He’d say, “Your mother has been a nervous wreck. Do you have any money?”
I had $48.16 plus the credit card in my name that was billed to Henry. I had a set of gym clothes, a new notebook, a new copy of King Lear, an empty thermos, and half a bottle of paregoric. I had a vague plan to kill myself.
“Where you going?” asked my companion.
I shrugged. “I had a fight with my mother.”
“Is that right?” She had the face of a warrior, mapped with battles. When she drank from her cup she screwed up her face as if bracing herself against another enemy.
“Yes ma’am,” I replied.
“What y’all fuss about?”
I pushed my glasses up on my nose and tightened my pony-tail. Then I shrugged again. “People never really fight about what they’re fighting about. It’s always something else.”
“Ain’t that the truth. You hear about that man went and shot his wife after forty-five years of marriage? Said she burned the cornbread. Shot her right at the supper table.”
“In the face?”
“Lord yes, honey. What make a man go and do that evil thang?”
“I don’t know.”
With a grimace, she finished off her toddy. “That be the devil,” she confirmed. “The devil hisself. Lord have mercy on us.”
After my blowout with Florida, Henry called me into his study. Over the years, Florida and Shirley had been gradually redecorating Owl Aerie, stripping hallucinogenic wallpaper, replacing beanbags with Queen Anne chairs, and rolling up shag carpets, but some vestiges remained. Henry’s study was still done up in relentless brown with chrome accents and track lighting. Shirley had tried to compensate for the monochromatic color scheme by varying patterns; the result was a dark confusion.
Wearing the orange smoking jacket Florida had given him last Christmas, Henry paced the plaid carpet with his hands clasped behind his back while I struggled to sit up straight in a brown-striped mamason chair.
“You want to be different,” he was saying. “You want to go way, way out there.” He raised his arms in the bright silk sleeves. Everything she bought for him was orange, to bring him out, and everything he bought for her was blue, to calm her down. “Way out!” he cried, “into . . . into . . . outer space.” His eyes widened when he looked at me. “Don’t you?”
“It appeals to me,” I said.
Shaking his head, Henry dropped his arms. “What do you think is out there?” We tried to stare each other down. “Honey, let me tell you what is out there. Nothing.” I blinked. “There is nothing out there. Absolutely nothing. You’re going to get out there . . . to . . . Mars, or somewhere”—he waved angrily at Mars—“and you’re going to find yourself alone.” He smiled sadly. “And what are you going to do then?”
Before I could answer, Florida’s house shoes gave a warning clack, clack, clack in the hallway, and the door clicked open. Her face was smeared with cold cream, and her eyes were swollen from crying.
“What are you all doing in here?” she asked, but she hung back in the doorway as if we might chase her away. Henry and I remained silent. “It’s late,” she said sharply, taking a determined step forward. “You all need to be getting to bed. What are you talking about?”
As much as I feared Florida in her blaze, I preferred her fury to this. In the thin black nylon robe, with the white cream on her face, she looked scrawny and obscenely naked, like a plucked bird. I wanted to cover her, to hold her. She wasn’t much of a hugger, though. She always twisted away, leaving me with my arms hanging, feeling foolish. Henry hugged. He held me until my blood ran smooth and warm, and once more, I belonged to the single body of the human race. So I didn’t touch Florida. I saw her hovering there by the door, white-faced, plucked, and scared, and I lashed out with my tongue.
“We’re plotting your death.”
She jerked as if she’d been hit; then she began to bawl. I mumbled an apology, but it was too late. Turning to Henry, she said flatly, “Either she goes, or I go. Choose.”
When she had gone to her room, weeping, Henry paced the floor. “If I had to choose,” he said with a sigh, looking as if he were already drifting behind the gently rustling pages of the Wall Street Journal, into the relative calm of the stock market, “I would choose your mother.”
WHEN THE BUS pulled into Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, my friend was sleeping. Her wig had shifted, revealing a gray braid beneath the red wig.
Outside the bus station, the rain beat down on my head. Water splashed across my espadrilles, bleeding red dye into my new white socks. A sign with a neon palm tree advertised a room for all the money in my pocket. I was dizzy with hunger. In the window of a bar, a neon lady in a bikini flashed back and forth, swinging her hips. What Henry said about me was true: “You just don’t think!” I was not good at thinking. Before I reached the logical conclusion to an argument, an obstacle always appeared: something fast and dazzling, something so wild it made my heart jump, made me want to live!
This time it was a Ferris wheel. I saw it at the edge of the strip—a ring of colored lights rolling majestically through the gray sky like a wheel on Ezekiel’s chariot. I stepped to the edge of the road and, for the first time in my life, raised my thumb. A red truck with an umbrella opened over the roof, spoke hubcaps, and the head of a baby doll stuck on the bumper screeched to a stop and backed up. One of the back lights was missing, but the other one shimmered over my path as I splashed across the wet pavement.
“Jim,” said the swarthy, toothless little man behind the wheel. “Which way?”
“Louise Peppers. Forward.” Between us, a chimpanzee strapped into a child carrier held the umbrella that opened through a hole in the roof. “Hi,” I said.
For a moment, she gawked; then in a flash, she reached a long arm over my lap and pulled my shoe off my foot, waving the wet espadrille and hooting. She herself was smartly dressed in striped overalls and yellow rain boots.
“That there is Daisy. Apple of my eye. Daisy, reach in the back and get her my flannel shirt.” Daisy crossed her arms and stuck her lip out. “Don’t give me none of your sass, girl. Get that shirt.” Turning her small, elegant head away from him, the chimp bared her teeth at me in an enormous leer. Then she spit. “Don’t make me stop this car,” said Jim. “Shit. Rain’s really coming down now. Louise Peppers, open your window there and reach for that string. When I pull my wiper, you wait a second, then pull yours.” I was glad to open the window because the car smelled rank, as if Daisy had needed a diaper change for some time, but I had some trouble pulling my wiper in synchronicity with the other one. Jim didn’t seem to mind. He steered with one hand and pulled his wiper with the other, talking all the while. He was missing some fingers and teeth, but he didn’t seem dangerous.
“My Christian name is Jungle Jim. Mother named me that ‘cause I kept her house filled with strays. Down in Louisiana we had alligators in the bathtub, snakes in the potty, and a panther in the parlor. Not to mention the cats and dogs—had up to thirty-seven at one time. Once I got me a black bear cub— cutest damn thing you ever saw. He’d eat a whole jar of peanut butter at a time. Then one day his paw got too big—he couldn’t get that jar off to save his life! Tore the house up, trying to—Daisy, get a shirt for the lady ‘fore I have to take your head off. Ain’t she cute? She’s got a little brother back at the house. Spencer. Now he’s shy. Ain’t like her. But smart! Personally, I think he’s ready to read. I’d teach him myself, but I never went past the third grade. Tried to get him a tutor back in Mississippi, but they were all too stuck up. I’ll tell you one thing—a chimp, and most animals for that matter, is smarter than most people I know. And a hell of a lot nicer. But I pick up strays, can’t help it. Saw you standing there wet to the bone and said to Daisy, ‘We got to pick her up.’”
Afraid that he was going to offer me a warm bowl of milk, I smiled and said, “I’m not really a stray. I’m traveling.”
“You a carnie?”
I had some vagu
e notion that carnie meant carnivore, and feeling that meat eaters might be repugnant to this die-hard animal lover, I said I was not. He looked disappointed. Daisy chose that moment to hand me the filthiest, smelliest rag I had ever touched in my life. “You put that shirt on over your dress,” said Jungle Jim generously. “Don’t want you to catch a chill.” Miserably, breathing through my mouth, I jerked my arm back and forth in the rain, trying to see out the window. I was about to ask the driver to let me out when I saw the Ferris wheel in front of us.
“This is us,” said Jungle Jim. “You want I should carry you on down the road some, or you want out here?” I hugged his dirty shirt closer around my shoulders, shivered perceptibly, and gave him my best sad eyes.
“Aw, hell,” he said. “My show ain’t for another hour, and this rain will keep most of the rubes at home tonight. Come on over to the trailer and let me get you a cup of hot chocolate.”
I jumped out of the truck into the back lot of the Arthur Reese Traveling Show. Hoarse shouts broke through a rollicking circus tune: “Three rings for a dollar, whose the next winner! Step right up! Step right up! Popcorn! Hot popcorn!”
“You know that song?” asked Jungle Jim. “That’s the carnie song, ‘Le Sabre.’” In the rain, Daisy did a brief dance. A clown walked by, holding an umbrella over his head. On his heels walked a dog with a wet cat perched on its back. A faint strain of Frank Sinatra crooned beneath the lighted Ferris wheel.
“Party tonight, Warren?” Jungle Jim asked the clown.
“If you say so. Who’s the new addition to your menagerie?”
“This here is Louise Peppers. Louise, this is Lollibells.”
“Lord have mercy on us,” said the black man in white face. He waved a white-gloved hand at me. “Watch out for hair balls,” he said.
“You ain’t funny,” said Jungle Jim.
“You, however, are a gas,” said the clown, and walked off with the dog and cat behind him.
Slogging through the mud, I pondered what a remarkable thing a college education was turning out to be, and then, with a cramp in my heart, I thought about poor Florida and Henry, worrying themselves to death.
Chapter Ten
IN THE MORNING I woke up beside a snoring man. I tried to recall his name by going through the alphabet, but this gave me a headache. Afraid that I would throw up on him, I got out of the narrow, rumpled bed and found a bathroom. The water from the faucet made me gag and the orange juice I found in a battered refrigerator scorched my throat, but at last I found a single can of beer hidden behind a rotting lump of lettuce. The drink cleared my head; when I looked around again, I saw that I was in a trailer.
In Counterpoint, trailers sprouted like weeds in forgotten corners of town. Henry liked to drive by them, frowning at the trash in the barren yards, the cardboard on the windows, the grubby barefoot children gaping back at us.
“How can people live like that?” he’d wonder aloud, and Florida would answer, “Riffraff.”
I’d always liked the sound of the word.
Although most of my sexual fantasies about T. C. Curtis had taken place in trailers, until now I’d never been inside of one. This was an old trailer with warped walls, torn linoleum, and a rusty bucket sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor to catch the rain. It smelled of mold, cigarettes, and stale whiskey.
Posters of the Arthur Reese Traveling Show covered the stained walls, introducing circus wonders: POPEYE—THE MAN WITH ELASTIC EYEBALLS; DEVIL BABY—BORN WITH REAL HORNS AND A TAIL—ATE HIS OWN MOTHER; and FIFI THE HEADLESS WOMAN, picturing the decapitated gal holding her head under one arm. I recognized Lollibells, grinning down at me from a poster plastered across the ceiling, and Jungle Jim, featured with Daisy and Spencer on his lap, a gorilla standing by his side like a wife, and a parrot on his head. There was a middle-aged woman wrapped in a python, a pissed-off midget, and a Gorilla Girl—a bikini-clad chick in a gorilla mask. She signed her poster “With Love” right on the crotch. Hanging next to Gorilla Girl, a banner announced ZANE WILDER— THE HUMAN DRAGON! A collage of photos showed the dragon swallowing fire, swallowing a sword, and biting into a light bulb. He was tall and lean and buff, with a flat belly, bronze skin, long red hair, and big, crazy green eyes. His teeth were as bright as ice.
In the dim bedroom, I looked at the snoring hump under the sheet. Red hair fanned out over the pillow. I tiptoed closer and examined a freckled shoulder and the shapely hand resting on his his smooth golden chest—a wedding ring. In my head, I heard Florida’s voice: “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself now!”
Outside, I sat down on the concrete block steps in front of the door, and not knowing what else to do, opened King Lear. I skimmed the introduction, then closed the book again.
I wandered out along the chain-linked fence, staring glumly at the empty midway. There were the shells of hankypanks. They taught me the word last night, and I laughed at the sound of it, laughed as we staggered through the crowd of rubes waving hot dollars in their fists, shouting winning numbers for teddy bears. The song “Le Sabre” blared through a speaker at the carousel. It made me want to throw my money away, do cartwheels, kiss strangers. A cop on duty picked up the play rifle and, with a cruel squint, tried to shoot the piano player in the back. “Aim again, Officer!” cried the carnie. “One more try, just one more try.” The policeman was there for the rest of the night, passing dollars over the counter, squinting into the toy gun. This morning the abandoned hankypanks looked like chicken coops.
Circling the carousel that had spun in a ring of pretty lights, up, down, and around—a tiny galaxy of stars and ponies, “Step right up, step right up, put your darlin’ on a pony, step right up”—I stared ruefully at the scarred horses with lopsided stirrups, a chipped hoof, a tail lopped off in midcurl. The whip that had snapped through the glowing black sky like a biting snake now lay dead on the ground. At last I came to the Ferris wheel I’d seen from the bus station. Chaise volonte, they called it. Up close, it had been even more fantastic, a wheel of colored light turning through the sky in a concert of Sinatra tunes: “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Come Fly with Me,” “That’s Life”—and the night rushed back to me.
Rufus Swaziek, the operator, had confided that he hated Sinatra, but the owner of the carnival, Arthur Reese, would allow no other music on the chaise volonte.
“Means ‘flying chairs’ in Spanish,” said Rufus. He shook his head. “Arthur is a tragic man. Don’t tell nobody I told you, but he is a tragic man. I’d like to play a little disco, a little country music, but he won’t have it. He’s got to have a sad song, see? Tragic. Puts the damn thing over here in the corner with me. I ain’t complaining, but now and then I’d like to hear something a little more upbeat, more modern. It affects your brain rythmns to hear this shit all night long. I go to bed depressed, wake up depressed. Now I ain’t blaming him—he’s just playing the hand the Lord dealt him, and all the money in the world don’t change that, but it affects my brain rhythms. You put me over on the merry-go-round, and I might be dancing to ‘Le Sabre.’ That’s the carnie tune.”
Rufus didn’t look like he’d ever danced in his life. He was a wiry little guy of no particular age: bowlegged, pockmarked, tattooed, also missing some teeth and a heart valve. The other carnies called him Tic Toc because his artificial heart valve sounded like a clock. Over his scraggly ponytail, dyed the color of summer squash, he wore a greasy cap. “Now git down,” he said after I’d been riding for half an hour. “Arthur will kick my butt for giving free rides.” Then I passed him my small amber bottle. “Shit!” he cried. “Where did you get this shit? What did you call it? Parachute?”
“Paregoric. It’s for menstrual cramps.”
“Goddamn!” He ducked his head as my chair swung up for another round on the chaise volonte. “I wished I was a girl.”
Above me, painted onto the gilded ceiling of the ride, were portraits of ladies—old-fashioned ladies with piled hair, pink cheeks, milky white necks, and lips painted into bows.
There was a green-eyed redhead, a blue-eyed brunette, and a brown-eyed blonde. Chugging my paregoric, I began to feel about these ladies the way Catholics feel about the Virgin Mary. While Frank Sinatra crooned that this was life, or that was life, or there was life on the moon, or something wonderful, Rufus switched the spotlight from green to violet, and my chair swooped up to the stars. I was flying.
In the mean light of day, the chaise volonte was a piece of junk. A hot breeze came up, smelling of dead fish, melting asphalt, cocoa butter, and salt. The lot was still empty, save for a skinny stray dog poking through an empty red-and-white popcorn box in the weeds. The flaps were down on the dingy tents, and the metal roofs of the trailers glared.
“Reality,” Florida called this. I needed a drink. I needed to get my gym clothes and Shakespeare books and go back home. I headed toward the glare of metal roofs.
Pushing the warped door open with my shoulder, I stumbled inside, blinking in the darkness. It took me a moment to realize I was in the wrong trailer. Suddenly, a light switched on, and a woman shot out the corner with a broom.
“Hold it right there!” she shouted, raising the broom.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“Who are ya?” she demanded. “What are ya doing here?” She was a big-boned woman with a round Slavic face and bright blue eyes. She had pale hair, very fine and straight, that fell past her strong shoulders. She wore a powder-blue bathrobe.
Gingerly, I backed away from her. It was the right thing to do. I had run into another animal lover, partial to strays.
“Easy now. Don’t be scared. It’s just me. Just old Madge.” She took a better look at me. “Are ya lost, honey?”
“I slept with somebody in a different trailer. I think.”
“Well fuck me running! Wrong trailer!” She slapped her knee. “Whoeee! Girl, you need a map!”
I stood stiffly in the tiny hallway, shifting in my muddy espadrilles. With a grip like a welder, she took my hand and shook it heartily. “Madge Olinick,” she said. “You’re a girl after my own heart. Wrong trailer! Wait till Arthur hears this one. I heard yous guys whooping it up last night, and I would have joined yous, but I’m Percy’s old lady now. He wraps hisself around me so tight in that bed, I have to fight him off to go to the john.”
The School of Beauty and Charm Page 18