Balancing Acts

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

‘Come over here. We want to talk to you.’

  Wanda and Josh sat side by side on the couch. They had just finished dinner. Wanda held a coffee mug on her knees, and with her other hand patted her blond curls over and over. Josh was lighting a cigarette, with his hands cupped around the match. They exchanged one of their coded messages, eyes darting, eyebrows quickly raised and lowered, saying something secret and wordless about her. Josh blew out a stream of smoke, shook the match, and coughed. Wanda said, ‘The guidance counselor, Miss Wharton, called me today to come to school. She told me you’ve been cutting classes.’

  She became hollow inside and her face flushed. ‘You mean you went and talked to that Warts about me again?’

  ‘I had to, Alison. She asked me to come in for a conference. I am your mother, after all.’

  She could just hear them, discussing her, the problem child. I’ve told you before, Mrs Markman, her emotional age lags behind her intellectual age. Is that so? Well, hot shit to you too, Miss Warts. Her attitude is so critical that she has trouble accepting authority. Not that she’s disruptive; I would say, rather, passively uncooperative. All those things were inscribed on cards every year—she had read them. Wanda must be tired of hearing them. Well, Wanda would not have to hear them much longer. Very soon she would be gone, and they would have nothing to discuss. And when she came back she would be somebody; they would have to treat her with a little respect.

  ‘Alison,’ said Josh, ‘what do you have to say about it? We want to give you a chance.’

  She said nothing. She had thought it would be fairly safe to leave at lunchtime, because the homeroom teacher took attendance in the mornings. But nothing was safe—they found you out.

  ‘Where do you go? What do you do?’ Wanda’s voice rose, thin and fast like a record switched up to the wrong speed.

  She couldn’t tell them about going to Max’s at lunchtime and talking to him—and to Lettie, if she was there—of the things she might do in her life: live on an Indian reservation out west, lead archaeological digs in Africa, win the Nobel Prize for her book about famous vegetarians. And how they listened seriously, or if they laughed it was a good kind of laughter, not the mocking kind of the girls in school. Or that Max made her leave in time for her afternoon classes because, he said, he wouldn’t abet truancy. The first two times she had walked around shivering with cold, and then she thought of Lettie. Lettie understood that school was no place to be cooped up during one’s youth. She couldn’t tell them about the walks and the sodas in Highet’s and the movies, either, and how Lettie was never shocked at anything she said, but paid attention, as if she were grown up.

  ‘Well, what are you dreaming about? And for Chrissake will you stop fiddling with those damn oranges? We’re waiting for an answer.’

  She put the oranges on the floor. ‘I go to the library. I can learn more there than in those dumb classes.’

  Baffled, they sought help in each other’s eyes. Josh stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. ‘Doesn’t the librarian ask why you’re not in school?’

  ‘They don’t care. I tell them I have a special research project. I do, actually. I’m doing a report on—oh, what’s the word?—geriatrics.’

  ‘Geriatrics!’ He leaned forward, one side of his face screwed up.

  ‘Old people, you know. It’s a big social problem. They don’t feel useful.’

  ‘Whatever the hell you’re studying,’ said Wanda, ‘you’d better study it in the school building. That’s where you belong and that’s where you’ll stay from now on.’

  It was a strange thing, but as she watched, Wanda’s belly seemed to be slowly expanding. She was sitting backwards with her legs apart—it must be too hard to cross them. The belly was just about the size of a basketball; she knew the feel of that size sphere between her palms. She could feel her hands squeezing it. Beneath the red-checked maternity blouse a crescent of white underpants showed through the hole cut out of Wanda’s slacks. Three more months. Only yesterday she had caught a glimpse of Wanda in the shower. It was gross. ‘Do you want to feel it kicking?’ Wanda had called out from behind the curtain. ‘No, thanks!’ Now it looked as if it would fill the room and smother everything in it, and finally explode—a shatter of blood and unfinished flesh.

  ‘Take it easy, Wanda. Alison, tell us what’s troubling you. There must be something behind this.’

  ‘What could be troubling me? I have a perfect life.’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t see what’s so terrible about your life,’ said Wanda. ‘Lots of kids would be grateful for your life.’

  ‘We want to help you, Alison. I hope you’re not—uh—getting into any bad habits?’

  ‘I don’t smoke pot, no. I don’t like artificial stimulants.’

  “Is it the baby?’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m thrilled about the baby. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘She’ll get used to the baby,’ Wanda said. ‘It’s not that. What she needs is to be with other kids more. She’s always alone. They call her, but she tells them she’s busy. Busy with what, I’d like to know. Franny Grant would love to be friends with her again. They used to be like this’—Wanda held up two crossed fingers—‘and then she dropped her for no reason.’

  ‘Franny is an idiot,’ she burst out. ‘She just had her ears pierced, that’s the latest. She doesn’t need me anyhow. She has boyfriends now. Real nerds, I can tell you. Elliot Forman—God, I’d rather die. They sit in the lunchroom and throw food and insult each other. I suppose you’d prefer me to be like that.’

  She could swear she saw Josh almost smile. ‘Are you having any trouble with your schoolwork?’ he asked.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed, and leaped up. Her voice had the mangled sound of someone about to cry—she had to get away fast. ‘Nothing is wrong! I don’t want to talk about it any more! If you say I have to go to school I’ll go.’ She grabbed up the oranges and backed towards the stairs. ‘But just stop talking about it!’

  She hurled herself on to the bed, clutching the pillow around her face. This was horrible—to cry like a baby. It was useless pretending no one could hurt her. They trapped her like a tiger in a net, just to humiliate her and prove that she was nothing, nobody. With all her stories, all her work to have something of her own no one could touch, in the end they proved she was nothing. They forced these miserable tears out of her, like cutting her open and spilling her blood. Her life was streaming away.

  After a while she sat up, smoothing the hair off her face. She refused to be nothing. She was young and strong, and she would outlast them. She reached under the mattress.

  The acrobats are enraged at first to find Alice hidden in their trunk full of old costumes. They are a husband-and-wife team named Lothar and Louise, with a baby named Heidi. But when they see how bedraggled and hungry she is, they give her hot soup and listen to her story. She tells them how much she longs to work in the circus, and they consent to let her stay with them, provided she helps with the baby. For several weeks, crossing the plains of Nevada, Alice barely stirs from the trailer. ‘Why, you’d think she had years of experience with babies,’ Louise exclaims to Lothar. ‘She can quiet her down and make her laugh even better than I can.’ She feeds cranky Heidi mashed fresh vegetables and yogurt, and Heidi spits back white lumpy stuff. One night while Lothar and Louise are out doing the show, Alice awakes from dozing to find half the trailer a blazing inferno. She grabs Heidi and wraps her in a blanket, and rushes out with the flames practically at her heels. She becomes a heroine. Lothar and Louise are so overwhelmed with admiration and gratitude that they speak to the manager, who give’s her a job taking care of the animals. There is a great deal of shit to sweep up, but Alice doesn’t mind; she has already decided on her next step. As soon as she can find the right opportunity, she plans to ask a certain young trapeze artist, not handsome but darkly foreign-looking and witty, to coach her in his art.

  She stops him one morning on his way to rehearsal, to ask, very politely, if she might
climb up to the platform with him for a better view. ‘Why, certainly,’ he says kindly, and takes her by the hand.

  ‘Alison?’ It was Wanda, knocking at the door. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Just a second.’ She shoved the notebook under the mattress, and glancing in the mirror, rubbed her puffy eyes and blinked them wide open. ‘Okay.’

  Wanda entered cautiously, holding out a small tray with a glass of apple juice and three Oreo cookies. ‘I thought you might want something.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She set it on the dresser. ‘You were crying.’ Clumsily, Wanda patted her shoulder and tried to kiss her forehead, but she moved off.

  ‘Daddy and I are going to a movie. Would you finish the dishes, please, and not stay up too late?’

  ‘Which one, The Towering Inferno?’

  ‘No. The one at the Cameo.’

  ‘Oh. Coming Home.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I get around. Can I go along? I can’t get in alone.’

  ‘It’s not for you, Alison. That’s why they have those ratings.’

  ‘Oh.’ She took an orange from the bed and tossed it against the wall. ‘What’s not for me, the war or the sex?’

  ‘Both,’ said Wanda, closing her eyes briefly. ‘And please stop doing that. You’ll break something.’ She stared at the orange in Alison’s hand and shook her head sadly. ‘You can stay up for Alfred Hitchcock if you want to.’

  ‘Thrill, thrill.’

  ‘You don’t mind staying alone, do you?’

  ‘No. You always ask me that. I’m not a baby.’ She would never tell Wanda, but as soon as they went out at night the floorboards in the hall outside her room began to creak, and then somewhere between eleven and eleven-thirty they gave one tremendous creak that sounded like a heavy foot pressing down. She didn’t hear it when they were home.

  ‘Don’t forget to write down the message if anyone calls.’

  ‘All right.’

  Wanda sighed, and twisted the gold bracelet around her wrist. ‘Look, Allie, school is something you have to do. Everyone does it. Is it so hard to be like everyone else?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Wanda stood for a moment as if she were waiting for something to happen, then left. Alison broke apart each Oreo and began licking off the cream in slow strokes. The sweetness burned into her teeth. She heard the front door shut and lock click. The car doors opened and slammed closed; the engine started up. She climbed on her bed to watch out the window as they pulled away. The taillights diminished to two points of red in the blackness. The sound of the motor faded to a faint hum, then the dots vanished around the corner and even the hum was gone. She was all alone. Soon she would go and turn on every light in the house. Already the twitching and creaking were beginning. It was only the wood, aging. She hugged her shoulders.

  She might play Queen. Often when they left her alone she became a disinherited queen lost in a raging storm, who discovers the house by chance and takes refuge. She wanders through, touching the unfamiliar objects in each room, wondering what they might be and trying to imagine, from them, what the family might be like. She liked Alison’s room, and sometimes she ate an orange from the bowl on her desk; but she couldn’t understand what a girl with so many good books and filled-up notebooks around would want with an ugly Raggedy Ann clock, or gym shorts, or lists of spelling words. And where was the finery in her closet, as befitted a child of so well-furnished a house? There seemed to be only wrinkled T-shirts and patched jeans. The Queen couldn’t get a clear image of the daughter of the house. But the Queen’s favorite place to explore was the master bedroom, where she was puzzled by many things she had never encountered in her own land: nail clippers, boot trees, Princess phone, hair blower, electric razor. These people collected mysterious artifacts, she murmured to herself. Some cold nights the Queen put on Josh’s velour robe to keep warm, and once she even lit one of his cigarettes, but she didn’t like it—it made her cough. Tonight she went on tiptoe to their door and gazed around. Their bed was unmade: the pillows were askew and the pink quilt in disarray, its upper corners tossed back as if the people had just arisen, although it was evening. Suddenly the Queen felt very tired. She crept into the bed and under the covers, on Wanda’s side. The satin of the pillows was smooth and cool against her hot cheek. She turned lazily toward the empty side of the bed. ‘Darling,’ she whispered, and stroked the pillow. ‘Darling, oh darling, I’m so glad I found you at last.’ She stretched her arms out languidly as if to gather someone in, then leaped up, flinging the covers back.

  This was crazy! This was by far the craziest thing she had ever done! Flaming with shame, she ran from their room and into her own. She had to give up these baby games! She had to get out of this house right now, too, or she would do something or think something awful. She was terrified of her own mind—the thoughts it could send. If only a person could think nothing. She had tried, many times, making her mind a blank: a flat empty space, with all the thoughts you couldn’t control shoved over the edge. Dark nothing. But it didn’t work—it was impossible. How could some of those thoughts even be her own, if she didn’t know how they got there and didn’t want them?

  Some place they could never find her. They would come home and look in her room to make sure she was all right, and then, how they would suffer! Oh, they would be sorry then that they had tormented her.

  The glass doors to his building were locked at night. She had to wait until Mrs Cameron, peering from behind her desk, pressed the button to let her in.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Alison.

  Mrs Cameron nodded, with a look of distaste. She realized she should have washed her face and combed her hair. Her orange down jacket was dirty too, and her sneakers streaked with blurry trails of color. Max liked women to look pretty; she could tell from the photos of his wife. Well, it was too late now. She raced up the stairs and knocked. From the other side of the door came Max’s voice, jovial as it rarely was for her.

  ‘I have no idea who Joe Haber owes me ten bucks from last week’s poker. Maybe he’s come to pay up.’

  When he saw her his eyes flashed then dimmed, like a bulb flickering out. ‘Alison. This is a departure from your usual habits. To what do we owe—’

  ‘Oh, please don’t start that, Max. I’m sorry if I’m interrupting, but I had to come.’

  He stepped aside so she could enter. She flopped on to the couch.

  Lettie, holding a fan of cards, was sitting at a bridge table set up in the center of the room. She had changed from her flowered dress of this afternoon. In a white round-necked jersey over a long velvet skirt, she looked awesome and beautiful. A chain of amber beads hung round her neck. ‘But what happened, sweetheart?’ she asked.

  ‘I had to get away from there. They’re impossible. They want to control every move I make, everywhere I go.’

  ‘In that case, do they know you’re here?’ He was pacing about in his quick, intense way.

  ‘Of course not. They went to see Coming Home. But they wouldn’t take me. It has sex—I read the reviews.’

  ‘Big deal,’ said Lettie. ‘That part lasts for all of five minutes. Isn’t that right, Max? I’ll take you next week if you like. I don’t mind seeing it again.’

  Max gathered up the cards on the table, shuffled, and made a waterfall. One card escaped and the rest fell from his hands, scattering. He shook his head and made a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘Slipping, slipping,’ he muttered, and bent to pick them up.

  ‘Can I play? What were you playing?’

  ‘Gin rummy,’ Lettie said.

  ‘What do you mean, play? What is this all about? You come here alone at night, it’s almost nine o’clock, and you think you’re sitting down to play cards? How are you planning to get home?’

  He loomed over her, his lips pressed together in irritation. She started to cry, not sobs like before, but slow hot tears that slid down her cheeks. She didn’t even try to cover them up: it wasn’t bad,
crying with them looking on. They were so old, finished with all the struggles and pains. They could watch from a great distance.

  ‘I’m never going home. I don’t want to. It’s no home of mine.’

  ‘Oh, the poor thing.’ Lettie came over to sit by her, encircling her. Her arms and chest were soft as pillows. ‘She’s so unhappy. Poor baby,’ she crooned.

  She couldn’t remember ever crying like a baby in someone’s big arms. Crying showed that you hurt, and if you hurt, something was wrong with you. But this felt almost good; she sniffed against Lettie’s white sleeve and burrowed into her chest.

  ‘Don’t make a fuss, Max. Let her stay awhile, till she calms down.’

  ‘I never thought I’d be running a home for wayward girls.’

  ‘She’ll call her parents later on and they’ll come for her. They’re out now anyway—what’s the harm?’

  ‘Oh, sure. They’ll think I kidnapped her for dubious purposes.’

  ‘I’m not calling, ever. I don’t want them to come for me. I want to stay here.’

  ‘Holy shit!’

  ‘All right, all right, Max. We’ll play cards for a while, then we’ll see.’ Lettie dislodged her and gave her a handkerchief. ‘Here, sweetheart, wipe your face. It’s enough.’

  Max dealt the cards in silence, tossing them out with swift flicks of the wrist. Grudgingly, he gave up each reject with a nasty snap of his thumb and index finger.

  ‘I can’t get a thing,’ said Lettie. ‘This is not my lucky night.’

  ‘When is it?’ he asked. ‘You don’t keep track of what’s on the pile, so how can you win?’

  ‘I win very often, you know that. I do it by instinct.’

  ‘Instinct!’ he sneered. ‘Instinct has nothing at all to do with it.’

  ‘You two can stop bickering. I have gin.’ Alison spread her hand on the table. The second time, she said, ‘You’re letting me win.’

  ‘Me!’ Lettie’s hand flew to her heart in denial. ‘I didn’t see one thing I could use.’

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Max. ‘If I wanted to I could win every hand. The two of you would never know what was hitting you. Anyhow, that’s all for now. It’s time for The Ascent of Man.’ He switched on the TV and played with the dials until Bronowski emerged, prancing gracefully about a desert oasis, his arms cast wide, marveling at die harmony of the universe. ‘Now there’s someone I wouldn’t mind talking to.’