Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [53]
I didn’t realize that I was grieving still, that the grief had exhausted me and wiped out all desire for the future. Often I thought of Riley Farm and the hedges that lined the front yard. What my father had been doing the day he’d carved that giant peacock with the leaves spraying out behind him. How it had taken weeks for the branches and leaves to grow back again, though they’d never taken on the same shape they’d had before. I thought of that feeling I’d had, crawling into bed each night and lifting the quilt to my shoulders, that feeling of being home, as terrifying and sad as it was. You can’t just shuck it off, I thought, just as Mary had said. I spent hours imagining my life, rewriting it, as I bent over the sewing machine, as I sat alone in the lunchroom while the other girls chattered, as I wandered the city streets and stared at the lit-up windows, wondering if I would always be alone, if there would ever be another person for me to love.
Slowly the winter gave way to spring, and then flowers burst out of the flower boxes hanging from every window. The trees that dotted the streets turned a bursting green. And after many weeks and months of the grief that clung to me like ice, I, too, felt ready to come back to life, and was able to part that dullness, pull it back ever so slightly and reveal something new, a longing that came from deep within my muscles and blood. One day in April, alone in my room after work, I placed my hands on my flat torso and realized it was mine, my own body, a body that could twist in the air and crumple into a box two feet wide. And then I missed the rope and the trapeze so feverishly that I almost cried out. I left my room and walked the streets until I found a hardware store, where I bought a length of heavy rope. Later that same night I tiptoed down to the basement with a candle and hung the rope from one of the pipes crossing the ceiling, using a ladder I borrowed from Esther. For a dollar more each week, she said, she didn’t mind.
The first time I swung up into the air, my muscles ached and burned and my balance was so off that I kept slamming into the wall. But it didn’t matter. I worked hard, pushing myself. I returned to the basement after work each night, anxious to climb up to that rope and practice. With one turn after another, I forced my creaky muscles into submission. Seeing me huddled over those uniforms in the daytime, nobody would have guessed that I spent my nights flinging myself into one rotation after another, in the air.
The Velasquez Circus would come any day now, and I was ready.
But the circus did not come that spring, or that summer, and I began to get nervous. I worked and saved every penny I could, eating the beans and bread and soup Esther provided in the evenings and buying small containers of tuna in the factory cafeteria every day for lunch. I stopped visiting the five-and-dime, as if denying myself small pleasures would make the circus come faster. I began to wonder if I’d missed it—if the circus had come and gone without my noticing, if I’d been too lost in all that reflecting and wandering. I was sick of myself and my thoughts, and I couldn’t stand another year in the factory. If the circus didn’t come to me by winter, I decided, I would just have to set out once again and find it myself.
I continued to practice in the basement until I collapsed into bed each night, exhausted. Days and weeks and months passed. I worried and waited, wondering if my life would ever truly begin. And then finally, after a long, blistering summer that baked the sidewalks, well into an autumn that sprinkled leaves over the city sidewalks and