Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [57]
Suddenly music filled the air, from the big top, and everyone started moving toward it. For all the wonders of the midway, it was clear that the real magic took place within the tent that rose up in the middle of everything. Every person I passed seemed alive with the same excitement I felt; I could close my eyes and hear the whoosh of the trapeze, see the darkness shrouding the audience, their eyes glowing out of it, and I could hear the beating of rain. It all ran together—the sounds and smells and images that made up my memory and my past, which was always Mary’s past and would always be Mary’s past before mine. What had she felt, I wondered, as she stood outside the big top for the first time, surrounded by the talkers, the banners announcing the most astonishing, impossible feats and creatures? I imagined her next to me then: not the Mary I had known but the young Mary, the one who’d followed Juan Galindo and arrived at the same place I was standing now.
The talkers continued to yell into the crowds, luring us into each tent, seducing us.
“Girl!” a voice called. It seemed far away and right in my ear, all at once. I looked up. A fortune-teller sat inside a partially opened tent, beckoning me in. I stared at her, then slowly pushed through the curtain and sat across from her, leaning forward until my chin touched the table-top. She smiled and her face was like a planet, covered in pockmarks and dropping from her bones. A sign saying “Fortunes, 20 cents” hung above her.
“Here,” I said, pulling out two dimes from my skirt pocket.
“Let me see your palm.”
I hesitated, then pushed my fist across the table and unclenched it. She put her fingertips on my palm, and I flinched, then looked up at her.
“Such extraordinary hands,” she said, studying them. “Hands like this are special. Your love line runs right to your wrist, do you see? You will have a great love in the future, not too long from now. More than one.”
“Yes,” I said, excitedly. “The trapeze, the circus.”
“No,” she said. “A man, and not only one.” She winked at me. “You’ll be a heartbreaker, you know. You wait and see.”
I stared at her dumbly, then laughed out loud. “You’re making fun of me.”
“I never tease about love,” she said solemnly, watching me with her large, soft eyes.
I shook my head and stepped back into the crowd, let the fortune-teller’s words sink into me as I gave myself over to the spangles and the talkers’ ballies, luring us inside the tents.
The sun started to drop in the sky, behind the line of train cars, and everything became more frenzied and wild. The Ferris wheel exploded with light. The crowds had grown even larger, though I had hardly thought it possible. I seemed to be the only one alone. The air smelled like powdered sugar and fresh dough. I bought myself a stick of spun sugar, which tingled and melted on my tongue, then a candy apple I spent an hour licking the coating from. I held the sugar into the light to watch it sparkle and melt. The grass and dust crunched under my feet. Lights started to shoot on everywhere, popping like little explosions from the strings that looped from one tent to another.
The crowds pushed toward the big top, the midway tents started blacking out their lights, and the circus music grew louder and more frantic, pulling us to the main show. I stepped into the big top, past a starry black curtain and into the main space. Grass blades jutted through the sawdust. The smell was sharp