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Autumn Valley, Wisconsin
1976
The small cast-iron frying pan felt heavy in my hand, like a stone about to drop in the sudden silence of the kitchen. Only the sound of cicadas sawing their wings together, calling out for companionship, could be heard through the open screen door. The kitchen where I stood was the most familiar place in the world to me. Indeed, I could have described, in great detail, every notch and bump of the peeling linoleum, every surface and angle of the gas-burning stove, and every line and swirl of the wood-grain table.
Time seemed to have stopped. In the normal course of events, I would have been washing the dinner dishes. The smell of fried chicken and the fainter, homey scent of cookies baked hours ago lingered in the air. It was still light outside because days went on forever in summer. I had to leave. I knew that. I pretended for another moment, though, as if nothing had happened.
I placed the skillet in the sink of dirty dishes. For a long time, I had wanted to leave the claustrophobic confines of home. However, weighing as much as I did—probably about five hundred pounds, by my estimate—the idea of going to college, having a job, or getting married had seemed impossible without losing an exorbitant, outrageous amount of weight. Every diet had failed, making any other plans beside the point. Those past efforts had been nothing more than an unnecessary waste of time. Now, I was going to simply walk out the door and not come back. How had it never occurred to me, before it was too late, that such an act had always been in my power?
First, though, I had to find the phone number Mr.—I couldn’t even remember what he called himself—had given me. The other man, the bald one, was named Jim. The two of them had visited the house only three days ago to get a look at me and ask me about working as the fat lady in the carnival sideshow. Decent people didn’t run away with the carnival, so I had told them “no,” of course. Still, the idea of escaping my house and leaving behind my brother, Jared, and the encased drudgery of my life had been appealing enough to prevent me from crumpling the scrap of paper on which Mr. Whoever had written a telephone number to call if I changed my mind before the show left town.
Such a tiny piece of paper—easy to lose, impossible to replace—and there it was, folded in tight squares under the silverware tray. “Thank God,” I said, pulling open the utility drawer, mashing my hands over the tools to find a pencil to dial the phone, since my fingers couldn’t fit in the holes of the rotary dial. The sight of my reflection in the window, the whole breadth of my bulk, so wide that the glass wasn’t large enough to fit my entire image, caught my eye. Leaving would mean navigating a new world, one that had not been outfitted with a strong bench and reinforced furniture and a bed to accommodate my size. The pulsing twitch of my eye appeared as a red smear that spread across my field of vision. Picking up the receiver, I couldn’t remember the last time I had called someone other than Mrs. Schendel. Possibly, in my seventeen years, I had never used the telephone to contact anyone else. My mouth felt dry and creaky, like it would after eating an entire sleeve of salty crackers with no water. I had to slap my own face hard.
The paper shook in my hand as I inserted the pencil into the rotary dial, moving with care and deliberation from number to number. The line rang. Rang again and again. Each peal sounded longer, more extravagant than the one before it. Sweat, hot and itchy, beaded on my lip and dripped down from under my arms. I should have pushed the table bench closer to the telephone so I could have sat to relieve the ache spreading through my hips and knees, but maybe if any part of my body were allowed to relax, then some creeping inertia would conspire to keep me trapped in the house. Stuffing the phone between my neck and shoulder to grip my hands together, I prayed—not to God precisely but to whomever it was who had created me and given me my life. Something had to happen. Someone had to save me.
“Hello.” The sound of a woman’s voice on the other end of the line startled me so much that I nearly dropped the telephone. The impossible, having the exact thing that I wished to occur, had taken place. “Hello?” she repeated, annoyed impatience edging the word.
“Hello! Hello,” I said. “I’m, um... I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were going to answer.” I wiped my wet hands on the front of my skirt.
“Yeah, well, it kept ringing and ringing, and I thought, you know, no sense running to get it, because whoever it is will hang up by the time I get there. I mean, normally, I’m up and around and doing stuff, but there’s this program I wanted to watch on TV, and—”
This woman’s story might go on forever. “Okay. I see. Well, I actually called to talk to... the carny man. I mean the person who runs the carnival.” For a merciful instant, an exact recollection of the two men standing on the porch sprang to my mind, and I could hear the one who seemed to be in charge introduce himself. “I’d like to speak to Mr. Hinkle Musgrave,” I said.
“Hinkle? Sure. I’ll pass a message on to him. Let me just write it down.” I could hear the woman tap the edges of a stack of paper on some hard surface.
“The thing is, actually, this is an emergency. I need to talk to him right away.”
The woman’s busy rustling sounds ceased. “Well, okay,” she said at last. She must have cupped her hand over the receiver because her words became indistinct, part of a murmured conversation with someone else in the room.
“Hinkle here.” The man’s tone was a little sharp, a little annoyed, a little confused. “And who’s this, and what seems to be the emergency that you think I should help you with?”
“It’s me, Sarah.” I coughed. “You might not remember me, but you came to my house a few days ago with that man, Jim. You said I could come work for you as the... um...” I swallowed hard to say the words. “In the sideshow, you know, as the...”
“Yes, yes, as the sideshow fat lady. So you’ve changed your mind, then? That’s great. Not exactly what I’d call an emergency, though.”
I stayed silent while Mr. Musgrave talked about meeting at his trailer the next morning to sign a contract and make arrangements of some sort. The truth was I lost track of what he was saying as soon as I understood that he meant for me to stay the night in this house.
“No, it has to be now. You see, my brother is very against my doing all of this. He cares about me. He really does. But I think it would just be better for everyone if I left before he got home.” The stillness of the house, the smallness of the rooms, the prospect of an endless night alone filled me with fear, like water pouring into an overflowing pitcher.
There was a pause on the other end of the line while Mr. Musgrave apparently weighed my argument, considering the best course of action. Then I heard him swallow and take a drink. “Sorry about that, honey. I was just finishing up my dinner.” He hadn’t been thinking it through, after all. He had been chewing. “I’ll send Jim over in a bit.”
“Hurry, please.”
There was no way to know or calculate how much time was available for the various correct before-leaving chores. Even so, my first move was toward the row of low bookshelves lining the back wall of the living room. After I had to leave school in the fourth grade, my father taught me himself from those texts. He would hold me next to him in the soft recliner, both of us squeezed into that tight, breathless space, while Jared watched from the dining table, bored and uninterested in the public-school homework spread out in front of him. I selected the big volume of Emerson’s collected essays and poems, cumbersome and impractical though it was, because it had been my father’s favorite. My father had been dead less than a year, and the thought of compounding that sad misery with having no memento of him seemed worse than failing to pack items that were actually practical and necessary.
Next, I rolled my nicer clothes around the book and tied the whole thing up in the top sheet of my bed before going to the pantry. I knew, the way a person could know obvious things, that it would be a long night, with no idea where or when my next meal would be. After lining the cleaning bucket with two cloth napkins, I filled it with a loaf of sandwich bread, the peanut butter cookies that Jared had never even tasted, and a pound of deli ham from the ice box. I hadn’t eaten one bite of dinner with Jared, and the sight of so much untouched food on the counter filled me with a sudden righteous hunger. All the pieces of fried chicken from the platter didn’t fit in my travel bucket anyway. They were still warm, and... I took a bite, or maybe it was two, possibly more.
The sink was a mess. Mrs. Schendel would be disappointed in me. I pushed the dirty dishes to one side of the basin to rinse the small skillet under the tap, taking care to turn my head away so that I wouldn’t gag or get sick. Most of all, I wanted to be done with the tasks of packing my belongings, folding up my vital documents, and stuffing the cash I’d scoured out of the house up into the high crevasse where my left breast fell into my stomach. I longed to be outside, breathing good, clean air.
The house felt haunted already, in obvious ways but also by me, by my never-ending presence inside those walls. I turned out all the lights except for the one over the kitchen sink. “I left the light on for you, Jared.” I paused for no good reason. “And... I want you to know that I did not mean for this to happen. I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.” Tears stung my eyes and rolled down my cheeks as I closed the door behind me.
A thunderstorm threatened on the purple horizon as I pressed my back into the front porch rails, waiting. After some time, a set of lights appeared in the distance and came closer, passing by the Schendels’ barn, while I played a game where if I held my breath long enough, then the truck would turn up our driveway. The effort made me dizzy and, with a quick stab of longing, want to rest in my bed, to close my eyes and sleep—the siren song of certain insanity. Still, I wouldn’t breathe until the lights grew bigger and brighter then switched direction toward the house, making me laugh with relief as I sucked air into my lungs. The thumping diesel of the truck’s motor reminded me of my heart.
Jim cut the engine and walked toward me. “There you are,” he said.
The lighthearted tone of his words relieved me, erasing my fear that he would be as sharp and annoyed as Mr. Musgrave had sounded on the phone. Looking at Jim, I realized he was quite a bit taller than I remembered. He was also older, probably around the same age my father would have been. Jim’s baldness struck me as unique, too, and different from the ordinary type with an exposed pate on top and a ring of hair around the sides. He didn’t have a single strand, while the skin covering his skull was nearly shiny, as if he polished his head in the mornings. A scar started near his right eye and extended down the side of his face, giving him a squinty look on one side.
“Are these all your things?” Jim pointed to my hobo’s bindle and the beat-up cleaning bucket draped with a frayed dish towel.
“Yes,” I whispered with quiet shame because I had so little.
Jim appeared not to notice as he picked up the bucket and hoisted my sheet bundle over his shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said when he opened the passenger door of his pickup truck for me. “The 250 is good and roomy on the inside.”
I could plant my foot on the running board and grab the doorframe but didn’t have strength enough to pull myself up onto the seat. My arms and legs shook with the effort. Panic fluttered across my heart that I would be left behind, that I had only dreamed this escape, and that I was still back in the kitchen hours earlier, frying a pan of chicken.
Jim put both hands on the back of my skirt and squeezed my bottom. “You pull, and I’ll push.”
His touch, unexpected and unflinching, surprised me. He’s just trying to help, I told myself. We drove away, the light above the kitchen sink glowing against the cloudy gray sky.
“So, Hinkle said you were in a hurry.” Thunder cracked in the distance. A flash of lightning and the sudden darkness that followed made the small space of the truck cabin feel even more confined. “It’s a lot of work, going from town to town and doing one show after the next,” Jim continued, “but it’s a good time too. You’ll see.”
We drove past the Schendel house, all the windows dark. Mr. Schendel was probably already asleep. Maybe Mrs. Schendel was on the mattress next to him, staring up at the shadowy ceiling, or in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette at the table.
There were a thousand questions I should ask Jim, but instead I just looked out the windshield, watching the road. Having finished the chicken in the yard, I reached my hand under the cloth napkin on top of the bucket, secretly fiddling the lacy edge of one of the peanut butter cookies.
“We can stop by my place first, so you can rest up a bit.” Jim took his eyes off the road to stare at me for a moment. “What do you think of that?”
“Okay,” I said. His voice sounded disjointed, a bit strange perhaps, as if he wanted me to understand more than what he was saying. There was no productive reason, though, for me to try to figure out what he meant. I was going where I was going. Every mile we traveled into the night was a stretch of distance farther away from what I needed to leave behind.
We drove out toward the fairgrounds, the Ferris wheel lights visible from some distance. Passing by the crowded parking lot and entrance, I pressed my forehead against the window for a better look, getting only a jumbled impression of light bulbs, the skeletal frames of rides, the talking and laughing of people, and the loud rushing and receding screams from the roller coaster that sped down a hill of track and turned away around the curve. A banner hung over the main entrance: 1976 Summer of Independence, it read in high white letters atop a swirling red-and-blue background.
Jim turned the truck to take us away from the thick bunches of people walking here and there so that we were moving past the backs of the booths lining that part of the midway. He veered again until we were driving over the bumpy ruts of a grass field.
The trailers where the carnival people must have lived were parked together in a group, looking like a small settlement all its own. Jim pulled up to a good-sized one compared to the others. “So,” he said, fumbling for the keys as we stood in front of the door. “What made you change your mind?”
I shrugged, an exaggerated gesture. “I thought about how you said that the sideshow performers liked doing what they do and how some people can’t just do regular jobs or get married and have families like everyone else.”
Jim nodded. “Home, sweet home,” he said, unlocking the trailer.
I had to crab walk through the narrow door sideways, scared that at any minute, laughter at the sight of me would come floating from an open window in another trailer. I felt safer and more protected once we were inside. The living room had an orange-and-brown plaid couch and chair and a small table wedged against the back wall. A kitchen with a sized-to-scale stove and refrigerator was visible over a type of half-wall partition with a countertop and leatherette swivel stools pushed up against it. I reached in to touch one of the cookies again. There was even a television.
“It’s nice.” That seemed like a normal sort of thing for me to say.
“I’m glad you like it. Have a seat.”
My father had used mending plates to reinforce our couch and had shored up my bed with boards and cinder blocks. Jim would probably make me leave if I broke his furniture. “Oh. That’s okay. I’ll just stand.” My feet began to ache in anticipation of being upright for an extended period of time while I pretended like nothing hurt and hoped I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom. I leaned against the countertop to find a position that would both look and be comfortable.
Jim laughed. “You need to relax a little bit. It’s your first night with the carnival. You’ll be busy soon enough.” He pulled the cushions from the couch and arranged them on the floor. “This way we can stretch out.” He went down the short hallway, where I could see a bed through a half-open door. “Here. I brought a few more pillows, so we’ll be more comfortable.”
I eased myself down among the cushions. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was at least better than trying to brace myself against the counter.
“Are you hungry?” Jim took a plastic-wrapped package of meat from the refrigerator. “How about I fry us up some pork chops?” Lightning cracked the sky, illuminating the entire room. “Looks like we’re going to get a doozy,” Jim said just as the rain began to pound outside.
He made us a good dinner, lighting a nearly continuous chain of cigarettes while he did so. The air felt dense with fried meat and smoke, reminding me of home and Mrs. Schendel and being inside a familiar place that was knowable and understandable, even if I had wanted to leave it. An image of Jared flashed in my mind, making me squeeze my eyes closed for a second. Don’t think about it, I said to myself because something was pounding behind my eyes, threatening to take over my body and mind and not give them back.
We sat together at the table to have dinner. Jim had stirred up a good, salty gravy from the pork fat to be sopped up with the bread and margarine he set out on the counter. “Eat up, Sarah. You don’t have to be so shy,” he said when he noticed me cutting a small, neat triangle of meat and raising the fork to my mouth, careful not to touch my teeth to the tines when I took a bite. Jim didn’t even use silverware. He just held the chop by the bone and tore into it. “We can’t have a good show if you don’t eat enough.” He laughed.
I did, too, because what he was saying was hilarious. “Do you have any ketchup?” I ate in front of him like I had never dared at home, dragging pork chops and bread with margarine through a slurry of thick ketchup and white gravy flecked with black pepper. Jim opened a bottle of Coca-Cola for me then a second one before asking if I wanted to try a little of the whiskey he was drinking. The sharp smell of the alcohol reminded me of Jared.
It tasted awful, like whiskey did. Jim had some half-stale Entenmann’s donuts for dessert, probably left over from his breakfast. Then he flopped down on one of the cushions, his back resting against the couch frame, glass in hand, with the whiskey bottle wedged upright between two pillows. His legs were stretched out in front of him. My face flamed red with self-conscious embarrassment because he was watching me. I rubbed a finger over the nubby sugar and cinnamon left on the counter.
“Come here,” he said. There didn’t seem to be enough room for the both of us. Standing or sitting by Jim was one thing, but given how he had positioned himself, he would be practically lying alongside me no matter how I arranged myself on the floor.
“I’m okay,” I said.
Jim motioned me over with his hand. “Sit by me. There’re a lot of things we need to talk about to get you ready to be in the show. Have another drink.”
I lowered myself down next to him and accepted the refilled glass. I had almost forgotten that people were going to pay money to look at me. The whiskey, now that I had grown somewhat accustomed to the taste, wasn’t so terrible.
“We’ll have to get some costumes made for you.” Jim grazed his knuckle down my arm. “Something sleeveless with a short skirt.” He rubbed the flat of his hand down my thigh and squeezed my leg a few inches above the knee. “With the hem right about here.”
Jim’s willingness to touch me, something I had never experienced, felt warm and satisfying. I grabbed one of the pillows he had brought from the bedroom and held it on my lap. It was the heavy feather kind, the stained ticking covered in a thin blue case that smelled vaguely unwashed, like the intimacy of a human body—Jim’s body.
Jim brushed away the bangs from my forehead. The skin of his fingertips had the same texture as coarse sugar, his touch light. “Did anyone ever tell you what a pretty face you have?”
“Okay.” I couldn’t think of any other response to this shocking flattery. My sense of unreality formed a hard, unmovable ball in my gut. I shifted my torso to alleviate the uncomfortable fullness of my stomach, made worse by the closeness of the room, the burning sensation in my cheeks. I coughed into my hand, closing my fingers around the small bits of ketchup-red pork that had come up from my throat. Maybe there was some way to wipe them on the floor underneath the sofa. The trailer was hot. The small electric fan whirring in front of the cranked-open Florida windows didn’t provide much relief. My stomach seized again. I covered my mouth, afraid to speak or move.
“Are you okay? Are you sick?” Jim held the upper part of my arm and leaned down to try to look into my face.
I kept my head lowered, pressing my hand tighter over my mouth. Tears leaked from my eyes from the strain of holding back the vomit filling my throat. I tried to think of some way out of this situation, even as I knew that it wouldn’t and couldn’t last forever. My coughing came out as a series of truncated little snorts that would have been retching if my hand unclutched, so I clung tighter.
“Ah, shit,” Jim said, jumping up from the floor. I heard him digging around in the kitchenette, then he quick stepped back through the maze of cushions with a green plastic dishpan in his hands that he slid on the floor in front of me. I leaned forward and vomited with such ecstatic relief that the red, pushing force of it even blacked out the repeating reel of scenes playing in my mind. Jim placed his palm on my forehead to push back my hair. He rubbed my back with his other hand, alternating between small pats and gentle circles. “All right. Get it all out, and you’ll feel better,” he said.
After my stomach emptied, I coughed and pulled long runners of spit from my lips, snapping them from my fingers into that dishpan mess of chicken and pork and clotted gravy, squeezing my eyes closed to blot out my shame and horror. What if I had to leave? Where would I go? How would I even get there?
Jim’s hand continued to move in its same soft pattern as he murmured a sibilant stream of comforting sounds. “Shhh... sssss... shhh... sut, sut, sut...”
“Let’s get this mess out of here then.” Jim picked up the full dishpan, the dreadful contents of which slogged back and forth with the movement. “Shit,” he said, half coughing and gagging at the awful smell. He walked out of the trailer, leaving the door open a few inches. As soon as he was out of sight, I struggled to my feet and went into the kitchenette, where I splashed water on my face, washed my eyes and nose, and rinsed the inside of my mouth. Muscles between my ribs and through my abdomen that I didn’t know I had or had forgotten existed felt stretched with the trembling pain of exertion.
The open door was my last chance to leave. If I could make it up to the midway, maybe I would see someone I recognized who could give me a ride to Mrs. Schendel’s house, or maybe I could call Mrs. Schendel, and she would come running again like she did the day my father died in the bathroom with no one there but me to figure out what to do. I would think of something to tell her. My head pounded with exhaustion, and I wished it was yesterday.
Jim stepped back inside the trailer, shaking water from the dishpan that he must have rinsed out somewhere. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. I turned back toward the sink and crossed my arms in front of my face to hide my bitter helplessness.
Jim walked up behind me and put both hands on my shoulders. He was standing so close that the front of his body pressed into the back of mine. My arms dropped at the sensation of his pelvis pushed up against my backside, shocked at his hardness down there jumbled up with our clothes and other soft body pieces.
“It’s nothing to cry about,” Jim said, kissing the top of my head. The sensation was unexpected and tingly. No man other than my father had ever put his lips on me. I wanted to say something or make some kind of movement or do anything, but I was nailed to the floor by my sudden understanding that Jim, who up until then had been a means—a ride, a meal, an escape from a horrible string of repercussions—was more than just some supporting actor in my life’s drama. He had his own ideas about what would happen next.
His talk about costumes and carnival business and rules were only props, bits of conversation, to move the evening forward to some point where the kiss on my head would be the next logical step. He provided the meat and the whiskey, the comfort and the lull, wanting something else as well, and no matter how I might try to convince myself otherwise, there was no going back to my old life. I had been right enough on one front. It was going to be a long night.
Jim handed me another Coke from the refrigerator to help settle my stomach and clean out my mouth. It tasted cold and sweet, so I drank it in three long swallows while Jim watched.
“Let’s get comfortable again.” Jim stretched back out on the couch cushions. I would have to walk right by the door to join him. Would he try to stop me if I left, or would he just let me turn sideways and wiggle my way out into the night? That last detail, the thought of wedging back through the narrow space and stepping down to the ground and the grotesque ungainliness of such an exit, even in the face of all the awkward, shame-inducing moments preceding it, closed off my last real thought of leaving. I sat down on the cushions, my body falling the last few inches, tinkling the glasses on the coffee table against each other. I grunted a little with the effort. “Like a piggy,” Jared would have said.
Jim rubbed my arm, as if he wanted me to lie next to him. “Here, come relax with me.”
I studied his face, only inches from mine, to take my mind off the burden of my body and the uncomfortable stress of navigating it through a new situation after years of being accustomed to its own, same routine played out in familiar surroundings. As close together as we were, Jim’s eyes, the soft color of sky on a clear day, were beautiful to me. I touched his scar without thinking, drawn by the imperfection, unmindful for a moment of the strangeness of putting my hands on a man I barely knew.
“How old are you?” I asked.
Jim moved my hand from the side of his face to press his lips against my fingers. “Old enough.”
He began unbuttoning my blouse. Never had it occurred to me that a man would have a sexual interest in me at my current weight. Every fantasy of mine—the romantic ones with a handsome husband and the more prosaic ones with the Schendels’ hired hand, whose bulging forearms flexed and relaxed in a complicated way when he tossed hay bales—had been set at some point in the future when I had a trim, perfect body.
Jim pushed my shirt off my shoulders to put one hand up under the straining wire cage of my bra and closed his fingers around a nipple while he reached around and laboriously opened the line of hook-and-eye closures extending down the back of the garment. I shifted slightly to keep my tucked-away cash out of his reach. He took a breast in each hand as if determining their texture and heft.
“You’re a nice big girl,” he said and stood to peel off his own clothes.
Hugging my shirt and bra to my chest, I watched as he pulled his T-shirt over his head, hopped on first one foot and then the other to take off his boots and socks. I closed my eyes shut when he unbuttoned his jeans. A light heat radiated from his body as he knelt in front of me, making me turn away, not wanting to see his nakedness.
Jim laughed under his breath. He tucked his hand under my chin to pull my face away from my chest. “Hey there,” he said.
When Jim had visited my house, he had looked me up and down and told me that a pretty girl like me would have a lot of admirers. Now, I chanced a glance at his body, a look so quick that it gave me little more than the impression of white skin broken up by patches of hair.
Jim pressed his face against mine so that our noses and foreheads touched, then he put his lips on my mouth. My first kiss. Never, even in my wildest imaginings, could I have conceived of or invented the circumstances under which it would take place. The gesture was soft and hard at the same time, better and more enjoyable than anything else that had happened so far. “Here, let’s get the rest of these clothes off you,” Jim said, sliding two fingers inside my skirt waistband.
“But... I can’t. I have to...”
He would see how my skin and fat fell in long sheets and folds, with my belly hanging down to the middle of my thighs, a flesh-toned apron hiding everything underneath it.
“Just lean back then. I’ll help you.”
I rested my head against the couch frame while Jim took off my shoes and stockings. Willing myself not to look or move, I concentrated only on the dark nothingness behind my closed eyes. He pulled off my skirt and slip and slid my panties down my legs while I tried not to notice how they snagged on the ridge of my stomach and then snapped back. At one point, the hard, cylindrical warmth of what must have been his penis brushed against me. Jim took the shirt and bra I still held bunched up against my chest from my hands and pushed my legs apart so that he was kneeling between them.
“Come on, now. Open your eyes, Sarah.”
I did for a split second, seeing what Jim saw—the avalanche of fat, spread wide and flat on the low cushions. “Oh God,” I said, turning my face to the side.
Jim stroked my hair. “Hmmm,” he said. “How about we move this here?” He slid both hands up under my belly overhang to push it back and to the sides. “There we go.” When he moved closer to me, I could feel his hardness push the softness of my thigh. “Why don’t we put this here?” He stacked one of the couch cushions on top of a bed pillow before sliding them both under my backside. “There. That’s good.”
He repositioned my abdominal rolls, then he put himself inside me. It hurt. I seemed to have forgotten in the midst of everything else going on that there would be pain involved. Combined with that sensation, though, was a profound sense of relief. The fear of never knowing what it felt like to have someone do this to me, to have someone want to do this to me, dissolved. I patted Jim’s rib cage. He braced his body weight on his arms, his eyes shut, as if he were lost in a separate world.
“That’s good. That’s nice,” he said.
He moved himself in and out until it was over with a warm rush I could feel inside of me. Jim brought two hand towels from the bathroom, draping one of them over my lap, while he used the other to clean himself. When I pushed it down between my legs, bloodstains bloomed on the white fabric, causing me even more embarrassment and panic at the thought that there was no way for me to wash out the stain, the evidence of my body. I pawed through the cushions to gather up my clothes to cover myself.
Jim put his arms around me to quell my frantic movements. “Don’t be so worried, sweet Sarah.” He held each of my hands in one of his own and stretched our arms open to look at me. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said. “Don’t forget that people are going to pay good money just to stare at you.”
And then I smiled. Seeing Jim see me, I took the first step from being a huge invisible girl with two dead parents, who hadn’t even been allowed to go to school, to becoming prancing and visible, an abundant sideshow attraction who could put on a crackerjack show night after night and who understood how fine, how thin, the line was between desire and revulsion.