Rain Village - Carolyn Turgeon [99]
I had more than a sneaking suspicion that Lollie was not altogether happy about my success. She remained my friend and had a vested interest in me, having trained me and made me part of the Ramirez act, but I saw her face when children called out my name and not hers when we went past in the parade. Everyone loved Lollie, but she had been a flyer for twenty years. I was new, brand-new to the world. I did tricks no one had ever seen before.
I saw her looking in the mirror, tracing her fingers along the lines that outlined her mouth and eyes. I sat next to her sometimes and just gazed at her, at how wonderful she was. So glamorous and rounded, so sexy and soft. Her light-brown wavy hair and hazel eyes.
“I’m old,” she said once. “Too old for this, for babies, for love. You are lucky, Tessa, to be young.”
“Lollie,” I said, “you are so beautiful. How can you say that?”
She turned to me. “Men used to line up to meet me after the shows. They used to send enough flowers to fill the villa with roses and tulips. Now look at me. All used up.”
“But you’re only forty,” I said.
“In the circus,” she said, “I am ancient. And it is too late for me. I never had a normal life. No family, no babies, no husband.”
“You can still be married,” I said. “Why don’t you and Geraldo marry?”
“He will never marry, and I will never leave him.”
“But why?”
“Let it rest,” she said, turning from me. She stood up and angrily reached for her bag. “Do not judge me, chica.”
She left me sitting there. I looked at my own face in the mirror. My blue eyes and pale skin, my small features. I held my hands up under the light and thought of what Mauro had said just a few days before.
“Your hands are beautiful.”
“They are starfish hands,” I had said.
“Tessita, what you see is all wrong,” he had laughed, picking up my hand and holding it out in front of both of us. “These hands are not fish shaped like stars. Why do you say these things?”
I was surprised to learn, slowly, that Lollie was like me. That she hated herself sometimes, felt ashamed the way I did.
To me, she was perfect. I never understood her self-loathing, or what it was about love that could reduce a woman like her and keep her tied to a man like Geraldo, who was nowhere near her equal. Lollie’s love for Geraldo pressed down on her like a sieve, but it was only later that I understood how painful it was for her to bear. I did not know back then about how much she had longed for children with Geraldo and how she had been betrayed by her own barren body, while he had fathered at least a dozen bastard children over the years.
Still, I don’t think Lollie minded so much that I could not do the flying trapeze. As attractive as it would have been, from a business standpoint, to include me and Paulo in her act, it was only on the flying trapeze that Lollie had Geraldo all to herself. There, under the lights, drenched in glitter and feathers, she could live out the love story she could not seem to have in real life. All his flaws fell away and it was just him, flying to her, cradling her as if she were the most precious woman in the world. Before every performance Lollie had a glow about her, an anticipation, and afterward it was always as if she had fallen to earth. It was a strange thing, how the air and the lights could seduce you like that, making you believe that what happened up there was more real than anything else.
Paulo was the one who wanted me to fly. “It’ll come,” he said. “In time. And when it does, there will be nothing like it in the world.” He was endlessly patient with me as I fell and fell and fell.
I knew his fiancée back home, Serena, had recently sent word that she was pregnant, that it was important for Paulo to make my act first-rate—for the Ramirez act in general, for me, and for the baby growing in Serena’s belly. I wanted to master the trick so badly I could taste it, but the fear was bigger