewarming.

  Much to Jake’s surprise, the visitors did nothing but compliment him on the success of the birthday present and on raising such a fine young woman. He had expected somebody to comment on the unusual location of the tent, or at least to ask what was so special about putting an ordinary tent that anyone could buy at a department store in an ordinary living room that could be anyone’s living room. Nobody reacted like that, though.

  On the second Saturday that the tent was open to the public, Jake made lemonade and left a jug with Styrofoam cups by the door so that people could have a refreshing drink while they waited for their turn. By the end of the second weekend, they began to implement a system so that each visitor was guaranteed an equal amount of time in the tent. Jake was in charge of manning the door and restocking the refreshments, and Annie ran the egg timer, which made a clear, bright “ping!” when tent time was over.

  Miss Bee, Annie’s art teacher, started crying while she was in the tent. “It’s simply astounding. A performance piece!” she said, hugging Annie afterwards. “I’ve never seen anything so sophisticated in my entire teaching career! The way you’re involving the viewer in sensuous experience, Annie, and with no training in artistic practice.”

  “Hi, I’m Annie’s dad,” said Jake, sidling up to the two of them and extending his hand to the teacher.

  “Your daughter has real talent,” Miss Bee said, still clasping Jake’s hand in both of hers. “I hope you realize how truly gifted she is.”

  “I didn’t know I was being graded,” Annie joked.

  “Grades are hardly the point,” said Miss Bee, finally releasing Jake’s hand so she could wipe her eyes with a tissue. “But yes, A+.”

  By the fourth week, people began to drive from across town and gather in droves on the lawn to try out the tent. Because there could be quite a wait, Mrs. Jacobson, who worked at the Rec Centre, brought her face-painting supplies to keep the children entertained, and Mr. Reynolds set up a picnic blanket (complete with a romantic meal for him and his wife) on top of Annie’s seedlings. There were even overly beloved pets waiting in line with their owners, including a ferret on a leash and a Labradoodle belonging to the Kinsey twins, who took turns holding onto her collar while the other twin went inside. Parking was a problem. Just as things were starting to get a bit chaotic (little Debbie Millhouse rode her tricycle off the front porch and two teenaged boys from Annie’s class pummelled each other in the driveway), Mrs. Mooney took charge and shouted commands until everyone formed an orderly lineup. “Two by two!” she howled. “Johnny, I see you sneaking around the back …” The unruly crowd settled into a series of awkward pairings. Reverend Allott from St. Joseph’s, still wearing his robes, made conversation about heavy garments in hot weather with his partner, Jonah the Goth, whose eye makeup was melting in the heat. Cindy Johnstone was allowed to take her teacup Yorkie as her partner, because she was too shy to go in with another human being.

  Later that day, Annie got a phone call from the local newspaper asking if they could run a story. Annie was firm: “No reporters in the tent.”

  When September came and Annie went back to school, they could keep the tent open to the public only on the weekends. A tone of begrudging acceptance descended on the neighbourhood like a humid spell. They thought that was the end of it until Jake went outside to pick up the paper one morning and found an envelope taped to the door. It was a letter of complaint from the local seniors’ centre, suggesting that to keep the tent open only on weekends was stressful and inconvenient for retirees and nurses who worked night shifts.

  There were about thirty eager tent-goers gathered on the front lawn the morning Annie drew a sign in purple marker that said �
��CLOSED” – in what she hoped were friendly yet assertive bubble letters – and taped it to the door. Instead of letting the hype die down, Annie and her dad made the decision to close the tent at the peak of its fame, so that there was no let-down, no dwindling, just triumph. “With a bang, not a whimper,” said Annie, reversing the T.S. Eliot line she’d been studying in English class. When she stepped aside to reveal the sign, the crowd erupted in disappointed jeers, and Annie apologized before closing and locking the door. “This is not what I was promised!” someone yelled from outside. People knocked on the door and pounded on the windows, shouting abuse and arguing with one another as they trampled what was left of Annie’s front garden. As the day wore on, the would-be tent-goers began singing protest songs to the tuneful drone of Crafty Alex the kindergarten teacher’s tissue-box guitar. “They’ll be standing outside with banners next, protesting the injustices they’ve suffered,” said Jake, and the two of them laughed so hard they had to hold each other by the elbows to stay upright.

  “We don’t need to worry, right?” Annie asked, still recovering from her fit of giggles.