Balancing Acts

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  At last he went out into the hall. The sirens wailed; he had grown used to them, as Vicky had predicted last fall that he would. Twice the elevator passed him by, so he walked down to the second floor. Two white-coated men were rushing a stretcher out of the elevator; he saw Vicky chase them all the way to the next-to-last door on the right, George’s. One by one, other doors along the corridor opened and faces poked out to watch, tense and alert like understudies observing a dress rehearsal. For a brief moment Max stood paralyzed. Then he wheeled around and went back out to the landing, to sit on the steps. But naturally, he thought. But naturally. It was only his shock that was unnatural. He bent over and covered his face with his hands.

  As if by fierce suction, the softness of the last weeks was drawn out of his pores; the walls of his body contracted and hardened, like cement settling. Good, this was familiar. This way he could live. The other was sentimental nonsense—how could he have lapsed so far? He rose with difficulty, clutching the banister, and went carefully down to the lobby. He ought to start using the cane indoors as well as out; he was moving very laboriously these days. With her grotesque frosted hair all mussed—ah, that nervous, absurd ruffling—Vicky stood at the door, watching the stretcher being eased into the ambulance parked out front. She was shielding her eyes against the declining afternoon sun, which belatedly and uselessly graced this dismal day.

  As the ambulance screeched away Vicky returned to her seat. A few people whispered in small, scattered groups. Max hovered over her, scrutinizing and savage. The doctors were wrong—anger was good for the heart. He simmered with a desire urgent as sex, but its goal was the contrary. He made himself wait.

  ‘What is it, Max? Can I do something for you?’

  ‘Ever ready. He won’t be back, you know. You might as well tear up his file.’

  ‘He’s got a lot of fight left in him. The doctors can do wonders these days.’

  ‘Isn’t that reassuring. The eternal optimist. Do you want to start planning his homecoming party, maybe?’

  She drew herself together and hugged her arms. Her voice faltered, as it used to in his early days. ‘That’s quite unfair.’

  ‘Oh, yes, fair play. I keep forgetting. But life is unfair, Vicky. Even our President said so. I suppose you’ve watched this kind of scene hundreds of times. All in the line of duty, right? Another empty apartment to fill. New faces to greet.’

  ‘I have a lot of work to do, Max.’ She shuffled through her papers.

  ‘I know your time is valuable. So much paperwork. But I’m your work too. I’m still animate. Now’s your chance to use a little psychology. Let’s see if you can improve my attitude.’

  She looked up from the form she was filling out, her face wan, as though he had drained from her any possible response. Finally she whispered, ‘I know you liked him, Max. I’m sorry about it. That’s all I can say.’

  ‘Speak up, my senses aren’t as sharp as they used to be. Oh, and there’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask you, Victoria. You know that Mrs Jordan who had leukemia? I haven’t seen her since I’ve been back from the hospital. Where’s her file?’

  She lowered her head. ‘Mrs Jordan succumbed to the disease.’ Her lips barely moved.

  ‘Succumbed!’ He banged a fist loudly on her desk. The others clustered around the lobby turned to look. ‘Succumbed, my ass!’

  ‘You’re disturbing people,’ she said in her official voice.

  ‘Am I?’ He parodied the tone. ‘I wasn’t aware.’ He turned, and with elaborate courtesy, said, ‘I beg your pardon.’ Then he leaned over to whisper in her ear. ‘It’s you and your sort, baby, that make it worse.’

  ‘Max, please. There’s no sort. Everyone lives and dies the same.’

  ‘No, dear. Some of us die. Other succumb. My wife died. George will die. Lettie will die. You will probably succumb.’

  He saw tears come to her eyes. She laid her hands flat on the desk. ‘I don’t understand. Just last night you called me to...’

  He almost weakened, but the image of the stretcher and George on it, helpless and unexpectedly tall, was too vivid. ‘Last night? You must have been dreaming.’

  Upstairs, he had another drink and fell asleep in his chair. When he woke, dislocated in time, Lettie was standing over him.

  ‘I heard. Vicky told me about it.’

  ‘Oh. I was just on my way to see him...Did you find the shoes you wanted?’

  ‘They’re on my feet.’

  He peered down. They were dark-brown leather clogs on cork heels, unadorned except for one braided horizontal strip. ‘Uh-huh. Simple but elegant,’ he said.

  ‘They’re very comfortable. You don’t feel the ground under you.’

  He gave a short laugh. Time passed.

  ‘Max, are you going to sit in that same position forever?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I’ll fix you something to eat. It’s nearly seven.’

  ‘You do that. I wouldn’t want to die of malnutrition, with so many more interesting choices available.’

  Lettie turned on him, eyes blazing. ‘Don’t you pull that stuff on me! I’m not Vicky Cameron and I won’t take it from you! You knew how old he was. Jesus, you’d think it happened just to spite you.’

  He hardly touched the dinner she cooked. She didn’t try to speak to him, for which he was thankful. When they finished clearing the table she said, ‘I’m going now. We ought to leave about eleven-thirty tomorrow. We can take a taxi to the station...What’s the matter? Don’t you remember? The circus.’

  ‘Oh, shit. I forgot all about it. I can’t go.’

  ‘No? Don’t you feel okay?’

  ‘I feel fine. I’m in no mood for a circus, that’s all.’

  ‘Neither am I, but still, she has the tickets and she’s had it planned for weeks.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Max, you’re an adult and she’s a child.’

  ‘That is certainly a fact, but I fail to see its bearing on the case.’

  ‘Oh, all right. I’m not arguing with you in this mood. Will you call her, at least, and tell her? Tell her you’re tired or something.’

  ‘You tell her, when you see her tomorrow. You can still go.’

  ‘Not without you. You’re the one she really wanted. I don’t know anything about circuses. It...wouldn’t work out.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Are we Siamese twins?’

  ‘I don’t want to watch her be disappointed! Lay off of me. I have feelings too.’

  ‘Well, if you’re not going either, then you can call her.’

  ‘You’re so damned stingy sometimes. It would mean a lot more to her if you called and explained. Such a little thing.’

  ‘I don’t owe her any explanations! I can’t help what anything means to her—I didn’t ask for it. She has parents, doesn’t she? Why must I care?’

  ‘Here we go again,’ she sighed, noisily straightening the two chairs at the empty table. ‘Congratulations, Max, you’re your old self. Fully recovered. What will she do with the tickets?’

  He didn’t bother to answer that. Lettie called. As she repeated the excuses she sank on to the couch with the phone in her lap, closing her eyes.

  After a silence she said, ‘Alison, sweetheart, calm down and listen to me. The truth is, a good friend of his had a stroke today and he saw him go off in an ambulance. He’s very depressed. He’s old and sick and he has things on his mind. It hurts to lose people. There are times when a person doesn’t feel up to going to a circus. You can understand that, can’t you?...We’re very sorry. Yes, of course. Anytime. Oh, and we’ll pay you back for the tickets.’

  When she hung up she stood and faced Max with her hands on her hips, an aging Amazon. ‘So? Accurate enough?’

  ‘Perfect. You’re perfect, I’ve told you before.’

  She grunted at him in disgust.

  ‘I mean it, baby. I’m not even being sarcastic.’

  ‘Good night.’ She left him, unkissed, u
ntouched, and with the dirty dishes still in the sink. A cloud settled over him, dense and grim like fog. It cast its weighty shadow whichever way he turned. From his chair he watched out the window as the sun finally went down, and more shadow crept across the horizon to dim the green landscape. He was moving into the valley of the shadow of death, bereft.

  CHAPTER 11

  ‘I CAN UNDERSTAND,’ SHE said to Lettie, ‘but I still don’t think it’s fair. I think it’s shitty of him. In fact, I think he’s a real shit.’

  She hung up the phone in the kitchen. The house was still—Wanda and Josh had gone out to dinner with Lou and her husband. A shiver went through her, and she rubbed her shoulders, thinking of the long night ahead, with the three green tickets tucked in her notebook under the mattress. As she stood up, a hollow opened in the pit of her stomach and spread wider and wider till it was everywhere. Hunger clutched her, gnawing at her inner walls and screaming for food. She contained a vast cavern, and if she didn’t fill it, she might explode from its pushing against her bones.

  She flung open the refrigerator and jammed a cold chicken leg into her mouth, crunched the bone and sucked out the marrow. She broke a hunk of cheddar cheese off the slab and swallowed it, then tipped a container of milk to her mouth to wash it down. Three brownies from the breadbox—not as good as Lettie’s but it didn’t matter- and still the cavern cried out, unsatisfied, so she ate last night’s spaghetti out of the plastic container. A sharp pain seared through her lower stomach, on the right side. Appendicitis, it must be. She lay down on the floor and watched the second hand of the wall clock go round and round. Two, three, four times. The pain kept stabbing. How many more rounds till she was dead? She didn’t even care. If he didn’t give a damn about her after all this time, well, neither did she. If only she had never met him—he had caused nothing but trouble since the very first day. And after everything, he turned out to be not at all what he pretended. Just a mean old man. Wanda and Josh would come home from the restaurant to find her dead on the kitchen floor, with not even a note explaining. She closed her eyes to wait, but gradually the pain went away. When she got to her feet she felt heavy and sick. All the things she had eaten were rolling around at the bottom of her stomach, bumping into each other.

  It was almost dark out. She curled up in Wanda’s and Josh’s bed and turned on the television very loud, so she wouldn’t hear the floorboards creaking in the hall. The movie on was Sybil, about a crazy girl with sixteen different personalities, because her mother had tortured her when she was a baby, and if Josh were home he wouldn’t let her watch it; too upsetting, he would say. But she had already read the book, a year ago. In the middle of the movie she had to jump up and run to the bathroom. Bracing herself against the wall, she held her stomach and threw up.

  Hours later she woke in a daze, to feel Josh carrying her like a baby to her own bed.

  ‘And start a new day,’ the clock’s whiny voice said. She slammed down the button of the alarm. It seemed she had tossed all night, while the leaves outside rustled and funny shadows jiggled up and down her closet door. Her head felt swollen and thick, and behind her eyes was a hot sting. She sat up and pushed back the curtains. It was a sunny, still day. The leaves of the maple had a sheen, with the outline of the highest ones cut sharp against a dazzling blue sky. It would be hot later, especially in the city.

  She ran the shower as hot as she could bear it, letting it soak her hair. A year ago when she came home from the school beach trip red with sunburn, Wanda had said that a hot shower would take the sting out, and she was right.

  With her denim skirt and the clogs Wanda had bought her on sale in Bamberger’s that made her look taller, she might pass for fourteen, even fifteen. People in the city didn’t bother about strangers. Lots of runaways were never found, even though their parents put pleading messages in the papers—‘Janie, come home, we love you.’ Max had not been found either, that evening after the First World War when he sat in Penn Station eating a chocolate bar and reading a newspaper so he wouldn’t look shiftless, waiting for a train heading west. But she might not have to go that far. He had once told her that in the old days a circus could always use a willing kid. If she approached them the right way, no smart-ass stuff, just polite and firm...

  Or if she could only find those jugglers she saw two years ago, that snowy day when they drove in to the city to see the big Christmas tree. They were a family of vagabonds. Gypsies, like in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and they had made everyone gathered round look so excited and happy. They didn’t even seem to mind when the policeman broke up their act—they had just smiled and bowed to the audience, picked up the shabby hat filled with coins, and skipped off in the snow. As they disappeared around a corner she had stared after them, wishing she could go along. And she thought the girl had given her a special look when she threw her quarter into the hat. If she could find them somehow and juggle for them, maybe they would let her be part of their act.

  There was one important thing left to do. She had never written the ending. The notebook looked older and more battered than she remembered. When you’re with people every day, Wanda once said, you don’t notice how they age. But if you don’t see them for a while...

  The trapeze artist Alice pulled down with her as she fell recovers from his numerous broken bones. She is very relieved—if he were dead or crippled, it would have haunted her for life. But laid up in bed so long, with time to think things over, she decides he was really not such a great artist after all; he was kind of a phony, in fact. Unfortunately, Alice is not as lucky as he is. Perhaps the doctor didn’t sterilize his instruments when he set her broken arm—circus life is so grimy. At first she doesn’t mention the pain, thinking it a normal part of the healing process. When she finally complains it is too late: gangrene has set in. The arm has to be amputated. Still, she faces the future with determination. Lots of people are worse off. Hal, the truckdriver, with two hooks. That deaf-mute in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, except he shoots himself. But in addition to this handicap, she suspects that she may be pregnant, which is very puzzling since she has done nothing besides a few kisses and gropings with Hal, months ago. Someone must have done it to her while she was unconscious, under the anesthesia or asleep. A stranger, or maybe someone from the circus. Alice doesn’t believe in abortion. Now she will have to become mature and responsible, for the sake of her child. She hitchhikes to San Francisco, where she buys a one-way ticket for a ship sailing to the Orient. And there the story ended, as Alice, one-armed, gazing at the turbulent sea with her long blond hair whipping behind her in the wind, embarks on a new life far away, free and possibly pregnant.

  She smacked the notebook shut. She could read it over later—meanwhile she had to finish packing. The last thing to go in the knapsack was the book she had borrowed from Max a week ago, And Then There Were None. He didn’t know he would never get it back. She picked up the elephant bank on her dresser, and noticed a tiny white box that had fallen behind it. The ring from Arizona that Josh gave her last fall—she had totally forgotten it! Guiltily, she took it out and slipped it on her middle finger. He would be hurt if he found she had left it behind. In the bank were thirteen dollars and forty-seven cents; that, plus the eighteen dollars she would get from returning the two tickets, should be plenty for a start.

  It was time to get moving. She took a few steps towards the door, but her knees felt funny. She returned to sit on the bed, with a hand on the bulging knapsack beside her. The hard edges of books and sneakers jutted from beneath the canvas. Was she really going to do this wild thing? What would she say to people? Where would she eat? Where would she sleep? What would happen at night, when she woke in the dark and saw the creeping shadows in strange rooms? Or in tents, or trailers?

  Through the branches just outside her window she could see two houses across the street, identical to her own, each with a car parked in the driveway and a bike lying on the flagstone path. On each lawn, a man sat on a lawn mower. Inside, the w
omen must be in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. The kids would be out soon, riding their bikes up and down the street until they were called for lunch. Then they would play ball and maybe ride some more, till dinner. When they grew up, after countless lunches and dinners, they would have houses of their own, lawns, kitchens, children, and so on, and so on. She could end up exactly like that. She rose and hoisted the knapsack on to her back. It wasn’t forever. She would return someday, to see Wanda and Josh and to meet the baby. By then it would not be a baby any more. It might be something like her. She could tell it stories and whisper secrets to it about exotic distant places, and maybe it would want to come away too.

  Wanda and Josh lay sunning themselves on beach chairs out in front. Wanda was wearing white shorts and a huge white maternity blouse that made her body look like a pillow on suntanned legs.

  ‘Is this really the same Alison?’ Josh looked her up and down. ‘Wow! I haven’t seen you in a skirt in years. Did you grow while I was away?’

  ‘It’s the clogs, not me.’

  ‘You look like you’re going somewhere.’

  ‘I am. I’m going to the circus.’

  ‘I didn’t know about that. Who’s taking you?’

  ‘It’s okay. She’s going with those old people from the home,’ Wanda said in a tired voice. ‘I forgot to tell you. You were in North Dakota. You’re away so much—I can’t remember every little thing.’ She picked up her coffee mug from the grass and sipped.

  ‘Them again! I thought that was all over, after that night.’