Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [31]
The next second, without warning, she dropped her whole body down until she was hanging by her ankles and her hands were nearly sweeping across the floor. Before I could even react, she flipped back up and hung from her hands, twisting her body again so that her waist pressed against the bar, her palms leaning down into it. She kept going, in a whirl of movement: jacking her legs up and to the sides, tossing herself over and under the bar, and then, finally, tossing herself off the bar and landing with a tiny flip and flourish.
She collapsed to the ground, out of breath. I clapped my hands, elated, and then collapsed with her. When I looked up at the shelves and the books, it seemed amazing that we were still there, in Mercy Library. For a few minutes I had been utterly transported, outside time and space.
“I’m going to be dying tomorrow,” she said, between gulps of air.
She turned her head toward me. I had never seen her more beautiful.
I became obsessed with the trapeze. Over the next year I practiced whenever I could, with Mary and alone, staying past when the library closed, past when Mary slipped out into the night to meet various lovers or just to be alone with her thoughts, and her demons. Mary agreed to keep the bar suspended from the beams and even rigged a tiny hook to keep it pulled back and out of the way of library customers.
I practiced so hard that my muscles ached and I felt myself solidifying into a hard mass. My hands cracked and bled from twisting over the bar; sometimes I hobbled to the library in the morning—through the dead leaves, and snow, and spring foliage—unable to move my arms or bend my knees, my head still clouded from the dreamless sleep of the night before. I was like a raw wound but as solid as granite, the most substantial I had ever been in my life.
As time passed, my body changed in other ways, too, as if my body’s changing and Mary’s coming into my life were intimately connected. She influenced me in so many ways, anyway: I also began to carry around the scent of cinnamon and cloves, trailing it behind me and letting it wrap around me when I stood still; I began piling books on the library’s front desk, running my fingers across their spines as if they were cats; I lined my arms with bracelets, bracelets I was constantly picking off the ground as they slid off; I grew my hair, too, letting it swarm from my head and past my shoulders. Though my hair was straight and thin, I let months pass without brushing it so that, like Mary, I could claim tangles and knots and ruin my hair with combs whenever the occasion arose. Of course I would never really be like Mary. And I was never beautiful like her until I was in the air.
Maybe it was the way I took Mary into me that made my father look at me in a new light. One day when I was about fourteen, I was walking through the house absentmindedly, dreaming of the Velasquez Circus, when I felt the strangest prickling on my skin. It was like the moment when Mary Finn had sought me out in front of the courthouse, except that now I felt no dizzying excitement of love like I’d experienced then, only the uneasy and dismal sense that I’d been found out.
The living room was the same as always. I looked at the thin burlap sofa so uncomfortable that no one was ever found stretched out upon it, at the bowls of plastic oranges and pears decorating the windowsills, at the splintering, sagging floor, and, finally, at the rocking chair that moved back and forth like a little minnow. That was when I realized the chair was filled with two eyes as big as suns, crackling into my skin and down my flat body. That was when I saw my father, whose gaze pinned me to the spot, trapping me in that little burlapped room my mother had designed to the discomfort of us all. There was nothing natural about it: nothing natural about that house and my being