Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [30]
CHAPTER SIX
I took to the trapeze as if it were a part of my body I hadn’t known existed. Swinging in space, the bookshelves on either side of me, my family didn’t matter anymore. The kids in the square, the endless fields in Oakley that stretched and stretched past the horizon—none of it mattered. It was like reading Sister Carrie but better, because this time it was all me.
“Now swing,” Mary said. “Kick out your legs. Get comfortable up there.”
With each moment passing, I felt more present in the world, more sure. I reached up my hands on either side, bent my head back and looked at the ceiling beams.
“I am comfortable,” I said, as the air ruffled against my hair and cheeks.
“The first trick,” she said, “is the knee hang. You’re going to separate your knees, grab on to the bar, and then drop. You’ll end up hanging from your knees, your hands pressed together between them.”
I could already see it. In one instant I did the move; before she could even reach me I let my body fall and my legs grasp the bar. I swung back and forth, hanging there, the world turned upside down. I let go with my hands, closed my eyes.
Mary gasped and rushed over. When she heard me laughing, her body relaxed.
“That’s too dangerous!” she said. “You could hurt yourself.”
Her disapproval couldn’t dull the bliss I felt as I swung my arms back to the bar. Mary reached out for me and grabbed my hands, flipping me up so that I was standing on the floor again.
I jumped around, already longing to be back in the air.
“Now hold the bar and fall under it,” Mary said. “Like that. Press your legs up to it, straight across, like doing a split.”
I did, and looked down at her surprised, open expression. “That’s exactly right,” she said.
My body moved of its own accord; my ankles slipped into the sides, where the bar met the rope. I started swinging that way, my hands still on the bar.
“The ankle hang,” she said quietly. She walked over, reached up, and placed her hands over mine. “Now hold with your ankles,” she said. “Hold tight.”
I did, and gently, she told me to unclasp my hands. “I’ve got you,” she whispered. I let go then and let my body fall back. She stood next to me and under me, making sure I wouldn’t fall. I stretched my body backward and waved my arms out.
“Like this?”
She hunched under me, her hands stretching toward me, hovering just under my skin. “How does that feel?”
“Nice,” I said. I couldn’t articulate the way my limbs felt loose and soft, my body completely without barriers, fluid as water. I don’t know that I’d ever been happier than I was right then.
“You are so lucky you have that body, Tessa,” she said, as I rocked back and forth. “It took me weeks to do that. You’re a natural.”
It was so easy: I learned the gazelle, where the left leg is straight, the right leg bent up to the front of the right rope, the rest of the body hanging underneath. I learned the toe hang and single toe hang, where you drop from the bar from just one foot.
“What about you?” I asked one afternoon. “Don’t you want to take up the trapeze again?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Tessa,” she said.
“Just once?” I asked. “I want to see!”
“After watching you, I think I never should have bothered at all!” she said. “I was all wrong for it, you know. All wrong for lots of things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, and for a moment it seemed like her hair had gotten curlier and her eyes more blue. Like something was pressing down on her. Then she looked up at me and smiled. To my surprise, she bent down and dipped her hands in the chalk.
“Okay,” she said, her face open and suddenly radiant. “What the hell?” And with one quick movement she hurled herself to the bar and flipped up on it until she was sitting, swinging back and forth, her legs crossed beneath her and hands gripping the ropes. Her face glowed as she began swinging faster, back and forth, and then pulled herself up to her feet in one graceful movement. In the next second she lifted her feet from the bar and threw them over her head,