Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [76]
“How long has your family lived there?” I asked one night before a performance, as I watched her line her eyes with thick black pencil. I thought of Riley Farms, the name marked out on our gate and windowsills. My father was so proud of that land and would tell anyone within hearing distance about how his great-great-grandfather had bought it in exchange for a blind cow and a bucketful of seed.
“Our villa has been in the family for hundreds of years,” Lollie said, never taking her eyes off the mirror yet making me feel like she was whispering in my ear, “ever since our ancestors set down roots and planted a thousand fruit trees, selling the fruit throughout Mexico. They grew rich and fat until a terrible case of wanderlust afflicted the sons and daughters and almost wiped out the whole line. That’s how we became a circus family. Our ancestors took to the roads and learned the gypsy arts. They beat on pots for money, hammered out necklaces from bits of silver, and learned to bend and tumble. When one of the sons married a girl from a Russian circus, they finally organized enough to form their own show, the Fantastic Ramirez Circus.”
“That sounds wonderful,” I said. I mouthed the word: wanderlust.
“They wandered and performed and made men, women, and children fall in love with them, setting up the circus in the centers of big cities and tiny villages or performing in countries so vast and spread out that people would travel on donkeys or by foot for miles to see them. Oh, they were something, Tessita. Devoted fans wrote so many long letters to them that the poor local postman had to carry two sacks on his route each day—one for my family, and one for everyone else. And though my ancestors went as far as Russia and China, they always found themselves returning to just outside Mexico City. It became habit for them to return to the villa every winter and take off with the circus again in the spring. They sold off all of their land except for the villa we have now. You can still see the last of the lemon and orange trees there. Every day we drink the fruit for breakfast, and I used to pour lemon juice through my hair to make it lighter.”
Lollie smiled at me, and in that moment she reminded me so much of Mary that I wondered for a second if it was from Lollie that Mary had learned to tell stories. From this great bright family of circus gypsies, so different from the pale, rain-soaked folk she’d left behind. At those moments I felt so close to Mary that I could almost touch her, and yet, at the same time, I felt the most piercing sense of loss, knowing I was just imagining her and how she would have been. I could never truly know what her experience had been, how she had felt when she’d sat right in the place I was now.
“I wish I had come from a family like yours,” I breathed, as Lollie twisted her hair into a knot at the base of her neck.
“It is nice,” she said, turning to me, “to know where you belong. But you have your gifts too, niña.”
I was regaled with stories during those first days as we traveled down through Oklahoma, all the way through Texas, watching the landscape become more and more sparse, and made our way into Mexico. In the daytime I worked on the ropes in the big top, beating myself into shape. At night, after watching the performances from behind the back curtain, I stumbled through the cars into the cookhouse or the common areas where performers met to eat and talk, or wandered outside the cars by the train tracks, where everyone gathered around bonfires to