by Lise Haines
He often stayed for a night or two if he was on his way through town, and one time, I must have been five or six, he drove a flatbed to our house with a tall wooden cabinet painted red and roped in the back so it stood straight up and down. The cabinet had a few crude paintings with oriental dragons on one side and a woman in a kimono with a strange stare painted on the other. In the front was a door. I guess it was inevitable that a boy of five or six would get curious, and so after dinner Sor found me in the flatbed, trying to peek inside the box.
You know my father drank rashly, and he had worked himself up and warned my uncle at dinner that he better get that thing out of the drive early so he could move his patrol car sitting in the garage.
When Sor found me up in the flatbed, he climbed up and opened the door to the cabinet and asked if I’d like to disappear. There was a makeshift seat inside, like a phone booth without a phone.
“Where would I go?” I said.
“That’s the question. Where do we go when we disappear? I believe I disappeared into the circus, but you might disappear into the police force where your father hides out if you aren’t careful.”
“No, where do I go if I disappear in the box, Uncle Sor?”
“Oh, the box. You go somewhere else. I’m not really sure. I hear it’s quite pleasant, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. The last man who tried it stayed away for years until a magician came along with the right spell. When he tumbled back into the box finally, and his wife asked where he had been, he seemed too happy to speak. Here, help me with these ropes.”
Soon we had the magic disappearing box out of its anchors and I was helping him bring it into the house. It was surprisingly light. As soon as my father saw it, he blew up at my uncle for being a bad influence and stirring up one kind of trouble or another. My mother did what she could to calm him. But Uncle Sor just ignored my father the way he always did. He directed me to turn to the left and then the right and watch the top stair so we would clear the bannister. We put the box at the foot of my bed.
“I’m going to leave this with you for a while,” he said. “Now, you need the spell so you’ll be able to come back if you try it out and there are no magicians around.” And so he gave me this: “Upon the brimming water among the stones are nine-and-fifty swans.”
I heard the basement door slam, and I knew my father had gone down to the family room, where he had built a saloon and where he would drink, mumbling to himself, and fall asleep with his head on the bar, hating the world. My uncle went down to the living room to sit with my mother and talk in whispers—I imagine trying to convince her again that she should leave my father.
The next day my uncle was gone before dawn and my father went off to work and my mother made me lunch and I was off to school. It was the following weekend my father went out with his buddies and came home stinking drunk and went after my mother and me as if he were invading an enemy camp.
After my mother had given me a cold compress for my face and after she had taken her quiet medicine, she stretched out on her bed with her own ice pack. I went back to my room and got inside the box, and that’s when I discovered the trapdoor. If I lifted up the floor using this tiny bit of rope in one corner, I could crawl into a box in the bottom that had air holes drilled into the back.
It took me a few years to understand that the spell was one of Yeats’s and that my uncle had built the box with his own hands to a purpose. I discovered I could curl up and hide out when my father was hunting me. He would open the door in the midst of bellowing and tearing things up around my room, but that was about it. He probably thought a disappearing box was too easy and simple-minded a place to hide. After all, he was used to working with professional criminals. I only wish that I had had a disappearing box for my mother.
The summer I joined my uncle on the carnival circuit, my father took an ax to that thing and started a bonfire with it. I imagine he had found out about the hiding place.
It’s always been my Uncle Sor I’ve wanted to emulate, never my father.
Before I close, your mother tells me you’ve decided to take a gap year. I hope you know I’ll be excited to hear your plans. You have a good head on your shoulders, Mona. It’s not a bad idea to build up some savings, but if you look at internships, we’ll have a room for you once we find the right place here. Public transportation is pretty good and we’ll make it work.
Love,
Dad
Sometimes I think my father’s drive to New Jersey, away from us—perhaps especially from me—began when I turned nine and started to assert my independence, speaking up in ways I hadn’t before. When we bought the house he worked longer hours and I had things to do with my friends on the weekends. I got used to Mom filling the spaces and became less interested in what he had to say. He became fragile if I was busy and didn’t have time to do something he hoped we might do—bowling, batting practice, miniature golf. As I pushed further into my own life, he appeared sullen or withdrawn. My mother understood life and art and what we’re here to do. He understood insurance.
I think he tried again to be this imaginary father when Lola was born. But once you carry a lack of confidence, it’s hard to hold a baby in your arms without thinking you’ll drop her.
After that we barely spoke at all.
Richard
I wrote something out to Liz at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t worry, and left half the money I’d gotten from the ATM. I slipped my car key off the ring. I knew Mona needed to sleep and Liz would insist she get up to say goodbye, and that would stir some new rancor I’d have to carry with me to Newark. Lola, who was the soundest sleeper, would be a sack of potatoes in Liz’s arms.
So I went back upstairs and instead of waking her I watched Liz in the circle of closet light. She was curled up with one hand tucked around her right breast, her hair spread along my pillow. This was the picture I would take with me, always wishing to crawl back into that one particular moment. I shut off the alarm.
Lola was in the little-girl bed I had assembled that week, out of her crib now in her own room. I stroked her hair and watched her breathe. I worried that she would grow too quickly while I was gone.
Downstairs again, I put my palm against Mona’s door and thought about turning the handle. Mona is a sleepwalker. She has a way of finding disturbances in nights the rest of us find calm. Maybe you could say that about the daytime too. With any luck she’d forgotten to set her alarm, consciously or unconsciously, the way she sometimes did, counting on Liz to wake her. I thought it best to let her be.
That morning became the coin toss. Daily I’ve wondered if waking my family up before taking off would have landed us differently.
With the suitcase in the car, I hoped to make it to New Jersey without spending a night in a motel. I had a blanket and pillow in the back if I needed to pull into a truck or rest stop. I let the handbrake out, and the car rolled down the drive.
I made good time all the way to Pennsylvania. The weather held, but the highway gradually filled with semis. I looked at pictures of donuts and office supplies and sweating Coke bottles on side panels for miles. It became harder to pass them, and then if I did, it was only to get wedged into another cluster of giant trucks. Reaching a rest stop, I grabbed a coffee and studied the Pennsylvania map, deciding on a rural route for the next leg.
I was fifteen minutes out on that two-lane highway when I saw a great plume of smoke—a cloud so long and thick it arced across the sky. Later I would try to tell Lola over the phone that it was like watching the tail of a giant cat. The smoke came from a tire graveyard set on fire, the rubber bedded down in gullies, pushed up ridges and thrown down over every slope. My windows were up, but the car filled with the stench.
A woman stood by her car on the shoulder making big, sweeping motions with her arms, appearing and disappearing in the smoke. I didn’t want to lose time, but I had stopped many times with Uncle Sor to help a stranger when we were on the road together. It’s what you do. Pul
ling ahead of her, I parked and got out and walked back to her car. She was midway between Mona’s age and Liz’s. She had a beautiful face torn up by acne and some kind of trouble. Her hair looked as if a fury had driven it straight into the air. There was a message on her T-shirt, but I didn’t want to stare at her chest. The backseat and the passenger side of her car were full. A small dog carrier sat on a pile of magazines in the front seat. I looked to see if there was a flat, but her tires were fine. “I have a few tools in my trunk,” I offered.
“The engine light wouldn’t go off, and I thought I had another can of oil. My sister lives a few towns over. Give me a lift?”
“Sure,” I said without asking which way over.
“I think someone can come back and tow it. Let me grab some stuff. I’m Linda, by the way.”
“Richard. You want to call them? I have a phone,” I said.
She fished hers out of her jeans and held it up, saying, “I think they do better with surprises. All I need is to get turned down because they have to think about it.” That’s when I read the message on her T-shirt: Hold your own … if you go limp.
I thought Linda would just take a suitcase and the dog with its small, rhythmic yips. But she kept moving through that coil of black smoke to get more, and I kept helping. “I heard it’s been burning for days,” she said, looking out to the hills. I set the crate in the footwell behind my seat.
There was a toaster oven, three sets of hot rollers, and framed posters of drag race cars. She wanted the magazines. I pulled my collar up and tried to breathe through my shirt when my hands weren’t full. Finally we were back on the road. “It’s a straight shot,” she said.
A fine rain began and picked up pace, but that did nothing to the reek of burning rubber.
She said, “You ever been betrayed?”
I figured she mostly wanted to talk about herself. So I said, “You?”
“By my own son. The older they get, the more they think they know, right? Snooping in your drawers, your pockets, listening in on phone lines, seeing what they can pry loose like they want to know who you really are when all they’re up to is finding a way to get back at you about one thing or another. I was sure my son was out with his friends when I was on the phone, you know, breaking it off with this man. It ripped me pretty bad because I thought we might have had a chance in this sick world, but I told him I was staying with my husband for my son’s sake. I was going to keep putting up with the drinking and the hunting even when it wasn’t the season and his damn meth cooking in the basement like I’m supposed to spend my nights waiting to blow up while I’m making supper. Anyway, my son came up to the kitchen just then and pulled the phone from my grip and hung up the receiver. He said he was going to tell Willis, that’s my husband, his father, when Willis got home from the gun show. So I just loaded up the car. No reason I should get a beating for staying loyal, you know? I’ve been beat enough.”
A loopy kind of fatigue took over as I watched the wipers clear a path through the rain. I hoped Linda would keep me alert with her stories over that stretch of green hills dotted with cows and farm equipment.
When I felt she was waiting for some type of response, I said, “So you’re saying kids have no respect?”
Under the quiet tones of a talk radio station I had forgotten to silence she said, “You making fun of me?”
“No, I just … I think you’re right. The older they get, the more damage they can do.”
She didn’t say anything to this, and I couldn’t help but think about Mona. I often wondered how much she knew at seventeen, what things she recalled and what things she had decided to let go of. She was in her own world most of the time, but that didn’t mean she didn’t surface when she wanted to. And though I always asked, half the time I didn’t really know where she went at night even when she told me, or who she was dating, or what she spent her time photographing. She didn’t show me the way she showed her mother.
Liz subscribed to this psychology magazine, and she once read aloud to me from an article on secrets. It said that keeping family secrets is as common as getting up in the morning. I asked Liz what she thought, and I was surprised when she dropped the magazine by the bed and said, “I think telling secrets, well, some secrets anyway, can be more harmful than holding on to them.” I didn’t say anything, and right after that she shut off the light and we went to bed, much as I couldn’t sleep thinking about this idea.
“You imagine you’ll go back?” I asked Linda. “When things calm down?”
“You must be crazy,” she said. Then she released her seatbelt and shifted things around and got her dog out of the carrier. He was a scrawny, trembling thing without much hair, and she placed him under her sweater, right over her belly, where he settled. She called someone on her phone and said she was a couple of miles away and to meet her at the diner.
When we pulled into the parking lot, there was a man idling in a pickup painted flat black, with rims the size of Pennsylvania. He was smoking a joint and just sat there, not helping, while she and I loaded her stuff onto the bed in the rain. I didn’t know if this was a brother-in-law or her boyfriend or what. She didn’t make any introductions. When we were done we covered her wet things with a blue plastic tarp he had up in the cab. But as soon as they pulled away the tarp flew up into the air and landed in the lot, and they didn’t bother to circle around to get it.
I stood there in that desolate country, the rain coming down, wondering how I was going to put things right with Mona. I wished in that moment that my Uncle Sorohan was around. No one had a better sense about people than he did and what kind of secrets it’s best to keep. I didn’t know how long Mona would keep hers.
Uncle Sorohan was a professional guesser on the carnival circuit and that meant he could tell your age within two years, your weight within three pounds, your birthday within two months. If he guessed wrong, he handed you a prize. But he rarely guessed wrong. He told me once I would wander. I never imagined this would be away from Liz and the girls.
Sor hired me to help out the summer I turned sixteen. Guessing had him on the road from one end of the country to the other, early spring to late fall in an old Chevy, and he said he liked having someone along. The Chevy pulled an Airstream with a special rig off the back that hauled a giant scale. He always got us to the next show before the break of day, nursing a flask.
The first time I saw his booth in a midway, it looked like a cartoon with question marks dancing at its edges. It was painted red and yellow, and it looked as bright as a burning city. Centered at the top was a sign that read, Fool the Guesser. Stuffed animals hung in clusters and were perched on shelves at the back. The Howe industrial scale verified his accuracy. “You have to know who’s going to put their money down,” he told me, “and who’s going to be a repeat customer, and who’s going to grab their friends and bring them back here thinking they’ll cheat you.”
In mid-July, after being on the road for six weeks, we stopped outside Chicago, a few towns over from where my family lived. It was one of the bigger carnivals where we had a weeklong stint. I didn’t even tell my parents we were in town, I was so happy to have my freedom. Sor let me try my hand at guesswork but I kept handing out prizes. Finally he said, “Guessing someone’s age within two years means two years on either side of the year they were born in, so you’re giving yourself a five-year span to work with. It’s not that hard.” Once that sank in and I discovered where he hid the flask, I began to relax.
He helped me understand bone mass: how a lump of fat in the upper arms will tip the scale, something about weight lifters and their light heads. He showed me how to assess pockets filled with keys and wallets and how a pair of work boots can be loaded with steel. “Look for yellowed fingers and stained teeth,” he said, pointing out particular lines in a face to show me the way a smoker could throw me off on age and how heavy coffee drinkers lose water weight and get a sunken look in their cheeks.
I thought birthdays were the toughes
t, but he said, “In time you’ll start to see the sunny disposition of the summer baby, the spectral look of the autumn born, the rapid talker of spring, the perennial sadness of winter’s child. I have books on Chinese face reading, body language, palmistry, and clothes psychology and fabric composition. You’re welcome to borrow any of them.”
His favorite author was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and each night he read one of Sherlock’s adventures aloud to me from his bed as if I were a young boy. He slept on two facing couches that pulled together in the trailer, and Sor’s deep voice drifted over to the nose of the Airstream, where I bunked. He had a fedora he never took off, even when he slept.
“You’ll just know. You won’t have to think about guessing after a while. I’ll admit there’s a letdown to seeing what’s behind the curtain, Richard, but you’ll get over that and find other kinds of letdowns waiting for you,” he said, and then he laughed.
While most people who came to that carnival outside Chicago thought he was paying a quick compliment and taking their tickets, he was reading them to their cerebellums. One day as two girls were eyeing the booth he nudged me and said, “Your turn.”
They were about my age and one had a high laugh, a smile that showed her full gums, and a body as thin and light as smoke.
The other was the beauty with true brown hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a short skirt with a tank top and gym shoes. She didn’t use a lot of makeup and had a way of sizing up every last thing around her. When her eyes mirrored the streaming, flashing lights of the park, she made all the other carnival goers who had come from the city look dull and habitual.
She was holding a paper dish with a sugary lump of fried dough when I blocked her path. “I can guess your weight within two pounds,” I said.