Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [75]
“A while,” I said. “I just started again last spring.”
“With just a rope?”
I nodded.
“Crazy chica,” she said, shaking her head.
Mr. Velasquez sighed. “Can you do the trapeze, ladder, rings, silks?” he asked.
“Everything,” I lied.
“Next season, then,” he said, turning to Carlos before abruptly leaving the room. “Make sure she’s ready.”
Lollie laughed out loud and hugged me then.
Carlos reached out and took my hand.
Mauro leaned in and whispered in my ear. “That trick will make you famous,” he said.
After that it was a mad dash back to the train cars, for them to get ready before the show. Lollie grabbed my hand and I sat with her as she slipped on a soft purple costume that caught the dim trailer light and cast it about the walls.
“You’ll need to dream up some costumes now, too,” she laughed, as she streaked her eyes with pencil and glitter.
I caught a glimpse of myself in her mirror. With the Ferris wheel lit up behind me and Lollie in front of me, as glamorous as a movie star, I looked radiant. My eyes were bright blue and my face flushed and pretty.
“Thank you, Lollie,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Thank you. I had no idea.”
When I ran out with her toward the tent, the show was already about a third over. We ducked through the opening in back and stayed behind the main curtain, along with the other performers who had yet to go on. I noticed then how everyone was looking at me and whispering. The brothers all walked over together and shook my hand, and even Geraldo gave me a short nod. Ana ran up and wrapped her arms around my waist.
“I’m so happy you’re staying!” she said.
It was an unreal feeling, and I just let it wash over me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everything seemed to change after that. Every morning I sat up in the train car and looked around, astonished that it hadn’t all vanished as I slept, the lot swarming with life outside my window, the Ferris wheel and the banners. All of it. I could step from the trailer and be in this world that was so ragtag and so glamorous, everyone spread over the lot, talking and laughing and working and cooking and sewing, and then, beyond it, the sideshow, which was its own separate world, equally wonderful. All these things that seemed so unreal were just how I lived now, I realized. I was constantly feeling like I was in a dream, like I was a character in a book I’d read. I thought of the poem Mary had read me once, “The Lady of Shallot,” and how I had felt that river, that look of Lancelot, while the rest of the world had slipped away. I walked slowly, feeling the sequins on the costumes hanging in Lollie’s closet, leaning down to touch the grass on the lot, the sawdust in the tent. I’d walk into the menagerie, smell the thick scent of animals, feel the fur through the steel cages.
No one would ever have believed it, that little Tessa Riley could be part of such a world, or that I would heading to Mexico for the winter to train with the rest of the circus folk. There were only two weeks left until the end of the season, and the new one wouldn’t begin until spring. Some of the performers left for other shows and returned the following spring, Lollie explained to me, while others stuck around, performing in the scaled-down winter shows throughout that part of the world. From December to March of each year the circus worked that way, with most of the performers using the time to settle down into normal lives and prepare themselves for the next season. Many of them met each day at the tents to prepare new acts or perfect old ones before the next season began. The Velasquez Circus holed up in Mexico City, while the Ramirezes retreated to their family villa just outside it and rode in each day to practice. Mary had never explained the intricacies of circus life, and I listened carefully.
There was much work for me to do, Lollie said. The trapeze was the main act of any aerial troupe, so it was important that I become as comfortable flying as I was on the ropes. There were several other aerial acts I could probably master in time for