ON THE WAY TO THE FAIR, I WAS IN THE FRONT seat with Laura, reading her a society snippet from the morning paper about how Ava Gardner, who was born a few roads over, had arrived for a quiet family visit, greeted by neatly bib-and-tuckered young kin, who more or less lost their minds, thrilled with the many souvenirs of Spain she’d brought them. When I asked whether she knew what sans Frank Sinatra or bull fighter meant, she said, Without them, but what’s that scratching in the backseat? Look around and see if Stuart or Starletta developed hives in their sleep.
The sound came from Stuart’s stomach, which from the way he was turned, had some extraordinary lumps I hadn’t seen before that had to be causing the noise when his clothes scraped against them. I said, I’d pull his sweater and undershirt up if I didn’t still have an eyeful.
It isn’t worth it, she said, nothing is.
The nostalgia that kept us from inspecting him came from the summer before when his mother saw my bicycle parked next door and ran inside to pull me out of selling magazines to their profitable neighbor who owned vending machines for a living. She needed me to help her pull Stuart out from where he’d run from her and gotten stuck under his bed in the nude. While she’d been out, her can of instant suntan had accidentally gotten away from him on a white bedspread, after he’d shaved his body so the color would soak in and chopped himself up pretty well in the bathroom. Because he hadn’t bled to death yet and he thought his mother was still in town with his little brother Henry, he took his first shave and did some other grooming as well.
We threw him her red robe and pulled him out by the feet, and he came out as such a blow to the system that you could call home the dank underbelly of a city dripping continually and never see anything like it. She yanked the robe closed on him and tied it harder than Luther’s mother ties the bobcat to the tree before a vacation. With him afraid to talk, we had no way of knowing why there were frozen green peas packed in his ears until we realized he’d reamed and gouged around with his father’s ear trimmer and figured he was trying to freeze the end of his blood vessels. Stuart’s mother had me ride Henry to the store in my bicycle basket and let him eat candy, watching to be sure he didn’t expose what was happening at home, to give her time to bleach him.
I couldn’t account for today’s scratching or the odd shape on Stuart’s belly, but I knew when I found out, the news was going to be out where Stuart usually reached, and complicated. All week, he’d been promising to bring a hundred dollars to be a gentleman with. When he’d fallen asleep wedged around Starletta, I read Laura the list he’d given me when just after dawn his mother had slowed down her car and rolled him, staggering, into our front yard. I doubted he’d accumulated the money, and he absolutely hadn’t found more spelling skills, but he’d been sure to plan.
Slingin rides I love to wach but you couldnt pay me to ride—Wach with Ellen
Childrun tendin there flocks of sheeps and other barnyeard animals—Wach with Ellen
Presdents faces painted on eggs, Stachu of Liburty painted on eggs—Show Ellen
Peecocks, monkees, Sonny and Cher, exhotic beests of the jungul and all made out of everyday kitchen foods—Show Ellen
Swurl art wher you squrt paint out of catchup squrt bottles and they spin it into art—Ellen loves art so leed her to it
Outsize turkey legs and candeed apples—Feed Ellen
Mrs. Tom Thum, the Smallest Woman Alive—Show Ellen
Doan walk off a way from the grupe, get More Avien cooky, thank Lora for carrion you, don get fool into given the shot gun game man all yure money, don show off for Ellen to see thu you and run, get to the bafroom befor it gets bad—Mama sede
After we’d waited in the traffic line and found a parking place, Laura got out, saying she had one nerve that hadn’t been danced on and needed to pull herself together with a bench and a Coca-Cola in a bottle before we were swept away too far inside Gate Five, where we had to give the bag of donated canned goods for free entry. After she dampened a place on her hem and wiped grit crystals from Starletta’s eyes, Stuart said his eyeballs felt like they were being cut into as well and stood behind Starletta in line, describing how thick his eye matter could be, particularly after he’d slept in daylight.
Laura fluffed her skirt back down and said, Stuart, you don’t have a clear idea of how well you’d have to know a person before they’d love to hear you tell that, do you?
He said, Huh, I was just saying is all.
He pulled out his shirttail and then crammed it back in, saying, Nothing, nothing, huh, let’s get rolling.
Rolling toward the gate, with him a little ahead of us and sloped completely over, weighted down by the three sacks of cans he’d insisted on carrying, he banked off cars now and then, more off his axis than normal. Starletta doesn’t know how heavy she is, and each holding her by a hand, Laura and I heard our shoulders pop when she’d jump and lunge forward. We didn’t so much roll as we jerked to the gate. Stuart still looked too lumpy around the middle, but he’d begun walking more and more upright, like the ape to human evolution picture, and while Laura watched him turn in the cans for us, she said, He has some very strange conduct. Is his mother going to allow them to issue him a driver’s license?
I couldn’t tell her everybody dreaded it because he was there with the tickets, saying, I need to find a bathroom to have any money.
Laura said, Tell me why that is, son. I’m interested.
He told her, It got to where I kept saying I needed to bring a hundred dollars and pave the way for everybody and my mother kept saying I didn’t. But you know the man that owns the vending machines that has the house next to me? I took all my and Henry’s change and what was in some jars and coats and different places to get him to turn it into dollars, but all he had was quarters, so I said that was fine, and then I remembered what a man on a show did with some duct tape and dynamite one time, so I got home and took care of it so I didn’t have to wake up with it to do this morning.
So, she said, you need to go to the restroom and, well, unbind a hundred dollars in quarters from yourself that you slept in.
Yes mam, he said, and even though it’s only sixty, I’m still afraid it could hurt. Do you have any lotion with you? Ellen can tell you it’s not a story to say I’ve got sensitive skin.
It always hurts less when you pull tape off yourself, I told him. Just go do it quick and have it be over with. Starletta’s about to start spinning, and the next stop can’t be the Red Cross tent.
He was gone long enough for us to visualize him sitting in a stall with duct tape stuck to his hands and his pink skin flaming, so Laura stopped a man at the door and asked him, Do you mind handing this tube of lotion to the little big-boned boy in there for me? His name’s Stuart, if you don’t see him, call him.
Stuart finally came out, glad for the lotion though now with his shirt sticking to him, saying, Okay, ladies, I’m ready to motorvate.
We changed four sandwich bags of quarters into bills and bought all the ride and show tickets we needed for the day. We stopped at the Village of Yesteryear first to find the Moravian booth and have the rest of the day without the pressure of remembering his mother’s cookies, which come canned, so there’s no breakage in a satchel. The booth was along a rim of other booths and small areas where they displayed folk customs and crafts, so Stuart and I kept Starletta with us while Laura looked at quilts.
People visit the Moravian ladies’ booth in droves for the thin ginger cookies they bake on the premises, and although they’re high, if you decide it’s too much to ask, you’ll wait a year because when the fair closes, they pack up the ovens and journey back to their own world in the western part of the state. They can be compared to the Amish in many of the ways they carry on their affairs, but they contrast on accepting the modern car and the electricity that enables them to have the kind of massive baking operation they were running that morning.
Starletta had on a yellow plaid waisted dress with a green belt, white fold-down ankle socks and blue tennis shoes, and you could tell she’d struggled against her mother believing that colored girls need to go out matching more than most and had won on the dingy striped sweater she took off and tied around her shoulders when she got overheated sucking cookie crumbs up out of what appeared to her as a convenient trough on the side of the Moravian table. I told myself the Moravian lady glaring like I’d wound Starletta up and turned her loose would end once Stuart made his purchase, but Stuart’s beading sweating and mumbling told everyone in the booth to come get a load of this boy. Stalled, frustrated, he asked me, Ellen, how many pounds is it to the can? Mama said three pounds, but the label says it’s so many ounces to the can.
If he can keep to a rhythm he knows well, he’s fine, but off it, he suffers, and worse in public, when he must feel so much farther away from his father, who he craves to be in charge of him on the few days a month he’s not away tracking down rubber. The last time his father was home, he told me Stuart had outlined a future with me, saying to please be careful of Stuart’s tenderhearted emotions until they passed and also stay safe, avoiding offers to go out in his raft. In fact, he told me I should turn down any invitations that involved his son and fire, outside the rubber pile, experiments with kites in thunderstorms, fishing off the bridge or in their canoe, and overall, any open body of water.
A Moravian lady refilled the crumb tray to see what Starletta would do, and about the time she was down into it hard with both hands to scoop, I said, Stuart, we need to get out of here. Get three cans and let’s go.
He took out his billfold, and had me turn from the table while he whispered in my ear, Is what she’s cramming in free? I bet she’s tooken five pounds. I’ll get the three for home and one for each of us, so that’s, huh, seven. It sounds like too much to carry though, but, huh, I’ll take your satchel.
That’s very thoughtful, I told him, but you ought to let that be it and not worry about paying for other things during the day. We didn’t come expecting it, so offer to repay the lady on Starletta while she’s making out the ticket, and she’ll say never mind it, so that’ll be all.
Stuart took it in and told the lady, I’d like to go ahead and, huh, give you what you take for seven cans, if you’ll let me, and see if I mighten ought to get straight with you on the samples.
He sounded like an old country man, ordering at a sit-down restaurant, because it was how he knew to be right then, and you could tell the lady knew it. She didn’t have to stop Starletta by taking the tray up and rush cleaning, and she didn’t need to refuse to tell him the price and make him stand there with his billfold open while she finished sizing us up as being the overscrubbed little colored girl with the hundred plaits and plastic bows in her hair, shoving in pricey crumbs she couldn’t have at home because welfare didn’t pay for sugared snacks anymore. She saw the sweaty, pumpkin-headed boy in husky corduroy pants and a hot-looking boiled-wool jacket with both shoes overflowing with bandaging he’d thought ahead to prevent blisters with. To her mind, neither he nor the colored girl had been anywhere, unlike the girl between them, who’d been to some places and learned how not to look like a tourist, conceited enough to have chosen clothes to make her look slightly above the grime and grist, and also quick-eyed the way tight situations teach you to be. That surprised her, I could tell by the way she looked at me and kept Stuart needing. I was standing there just as dumbstruck as he was.
I couldn’t move for the wall I hadn’t expected to find that day, at least not so early and at a religion’s booth. If Laura didn’t swoop in soon, I saw myself leaving some figure of money on the table with the kind of note you imagine writing to people who absorb the day-to-day bravery you need to get around with, saying, You’re in a costume, taking money from strangers at the fair. What harm would it do to be decent? You have a bad grease stain on your left chest. Hide and watch it come out in the wash.
Before I saw Laura with her hands on Stuart’s shoulders, I heard her say, There’s so much clang and clatter in here, so let’s make this quick. Let’s say what’s owed and bag it, but I need one extra can, please.
She paid and then opened the can and poured the cookies out onto the sampling tray, saying, We’re even now. You think?
We didn’t talk on the way out, and before we got back in with the stream of people, Stuart had us stop so he could take Starletta’s pumpkin pin off her collar and switch it to her skirt so she could handle it without her chin to her chest, running into people. Then standing up, he told Laura, The lady had mean coming to her, huh, you burned her.
She said, I didn’t tell her to have a nice day is all, as you say. It sounds rude to omit what people know to be a lie, but you didn’t need to carry her out in the satchel.
Starletta was drawn toward where a migrant-looking boy was calling out for fresh swirl artists at his booth, so we all kept the color bottles directed while she squirted with her eyes closed and then became so fixated watching them swirl that although her eyes were opened, the boy said, The little girl, she sleep on her feet.
Stuart said a Methodist hot dog would wake all our moods up, and when Laura and I didn’t know what they were, he tapped his back pocket and said, I swear before God, I’d love to introduce you to one.
They were unusually juicy, and while Laura went across to buy a football team hand towel to tie around Starletta, Stuart said, You know the taxidermy booth? The reason I know so much about out here is Luther and Harvey and me spent the night in it last year and it was next to the Methodists then so when they closed up, they allowed us to take ten, fifteen for a constellation prize after Luther worked like he did on the raccoon and had the letdown when they wouldn’t let him run something that wild and not know if it had been rabid or not.
What was he supposed to stuff, I said, a dog? His father had wolves riding around in their old car, drying with the top down.
He was still explaining something about a mysterious film the judges had seen on the animals’ eyes when we’d all left to walk down the main way, eating, with Starletta switching her narrow tail and looking fast and terrific, chewing without the bib Laura couldn’t put on her, and looking up to follow the voice she knew belonged to the weatherman. The closer we got to the television tent, the more you heard women’s voices, saying he’s good-looking but not striking, he’s secretly married, he’s too tan and his suits fit too much like rubber, his face looks rubber, embalmed, reading aloud off the information tables about how he boasts a master’s degree in science and loves to cook and fly radio control airplanes.
We stood for Starletta to meet him with some women who seemed to be dreaming of how they’d insert him onto their sofas and discard the men who were leaning against the tent poles to wait. When I edged Starletta to the side of the line for a better view of him signing autographs, she cut out and found an alley between two tents to stand and look petrified in.
I told Laura you couldn’t predict it, but her mother said this happened when Starletta recognized a salesman from his used car lot commercials and squatted to hide in fear beside a car. She’d thought the weatherman would be sized to fit the television set. She came out when we told her we’d go to the pick-up ducks booth next, the most luring thing she’d go along with, and then we stayed there through twenty dollars and noon. In the midst of corrupted nastiness of unfair games and people in public with threatening sayings on their shirts, we fell under a spell of mesmerization, watching the ducks streaming by, and when I felt Starletta’s wet hand on mine, I fell deeper in to wonder if she understood what her body was making mine remember, my mother’s hand on mine, under warm, soapy water, searching around for the chain on the stopper after we’d washed combs and brushes on Saturday mornings. When we were ready to go and waiting for Starletta to fit her fingers out with prize rings, Laura asked what was the matter, and Stuart said, Huh, I think you look patriotic.
I said I’d be fine, but I’d prefer taking the long walk to the slow rides and miss the sights of the slinging ones. It’s another kind of ambition that makes you consent to be strapped down on the edge of a rickety circle and slung around to yell like you’re glad to be there. I don’t scream except in shock or squeal over anything pleasing. I enjoy the sharp pleats on the high school cheerleaders’ uniforms, and I like it that our pack of rural girls can flip around and keep the pace in time, but no matter how hard they shout to shout back and go through their set of large arm motions with them, I have to stand there, remembering to smile and clap at the end, hoping it looks like the planet that assigned me to observe this pep rally has rules against me getting whipped up in the action. If startling jolts and frenzy could be eliminated, I could almost be comfortable, the way people with reptile phobias must feel more relaxed living in Ireland. I wasn’t as afraid of shooting straight down from a wild ride as I was of my seat cracking off the spoke and shooting me out over the fair. If you’ve had it happen before with things jerking and shaking off the rails and speeding up before you were thrown outward, you don’t acquire a deliberate ticket on centrifugal force.
Starletta rode around on several small, quiet circles, and then Stuart narrated us around the exotic carved and molded food creations in the food building, not saying what he knew, but what he wished he knew about how the things were formed, and when he fixed on a lard replica of Iwo Jima, which had won, he said, Huh, now that’s a hobby. You ready to go see Mrs. Thumb?
Laura said she wasn’t, so she took Starletta to meet us there later, going off one way while we went the other, irritating long way toward the oddity and striptease rows. Starletta’s mother had told me she heard they keep them so far to the edge because the Bureau of Agriculture leader in charge of organizing it had a loud civic wife who drew the fair plan on a napkin.
Nothing’s worth this, I told him. She’d better not be on her knees in a long dress.
He stopped walking and blurted, If you think you’re better than people like Mrs. Thumb, can you try to hide it harder so I can have a good time?
Stuart, I said, I never know what to do when you decide to let me in on an argument you’ve been having for us.
He said, But don’t tell me you weren’t thinking what I said.
Some of it, I told him. I’d be ashamed to tell Starletta’s mother we inspected people like slavery.
He said, I knew you’d dislike it in one way, but the other way, I thought you would because you go for unusual things. It’s confusing to be walking along, not knowing if you’re going to make me like it or despise it. You behave better than me and I’m the one that knows your aunt and cousin are moving somewhere the first of November because Dora’s expecting.
When he said the news came from his mother and was beginning to circulate around, I said, You should’ve let me find out random so I wouldn’t attach it to you.
I know, he said, but I swear before God, Ellen Foster, you take a great deal out of people. You want to see her or not?
I asked, Mrs. Thumb or my aunt?
Both, he said, I supposed I imagined.
I said, I can’t think to tell whether I have a choice on either, but we’re almost in the oddity zone.
When you’d mention what you wanted or didn’t want around my father, he’d say to spit in one hand and wish in the other one to see which one got full first, to forgive himself for having nothing to do with how things could turn out for you. Spit would roll through my fingers before anything I wished about my aunt was accomplished. No one was going to hold my Aunt Nadine down while I screamed over my mother’s missing things. No one could hold the universe down until it explained why my life had been this particular one and how the rest of it could happen without work taking over and being a secret insanity I’d have to keep hidden to get along in ordinary ways, and particularly in case a man I might love would have me. Males lean toward females with better histories, and although it would be ideal, it would be a rare thing to find one who wouldn’t say my history’s too freakish for his taste and move on.
Waiting in a long ticket line, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted more to leave the misery or injure the people who’d forced me to be inside it more. We didn’t mind running to Mrs. Thumb’s house with the tickets because the line had drained our time down to a few minutes before the hour, but when we got there blowing, the people coming down her steps said none of the human and animal shows had a set time. You showed up and looked in on her daily life and stayed until she ran you off. When our turn came to group around the short door, she was sitting on her sofa flipping through a True Story magazine with her bare feet propped on one of the stuffed Dalmatians you win throwing darts nearby, fuming.
Stuart whispered, She’s got painted toenails. Look, her feet look like the knotted cedar they make lamps out of.
She slammed the magazine down in her lap and said, You talk to your wife like that?
It was sickening to hear the boy’s tone when he’d said human and animal shows, but I kept looking because it felt interesting and I had to, despite what Starletta’s family from another century had no doubt been put through on slave examining blocks, and what kind of impression I would’ve made on a human being in the market for another human being.
I touched Stuart’s arm and told him never to tell Starletta’s mother we were stooped in this door. Stuart was telling Mrs. Thumb, They must take you to the beauty shop every so often, not that you need it though. I was just thinking, huh, everybody’s got to get out the house sometimes. It couldn’t be healthy, to be shut up. I see you have a fireplace. They keep the chimley working for you?
She glowered at us and twisted around to stand up, so I thanked her for having us, but as we hit the bottom step, we heard her rumbling to the door and shouting, Nope, nope, nope. You didn’t stay long enough to leave and not buy something first.
That’s okay, I told her. We’re fine.
Pulling some pictures out of a low mailbox by the door, she said, I know you are, growny girl, but you don’t want your husband to feel guilty for not buying you a picture of me and President Nixon, autographed, a dollar. I don’t think he’d want Mrs. Thumb going hungry, so how about bringing me a couple of Methodist hot dogs?
Stuart stepped up and reached a dollar to her and took the picture, saying, I appreciate it. What would you like on your hot dogs?
I said they must have people who come by with lunch and things of that nature, but she said, Nope, they don’t deliver out here.
Stuart asked though not with much zest, What could you call for if they did?
After she said she’d take two with mustard and ketchup, slaw, onions, pickle relish, and chili, it shouldn’t have felt like news but it did when she listed what she wanted to go with them, French fries, a large grape soda, two candy apples, and an elephant ear. She didn’t offer money, which Stuart chalked up to her not knowing the correct amount, but waiting for her order at the variety foods booth, I looked at the picture and told him, I think we just bought Mrs. Thumb a free lunch.
For mercy, Laura’s knack of knowing what to do about hard adults was working well enough to attract her and Starletta to be waiting on the bench in front of Mrs. Thumb’s house when we got back overloaded. Looking like it wasn’t anything she’d ever believe, she said, When I asked the lady if she’d seen you, she said two bright young people had offered to go pick up her lunch, and I could sit over here and wait, and look at a photograph of her and Richard Nixon. I’ll take the food in to her. How much does she owe you?
Thanks, I said, this was about all the Hansel and Gretel ordeal I could take.
We stood on the porch with Starletta while Laura hunched around inside the house, making sure the foods were in Mrs. Thumb’s reach, and when she noticed a picture of Mrs. Thumb and Richard Burton on the wall, she said, Nixon, not my type, Burton, definitely, but how did you become such a celebrity?
Not aware we were outside the door or not caring, she said, chewing, Not one. Have a nephew, does put-together pictures for a living.
Laura smiled and said, Well, it’s good to have something to make up for everything, and I’m sure lunch would go a long way if I wasn’t going to need five dollars for it. Do you keep your money in a particular place? Can we locate that now and get this taken care of?
Laura came out and handed me five dirty dollars, and after she’d asked Stuart to stop repeating, We got tooken, she said, We’ll go around some more, but this day will come to a close only after Starletta’s looked at some sheep, or goats, and a couple of other very plain, nonverbal things.
After Stuart said he’d love to go now, I said, You don’t know how fine that is by me, and I know I need to be extremely nonverbal right now, but I have to tell you what Stuart told me about my aunt moving with my cousin somewhere on account of she’s pregnant. What am I supposed to do about it?
Nothing, she said, but find Starletta something slow to pet.
I said, But we need to stop a minute. I don’t know if this news can get chopped off like the Moravian lady.
Looking at her neck now because she’d turned her face to the sun and interrupted me to tell Starletta she should try it, which made Stuart look up and leave me with three disinterested throats. I said, Laura, you need to look and let me say I meant what I heard about my aunt and cousin is close to being a bulletin from this other world I had to be in for a while, and I’ve learned it’s scheduled to go to another part of the universe and take some very important stuff of mine with it.
She said, But what we should do, Ellen, is have the remainder of the day here without borrowing interruptions. I know you’re eager to talk about it, and we can in a little while. I’m only suggesting you take advantage of the peace we came to walk around in some to recover from the hoopla.
I said, I’ll try, but we can’t postpone delving again. We could delay Dora if we had to because it isn’t like I can do anything but wonder who the father is, whether she’s going to finish her education, how her mother’s treating her, things like that, but I can’t wait and let them permanently steal the belongings of my mother’s they took from me. I can’t let that happen.
It won’t, she said, but nothing’s happening now except us walking to the pastured barn area.
I told her I’d like to look for the demonstration cow I’d seen in the paper when he was a feature in the veterinary barn last year. He wasn’t there, but the summary is he had hi-fi-speaker-looking circles in the side of his body that monitored his digestive track, but the last thing we saw that afternoon was what a vet told me was the cow’s capable replacement. Without saying where the cow went, he motioned toward a clean floored pen with a sign on the gate that said,
Meet Susan!
1974 Medical Miracle
Bovine Research Leads the Way
Support Our Vietnam Vets!
Vets for Vets!
From what her keeper described to us, the farmer who owned Susan took her to the veterinary school because she had a place that was found to be cancer in what would be our thigh. There appeared to be no way to save her, but then a surgeon said he could try something different if the farmer was willing.
I said, Which he had to be, of course.
Yes, he was willing to do what it took, so Susan got her surgery as volunteer to have the section of her leg with the place on it removed and replaced with a mechanical leg section. She has an improved ability to go around in the pen and small pastures and though she hobbles, you think, anybody would and all the best to her regardless.