Vanishing and Other Stories

by Deborah Willis

  Your student—no, your husband—will look at something beyond the camera: a pigeon maybe, or a woman sipping coffee. His posture will be perfect, and your head will tilt toward him, a curl of your hair blowing in your face. One of your hands will be raised to block the sun from your eyes. The other clasps his arm.

  He’s too cute, your mother will reply in a “Congratz” card. Hold on tight.

  THE MAN’S NAME IS PAUL, and though his skin is becoming leathery, he is only twenty-three. He works as a roustabout, fixing guy lines, painting and repainting the purple barrels that the bears roll around on. You break off a chunk of peanut brittle for him and he brings you to the circus’s muddy backyard. You see the clowns up close and notice their smiles are only painted on. A family of five rehearses jumps on their unicycles, and quilts cover the cage where the elephant sleeps. Two women and one man wear turquoise and groom horses. They shout something at Paul.

  “Arrêtez, là.” He puts his light, callused hand on your head. “Elle est avec moi.”

  He brings you to the wall that shields the grandstand from backstage, and points to a hole in the canvas. Inside, the show is on, and someone—hard to say if it is a woman or a man—swings high above the ground on a loop of rope. The crowd is quiet.

  “That’s the cloud swing.” Paul kneels beside you. “I help set that up. It can hold anyone’s weight.”

  You watch the performer hang upside down from one leg, then swing and shimmer in the spotlight.

  “I have to be just as brave as him. I climb just as high. And if anything snaps, it’s on my head.” Paul laughs. “It’s on all our heads, I guess, but you know what I mean. Took me a week to get the courage to climb that pole.”

  More interesting even than the slim figure flying through the air is the way Paul’s mouth moves. You get lost in his slanted words and added syllables.

  “Were you born in the circus? My mom says people are born here.” You imagined weddings in the centre ring, births there too.

  “Not me.” He watches through the hole the size of a thumbprint. “You’re mom’s tough. Chiante. Tell me, does she like flowers?”

  He stares through the hole in the canvas and you see sequins reflected in the curve of his eye.

  “She probably wants me back now,” you say. “She’s probably wondering where I am.”

  YOU WILL CALL YOUR MOTHER once a year, every New Year’s Day. But it’s the time you phone to tell her of your first marriage—its devastation—that you remember. The cost of the call will make both of you more concise, more honest, than in any of your letters.

  “You fall too hard.” The connection will be bad and her voice will fade in and out. “Always have. You’re too sensitive.”

  “Is that bad? Sensitivity?”

  “You scare people. You’re like a tightrope act gone wrong.”

  This is her type of mothering and you’ll appreciate its familiarity.

  “People want grace, Jilly. They want magic.”

  You twist the phone cord around your wrist. “I’d say they want distraction.”

  “Either way, they’re not looking for disaster.”

  WHEN THE SHOW FINISHES, Paul walks you and Marie out of the gate. He holds your hand and jumps with you over puddles, then offers a ride home in the spool truck. The road is dark, but in the light of passing cars you see wood shavings dusted through his hair and glittery paint stuck under his nails. He lets you rest your head against him, and you feel the movement of his forearm as he changes gears. You pretend to sleep, but still, he and your mother don’t talk. You smell Marie’s perfume and her Revlon lipstick. You hear her breathing and sometimes Paul’s whistling.

  At the turnoff that leads to your trailer and garden, she says, “Here,” and he answers, “D’ac.” In front of your place, he leaves the truck running. Your mother opens the door while he carries you inside, lays you on your bed, and covers you to your chin with a quilt.

  HE ARRIVES THE NEXT AFTERNOON to pick you and Marie up for the second show. When you open the door, your mother comes out of the bathroom in a satin robe—a gift from a past boyfriend—and you step behind her. She doesn’t wear makeup and her long hair is wet from the shower.

  If he had brought roses, she would have laughed in his face. So he stands on the flimsy porch steps with an armful of sunflowers. Sunflowers, in this rain. The stalks are nearly as tall as he is, and their heavy heads tilt ridiculously from his arms.

  “Madame.” He bows, his body imitating the stems. “A token.”

  Your mother stares at him. “You’re a child.”

  “Tell me my fortune.”

  “I’m not interested in your fortune.” Meaning, of course, that anyone can see from the wear in his pants and his shirt’s mismatched buttons that he doesn’t have money.

  He extends a flower to her. “So talk to me about now.”

  She leans against the door frame and nods to the sunflowers. “What am I supposed to do with those?” From where you stand behind her, you hear a smile, however slight, in her voice.

  AROUND THE TIME you get a sessional position in Florence, your mother will meet Wallace, an engineer who works for a modest firm. She will call him Wally. One month of every winter they’ll drive to Arizona. In her letters she’ll include pictures of her and Wally and their terrier, Della. The three of them cuddling on a green couch, or sitting on their deck with an Arizona golf course in the background. In these photographs you’ll see that Marie’s hair has greyed and her arms got fat. Her eyes will look heavy but eased, and every year the skin of her face will drop a little—as though she has let it go, released her fist. On the back of these photographs she will write things: This is us on the Grouse Mountain gondola or Della in her Christmas scarf! A language you never heard her use.

  FOR THREE DAYS, your mother is softer, kinder. She doesn’t count the money in the envelopes, and she doesn’t glare when you leave your jacket somewhere near the hot-dog stand. On the drives home, you sit between her body and Paul’s, and you feel warmth on either side.

  “I saw Mr. B. today. He was buying a stuffed animal.” You chatter to the rhythm of the windshield wipers’ slap on glass. “He says the corn in his field is mouldy from the rain. People could die from eating that.” You put your hands to your throat and make a choking sound. “Couldn’t they, Mom? They could die.”

  Your mother lets you stay up past eleven, and when she thinks you’re asleep, she sits with Paul at the square kitchen table. From your tiny room, you hear her laugh.

  “Long love line, short life line,” she says. “That’s always the way.”

  On the third night, they go outside despite the spitting rain. You watch from your open, half-curtained window as Paul tries to teach her to dance. She is clumsy and the dance is stilted. But you see his hand on her hip and can imagine the feel of his skin against the wet cotton. You hear his voice, faint through the rain, as he counts into her ear.

  THE NEXT MORNING, you sit at the kitchen table and draw pictures of moths and grasshoppers. He comes out of her bedroom and puts a finger to his lips. While she sleeps, you show him how to feed the chickens, how to candle the eggs, where to empty the buckets from under the eaves so water won’t rot out the garden. He repairs a loose porch step and offers to paint the mildewed windowsills. You wonder how his English got so good but then realize it’s because he’s all talk. He explains that crickets don’t actually sing, just knock their wings together, and he pencils bird-migration patterns on the tabletop. He promises to teach you to do cartwheels, shoot a rifle, ride a bike. He makes a hummingbird feeder out of a scrap of plastic tubing. When Marie comes into the kitchen in her thinning robe, he is showing you how to mix the sugar water, and she doesn’t say anything when you drink half of it.

  THE FOURTH NIGHT, Paul can’t give you and your mother a ride home. They need him to unhook the rigging, and in a few hours the big top will be folded into the spool truck. You help your mother roll up the poster, fold her table and chairs, and pull do
wn the velour tent. Then the two of you walk to the grandstand and watch as Paul climbs the centre pole, going up the metal spikes like a ladder.

  Marie watches his graceful, practical movement without saying a word. You take her hand and she lets you hold it, lets you feel what it will be like to be adult.

  “That’s not real rope,” you say. “It’s just firehose stuffed with cotton. Paul told me so.”

  At the mention of his name, she looks at you. There’s something in her face, a flicker, and you wonder if she’s just seen your future. She pulls her hand away. “Come on, Jilly. If we’re walking, we’d better go.”

  She leaves the big top without looking behind her, but you stay and watch as Paul shimmies up the pole. He doesn’t wear a harness, and there’s no net. He seems to trust the pole, the rigging, his own balance. If he fell, it would be bad luck, not bad form. The elegant person you had seen on the swing has wiped the white off his face and now wears overalls. He stands on the ground, laughs, and calls out to Paul. You can’t understand the words, but you can tell it’s a friendly tease. Paul looks down, waves, and pretends to lose his balance. It’s funny—the exaggerated arc of his arm and his comic, frightened look. And then, in the middle of this gesture, he sees you and his face changes. The second before his legs slip from the pole, his smile is wiped away. His arms reach, grasp air. You watch him fall the way you watched that cricket—you hold your breath. Until you see him grab a dangling end of rope. Until you see that this is rehearsed, maybe something the swing man taught him. Until he glides to the ground, his arms and legs wrapped around the rope, and lands lightly in front of you.

  “Why are you still here, Jilly? Where’s your mom?”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It’s the tear-down now. We can’t have anyone around.” He taps you on the nose. “This is the secret part. No one’s allowed to see the magician after the show.”

  “My mom left already. But she probably hasn’t gone far.”

  “You run.” He messes your hair. “Go catch up.”

  “Are you leaving?”

  “We hit Prince George tomorrow. There’s supposed to be even more rain up there.”

  “You should take us.” This is obvious, the way it should go. You can’t imagine another ending.

  “You don’t want to come with us. You’d have to learn French.” He crinkles his nose, twists his big mouth into a grin. “And you’d always smell like an elephant.”

  “My mom likes you. She hasn’t counted her envelopes in days.”

  He pulls the box of candy from his shirt pocket. “Here. You take this with you, okay?”

  “Or you could stay here. With us. We could get a bigger place.”

  “I’m going to miss you.” He kneels to your height. “Pour de vrai. But you have to leave.”

  “No.” You cross your arms the way you’ve seen your mother do it. You look into his eyes and you hold yourself there.

  “Jilly. You’re a special girl.” His smile is gone. “I mean that. You remind me of my daughter. She’s younger than you, but she’s bright too.”

  He looks into your face as though assessing damages, what can and cannot be fixed.

  “You and your mom—it caught me by surprise. Do you understand, Jilly? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  You suck in your breath, stare at the blue of his eyes, the lines already pressed into his skin. Then you turn and run as fast as your legs can take you.

  YOU ARE AFRAID OF YOUR MOTHER, GILLIAN, your Italian will say as he holds you in the dark. This will be after you showed Marie the drafty guest room and gave her towels for the morning. She leaves in a week, and seems glad of it. Earlier, over dinner, she said she doesn’t trust Wally to water the plants, and you know this means she misses him. You will face away from your Italian and feel his hand on your stomach, his sticky breath on the back of your neck. I was afraid of my mother, you correct, irritated already with his habit of making statements.

  And it’s true, you used to be afraid of Marie’s harsh, smoky voice and the way she slapped your face if you broke a dish. But you will not tell your husband that you’re still afraid. What scares you now are your mother’s strange, tragic stories. She has become more talkative, happy to share anecdotes. And in her stories, anything can happen. Maybe she exaggerates. Maybe no one really eats their own dog, and maybe no child is born missing a piece of his heart. But then again, maybe to you, no child will be born at all. And maybe Marie will find and keep a comfortable love, while both your marriages will be makeshift, stopgap. You never believed in her ability to know with accuracy. What will scare you as you lie in the dark is her willingness—later you might call it courage—to imagine the unexpected, the far-flung.

  t h e s e p a r a t i o n

  THE YEAR MY PARENTS SEPARATED coincided with the year I adored my sister. Claudia was fourteen, and was at the beginning of the long rebellion that would define her life. I was eleven and still looked like a boy: hair that my mom cut too short, legs that I hadn’t started to shave. I wore the same outfit almost every day: jeans with embossed flowers and a green sweater. No wonder I was obsessed with Claudia. She listened to the Dead Kennedys and the Dayglo Abortions. She had purple hair and a fake ID that claimed she was nineteen and from Oshawa. She’d gotten her period, and boys had started to call our house asking for her. Sometimes I answered the phone in the evenings, and there would be a nervous male voice on the line, pleading, “Can I talk to Claudia?”

  “Who’s calling, please?” I desperately needed to know.

  But Claudia was a slave to the telephone and always aware of its ringing. She’d smack the back of my head before I could get any information. “Give it, June. Now.”

  She was cruel and lovely and totally awesome. I snuck into her room to riffle through her shoebox of tapes any chance I got.

  OUR PARENTS WERE AWED by the latest catastrophe they’d created. First, two daughters. And now this: The Separation. They talked about it as though it had capital letters, and they both seemed to want to make it as crazy as the parties they liked to throw.

  They didn’t seem to notice that, separated, they were more married than ever. Each obsessed over what the other was doing, or might be doing. They sent messages to each other through Claudia and me: Tell your father/Please inform your mother. These messages were angry or heartbroken or flirtatious. They were articulate, defiant, or funny. Usually, Claudia and I forgot them entirely, or forgot the most important part of them.

  The Separation happened this way: first my mom left, and stayed with one of her sisters for a week. Then she came back and my dad stayed in a hotel for two days. Then he came back because the hotel was expensive—separation was expensive!—so for a few days the house was exactly like before: messy, crowded, loud.

  But one evening, there must have been an argument. Claudia and I didn’t hear it because we were in her bedroom listening to music. It was one of the few times my sister let me hang out in her room, and sometimes I wonder if she was protecting me, if she knew there was a fight going on downstairs. The point is, I never knew what caused The Separation because I was with Claudia, and Mickey DeSadist was singing us a lullaby.

  WE WERE RAISED ON LENTILS, brown rice, Neil Young, and solstice celebrations. Our mother ran a local grocery co-op and wore skirts made of hemp before hemp was chic. Our dad was a ceramics artist who sold cups and bowls at the local farmers’ market, had lost most of his short-term memory, and never got any of the big commissions that the tourist board gave out.

  As young children, Claudia and I were encouraged to be wild. We were always outside, and often naked. The neighbours complained because our parents never mowed the lawn, believing that children should have high grass to play in and dandelion seeds to blow. There was a picture of us on the fridge: Claudia with ripped overalls and hair that looked like it had never been washed, and me, naked except for a T-shirt that read, I Hate TV. We took vitamins, ate vegetables, and recycled. We’d been humiliated c
ountless times when our parents dragged us to marches against apartheid and solidarity dances for Cuba. One summer, when I was eight, we’d been forced to stand outside the local supermarket and protest the importing of grapes from Chile.

  No wonder Claudia found it difficult to be a teenager. She wanted to rebel, but our parents didn’t make it easy. Her first attempt, the one she undertook the year of The Separation, centred on music. Instead of Crosby, Stills and Nash, she listened to Minor Threat and Bad Brains. She went to concerts in people’s basements and all-ages shows at Little Fernwood. She moshed and stage-dived, and spent so much time thrashing around with other dirty, sweating kids that once she got scabies.

  And one evening, while Mom and I were in the kitchen, she cut herself thick bangs, bleached them, and dyed them purple. I was doing homework, and Mom was drinking tea and reading a book about the Buddhist practice of non-attachment. Then Claudia stomped into the room, with her purple hair and her boots that left marks on the lino. She heaved the fridge door open then slammed it shut.

  Mom looked up from her book. “Hey,” she said. “Great hair.”

  Claudia froze. She stood in front of the fridge for about three seconds. Then she stomped out of the kitchen.

  Mom sipped her camomile. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “I think she hoped her hair would annoy you.”

  “But I think it’s cute. I think it suits her.”

  I twirled my pencil through my own hair, which had almost reached my chin, and wondered if Claudia had any of that purple dye left.