Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [58]
Within minutes the place seemed crammed with all of Kansas City. I stared, trying to memorize everything: the way the paint swirled through the sawdust, spelling out VELASQUEZ, the way the top of the tent sloped down, jangling with ropes and wires and hooks that seemed to crisscross the whole ceiling. If I squinted, I thought, I could see Marionetta spinning in the air, a blur of light darting from one side of the center ring to the other.
Suddenly the whole place went black. A hush fell over the crowd, as if we were leaning in, waiting to hear a secret. I held my breath and waited.
When the lights snapped back on, everything seemed to break open. Pure white horses, sparkling with rhinestones, ran out like streaks of light from the back of the tent, with beautiful women perched on top of them. A voice boomed out from the center of the ring, and a tall, black-clad man stepped out to introduce the famous Vadala horses. The world turned inside out, and the glare of the lights, the rhinestones, the wonderful pure white horses’ manes, the snap and crack of the whips and the bars and the wires, the boom of the ringmaster’s voice—all of it just whirled around me like another body, ready to pull me into itself. Under the lights everything would be different, I thought, with a purity and a certainty I hadn’t felt before. Once I was under those circus lights, dressed in rhinestones and glitter, flying through the air—then everything, all the pain and hurt and longing within me, would disappear. I was seventeen, ready to slip out of my past and create a new one—a brand-new one, shiny as glass. Here was my life, I thought. The one I had always hoped for.
They brought out the cats that jumped through hoops of fire and stood on their hind legs; the clowns who stumbled and leapt across the floor; the girl who hung from her hair and did flips in the air, like a strange insect or bird. I saw the contortionists who could rest their toes on the tops of their heads, their stomachs against the ground. We, the audience, were bathed in blackness, and the performers passed in front of us like a dream. I longed for Mary as I had imagined her, for a friend I could turn to and say, “Look! Look what they can do!” For a brief moment I imagined Geraldine next to me, her face radiant and open the way she had been the night I’d first told her about Mary and the trapeze. “You would love this,” I whispered, and then winced as I imagined my father slapping her face at the dinner table, the way she would always just sit there dumbly and grow dark red.
I blinked the thought away.
Next came an act Mary had told me all about, the Flying Ramirez Brothers, Lollie’s four luminous brothers who could do flips across the wire, ride bicycles over it, and walk across stacked on top of each other, seemingly unaffected by the laws of gravity. I hadn’t realized that men could be as beautiful as Mary had been. I was used to old farmers and foremen; I had never seen a man who could look your direction and make you gasp. The girls in the audience went wild; one woman fainted on the other side of the tent. The brothers did not seem to notice any of the commotion they caused. The wire was just a gleaming silver strand stretching across the tent, but the brothers played with it, teased it, made us believe that at any second they might go crashing to the floor. They never even came close. It was as if they were linked to the wire by their breath, heartbeats, and skin.
Then Lollie herself appeared with Flying Geraldo, soaring across the room. She was dressed like a yellow butterfly, wings hanging off her back, and somersaulted three times before reaching out and grasping Geraldo’s hands. She balanced on her head as the bar spun and swung underneath her, and she hung from her feet, hooked into the sides of the trapeze. She was as beautiful