Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [97]
Everyone seemed to be happy for me, kissing my cheeks or shaking my hand, patting my back.
As the day wore on, there were more reporters, each of them wanting to talk to me. Most weren’t able to find me; either the roustabouts got to them before they sneaked into the backyard, or back of the lot, or the other performers claimed I’d gone into the city to get my hair permed, or to buy leather gloves, or any number of other things I had never done in my life. I just stayed in the car and stretched and played cards.
Lollie had spread the word fast: no interviews, no reporters. Refusing press also made the sting less biting for the other performers, Carlos said.
“Everyone wants to be where you are now,” he said, over a lunch of black beans and platanos. “Our livelihoods depend on it, on the people loving us. You’ve got to be humble to keep friends, chica.”
I nodded, almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of it.
But that second night, the lot literally overflowed with fans. Backstage, the atmosphere was electric. Even Mr. Velasquez stood back there that night.
“Go get ’em, kid,” he said, making me laugh.
Several people came up to wish me luck, but I began to notice, that night, the many performers who looked away when I caught their eye, or seemed to look me up and down disapprovingly when I walked by. Geraldo, especially.
“It is the flying trapeze they all come to see, the act that grabs their hearts and imagination,” I heard him say loudly to one of the menagerie girls, who didn’t even blink. “Not all this spin spin spin.”
I ignored it the way I used to when I walked through Oakley and it was just me and Mary, no one else. I stood behind the curtain in my leotard clutching Mauro’s hand. When the time came I scuttled up the rope ladder and stood staring down at the sawdust, past my glittering slippers. This time the applause came before I even began.
Afterward there was no celebration like the night before. Just quick congratulations before we packed up and dismantled the lot, leaving the grass so bare and blank that you’d never know we’d been there. The train whooshed out of town deep in the night, speeding to the next lot, the way it would over and over again. I loved feeling the ground rumble under us. I opened the curtains and watched the dark earth passing by, all the homes with glimmering windows and families sleeping inside, the endless stretches of crops and fields, the jagged cities and quaint towns, the fences strung along the tracks. That night, very late, there was a heavy rain that came slashing across the windows. The air roiled outside. I just lay back and listened to the pattering, the rumbling wheels.
I imagined what life was like in each town, each house, what selves I might have been had I lived there instead of where I did. It was safe, thinking like that, and there was nothing more safe than being in that train car, deep in the night, traveling between lots. I lay back and thought about all the lives unfolding around me, and imagined my family exactly as I’d last seen them: my father in his rocking chair, Geraldine tending her garden, my mother chopping and roasting in the kitchen while my brothers harvested the crops in the fields. What would they say if they could see me now? I wondered. If they could see my rhinestone-drenched costume, hear the applause? Flying across the countryside, it didn’t bother me to think like that. With each Spanish word I learned, each kiss Mauro gave me, each footprint I left in the sawdust of the big top, the farther away I got from Oakley, the more separate I was from my own past.
When the news about me and Mary broke, none of us could have predicted the way the crowds would react. The morning we arrived at the second lot, for the third show of that first season, Rachel’s article came out in the Tribune: “Mystery Girl Tessa Trained by Marionetta.” The story was picked up by the other papers even as the Tribune itself made its way to the next town, and the next.
The crowds went crazy.