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Jim slept stretched out on the floor among the cushions and pillows, wearing only his underwear. Everything was jumbled up, ratcheting up my unease. I had an itching compulsion to reorder the couch, to return everything to its rightful place, and to wash my body. The bathroom door looked miniature and had a dreamy Alice in Wonderland quality that complicated the all-too-real problem of having to empty my bladder and being unable to pull my balled-up skirt and blouse out from under Jim. My bra was stuffed under the couch.
The small fluorescent bulb over the range top, the only light in the dark trailer, cast a slight, sickly glow over Jim’s bare skin, making him look gray, a man made of ash. He didn’t move and could have been dead except for the rise and fall of his chest. His right hand was tucked into the waistband of his undershorts. They were yellowed and sagged a little bit between his legs like a polishing rag.
I had to wedge myself sideways to get through the bathroom door and then press on my fat to squish and mold it piece by piece until my whole body was in the bathroom. My skin beaded with sweat from the effort and from the dread of being seen, of having someone witness the rituals I had devised for moving myself around or of having anyone even know about the need for them.
When I was finished, I went into the bedroom. There was a full-size mattress and box spring on the floor with a fitted sheet pulled free from one corner. I took the untucked top sheet from the center of the bed and wrapped it around me, glad to be able at last to cover myself. The bed looked inviting and called me to rest and sleep in forgetfulness, but I knew better than to close my eyes in this unfamiliar place. I was Wonderland Alice through the bathroom door, and now I became Goldilocks. These childish fairy tales of lost girls with streaming blond hair. I looked nothing like them. Yet they stayed with me, all of us sharing the experience of sudden entry into a world of dark enchantment. I lay down on Jim’s mattress and waited. There was a drinking glass stuck fast to the surface of his night table.
A little while later, Jim started moving around in the other room. I could hear him putting the cushions back into place. I pretended to sleep while he stood in the bedroom doorway to postpone, for a little while longer, at least, what waited for me outside my bed cocoon and the four walls holding me tight inside. I couldn’t say that I felt safe there or protected by Jim, but he had come to my rescue, had given me food like my father used to, and I had seen and felt him in an entirety that I had never had with any other person. I was shrouded now in a thin, worn sheet so long unwashed that its meager softness and sweet-and-sour odor might have been the same as having Jim’s arms around me.
Jim padded into the bathroom. I pressed my face down into the mattress at the splashing sound of his urine hitting the water in the toilet. He walked back to the living room, and through a slit of eye, I could see him pulling on his undershirt then buttoning up his blue chambray shirt, all the while humming some monotonous melody I couldn’t recognize. The repetitive rise and fall of the sound rocked me like a lullaby.
I needed to think about what was happening back at my house, to figure out how to manage the falling-domino chain of events that would require only the lightest touch to begin. The thought of Mrs. Schendel calling the house the next morning, of how her annoyance at my continued silence would change to concern and then to fear, made it hard to breathe. She would purse her lips then hang her apron on the kitchen hook where it belonged before going out the back door, with a wave to Mr. Schendel up at the barn. She would walk to my house, determined to check on me, to talk to me, to do something for me.
Jim came into the bedroom. “Hey, Sarah,” he said in a loud tone. He clapped his hands together. The sharp cracking of his palms made me open my eyes even when I wanted to keep them closed. “Up and at ’em. We need to head on over to the sideshow tent. Monty’s probably got a pretty good-sized tip built up by now.” Jim dumped my clothes onto the foot of the bed.
“Huh? What’s a tip?”
“That’s the crowd the outside talker attracts. Monty’s not bad at building a decent-size one. Then he gets them into the tent to see the show.”
“Oh.”
“Get dressed so we can head on up there.” Jim walked out of the bedroom. It felt good to put on my clothes again, to be covered, to seem more normal and like myself. I felt better able to consider and analyze my situation. The idea of walking somewhere sounded exhausting.
When I came out of the bedroom, Jim was stacking dishes in the kitchen sink, a cigarette dangling from his lip. “You about ready?” he asked over his shoulder.
“I was actually thinking that...” My voice, scratchy and soft, didn’t carry far enough for Jim to hear. I coughed. “You know, it would probably be a good idea for me to stay here maybe. It’s not that I don’t want to see the sideshow,” I amended.
Jim laughed. “See it? You’re going to be in it, sweetheart.”
“Wait. What? You mean now? Tonight?” I fumbled at the arm of the couch, afraid of the spinning sensation that Jim’s words generated. I managed to sit before I fell down, not caring how my body crashed into the furniture frame. The couch must have been sturdier than it looked, though, because it didn’t break or even crack under my extreme weight. I had known, of course, that I would have to do some sort of performance or display, but I had assumed there would be a transitional period or perhaps a time of training, never considering the dangerous possibility that I would have to stand out in plain sight where anyone could recognize me.
“No time like the present,” Jim said. He studied me for a moment. “Did you bring something else you could change into? I mean, you’re not really giving people much to see with that outfit you’ve got on.”
I was wearing a bark-brown skirt with a blue wave pattern embroidered along the hemline and a long-sleeve beige blouse that buttoned at the cuffs and under my chin. “All of my clothes look like this.” Everything Mrs. Schendel had ever sewn or made with me provided the same degree of full coverage, the appropriate camouflage.
“Shit. I can’t remember now where Fat Fanny got her stage outfits from. I know she took them with her when she left.” Jim must have noticed the stunned expression of terror and confusion on my face. “She was the fat-lady act before you,” he provided by way of helpful explanation.
“If I had the material, I could make my own dress. I mean, it might take me a couple of days or so, but then I’d be ready to go, I suppose.”
Jim didn’t respond in the instant to agree with my plan, so I kept talking to fill in the blank silence. “I always make my own clothes anyhow. My, um...” The words stalled in my mouth as I struggled to assign a descriptive role to Mrs. Schendel. “My stepmother showed me how.”
“Is that right? We could use that around here.” Jim smiled, generating an expected jolt of embarrassed pleasure that heated my entire body. No one had ever, in my life, suggested that I was useful, that my presence or actions could somehow improve a situation. “Ah, well. We can figure that out later,” he said. “Right now, we can make do by cutting a piece off the bottom.” As he spoke, Jim rummaged through one of the kitchen drawers, looking for a pair of shears, no doubt.
“This is good broadcloth cotton with hand stitching.” My tone was sharper than I wanted, but the thought of slicing up Mrs. Schendel’s careful work, especially the wavy blue decorative border, made me react before I had time to think. “I mean, I could probably tuck it up and under somehow.”
By unbuttoning the waistband of the skirt then reclosing it with a rubber band that Jim gave me, I had enough room to pull up the bottom edge of the skirt and have it lap back over so that the pretty embroidery showed. My legs were exposed a good five inches above my knee tops so that I had to remove my slip from underneath to keep my makeshift outfit from looking even more ridiculous. Jim also thought it would be a good idea for me to unbutton my blouse and tie the tails together to show off my stomach and cleavage.
He rubbed one of my braids, which was how I wore my plain brown hair every day, between his fingers and thumb. “You’ll need to lose these. It’s good to look young, but you don’t want to overdo it,” he said.
After untwining my hair, I gathered the whole wavy mass into one big, high ponytail. Jim told me it looked nice but that I would need some makeup to keep my face from appearing too pale and washed out in the glare of the footlights.
“Besides which, it looks like you’ve got a shiner coming up there.” Jim tapped softly at the corner of my left eye but didn’t ask how I’d gotten that bruise. When I told him I didn’t own any makeup, he gave me some Vaseline from his medicine chest and had me smear a coat of it on my lips and eyelids, claiming it would give me some reflective shimmer at least.
“Good enough,” Jim said, squeezing my shoulder. He dropped a pack of cigarettes into his shirt pocket, the last-minute movement of a person ready to walk out the door.
“Wait,” I said. By following Jim’s sequential suggestions and getting drawn into a discussion about clothes and hairstyles, I had somehow lost the bigger point of what we were talking about, of what I was advancing toward. “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.”
Jim stopped moving. “Well,” he said. “The sideshow’s a way for people to get a look at stuff they don’t normally see. You’re the fat lady act, so you do something that draws people’s attention to the fat. You could dance or shimmy or have a funny song...”
“But I don’t know how to do any of those things.” I cut myself off before I voiced out loud my even bigger concern, my fear that someone might recognize me or connect me with that same fat girl who lived in the little house at the edge of the Schendel farm or who once in a while sat in the back at First Lutheran, taking up enough pew space for three people.
Jim seemed oblivious to my fear. “Well then,” he said, “you can just talk to the people in the audience or flirt with the men. You can tell them how you eat twenty pancakes for breakfast every day and put one hundred teaspoons of sugar in your coffee.”
Despite my concerted desire to convince Jim that I shouldn’t be in the sideshow that night, I found myself getting caught up again in the details of what he was saying. “One hundred teaspoons of sugar wouldn’t fit in a coffee cup,” I protested. “And you know, I don’t actually eat twenty pancakes a day. No one does.” My voice had risen a notch at the notion that Jim would have these outlandish ideas about my fatness. “For your information, I drink my coffee black.”
Jim shrugged. “That’s not the point. The more outrageous, the better. People want things like that to be true. So you give them what they’re looking for. Ready, set, let’s go.” Jim opened the trailer door. In that moment, I saw that, unless I followed Jim, there was nowhere else for me to go.
Maybe no one would recognize me. It was late at night now. The good folks who saw me in church once in a while would surely be asleep at this hour. Perhaps it didn’t matter anyway. The people I had encountered until this point in my life, fewer and fewer in the growing number of years since I had to leave school, considered me nothing more than a shocking, repellent visual oddity. My fatness was my entire identity to them. They wouldn’t think me competent enough, sentient enough, or even human enough to have a broken heart and execute actions I would regret. Even at five hundred pounds, I was invisible. Performing in front of a crowd probably wouldn’t make me any less so.
The sideshow tent was only a short walk from Jim’s trailer, which was very fortunate indeed, since I wasn’t sure I could have gone much farther. My pace was a great deal slower than Jim’s. Every six feet or so, he would stop when he realized I had fallen behind again until at last, he wrapped my arm around his as best he could, his opposite hand covering the one I had rested in the crook of his elbow. There weren’t as many people around outside as there had been when we first arrived. Jim seemed to read my thoughts.
“It’s not too busy now,” he said. “The rain must have cleared people out.”
The late-night air smelled damp and fresh, like it had been washed, and over that scent, I detected the thick aroma of deep-fried food and the unmistakable smell of newly made popcorn. Jim lifted a piece of canvas so we could enter the tent from the back. We were in a sort of dressing room with a single fold-up metal chair and a mirror nailed to a wooden post. There was some piping and a spigot in the corner with a wash basin and an outflow underneath it.
“Huh,” Jim said. “I thought Gigi would be in here. No matter. I’ll find her. I’m going to go signal Monty.” Jim turned to leave then glanced back at me standing there. “You’re going to do fine, kid. I’ll put you on first, then it’s over and done, okay? When you hear me introduce you, just walk right out through here then up the couple of stairs onto the stage. There’s not much of a crowd left, so this will probably be the last show of the night anyway.”
Jim kissed my cheek. The gesture sparkled all the way down my spine, surprising me with its electric pleasantness. After Jim left, I thought again about the day he had come with Hinkle Musgrave to the house to ask if I wanted to join the sideshow. As they were about to leave, he drank the last of the cold, milky coffee I had served, thumping the cup so that the sugar at the bottom could fall into his mouth. The sound of him crunching the crystals between his teeth had been so distinct that I could almost taste the sweetness myself.
My hips and knees began to hurt. The chair in the dressing room probably wouldn’t hold my weight, leaving me to brace myself against its back. The mirror reflected my bare skin and hunched-forward body, causing me to turn my head away from the rolling parts of myself uncovered for display, my clothes rearranged as if I were a stupid child playing dress-up and trying to look like a sexy grown-up woman. What would Jared do if he could see me now? He would turn and walk away without a word or maybe cough or gag into his fist, taking care to make the gesture loud and obvious enough for me to notice. Mrs. Schendel would tell me to cover up or remind me not to carry on so. I could hardly bear to think what my father would say. Jared’s fiancée, Missy, would surely find the spectacle entertaining, at least. She would laugh until her sides hurt, until she couldn’t stand the pain of laughing at me anymore.
The sound of clapping and whistling floated in from the other side of the canvas, followed by Jim’s amplified voice. The show was starting. Jim was welcoming everyone, telling them they were going to see oddities of nature and feats that defied the imagination. “First up,” he said, “I’ve got a nice young lady here with a great big heart and an even bigger backside. Folks, Sweet Sarah, who you’re about to meet, weighs six hundred thirty-two pounds. And I’ll have you know that’s an exact figure because we had the chance to weigh her on a truck scale last week. She just finished up her dinner of eight pork chops and ten big buttermilk biscuits. I’ll tell you she likes the whole thing slathered with gravy.”
Jim’s words caused me such embarrassment that I nearly lost my grip on the chair and fell to the ground. The thought of falling, the damage I could do to my body, terrified me. Was that how I had looked when I ate dinner in front of him?
“To tell you the truth, they say this girl likes everything she puts in her mouth to be covered in gravy.” Jim waited for the laughter to die out, to give the men in the crowd a chance to whistle through their teeth at that remark, which I only half understood. As instructed, I walked toward the stage and waited on the bottom step. Jim winked at me over his shoulder. “And now, it is my distinct pleasure to present to you, appearing on stage for the first time anywhere—Sweet Sarah.”
I took his outstretched hand and climbed the four steps up to the stage. He passed the microphone to me with a smile, likely meant to encourage me, then stepped off into the wing. I walked to the front of the stage.
“Hello,” I said, my mouth too close to the microphone, causing an alarming audio feedback screech. People in the audience groaned and covered their ears. The footlights were bright, just like Jim had said they would be, making it hard to discern individual faces in the crowd. As my eyes adjusted, I could see people having side conversations, looking at the stage, waiting for me to do or say something. I scanned the room to see if I recognized anyone. Everyone looked like a stranger. The audience was growing restless. Jim was making some gesture off to the side, holding his fist under his chin and then pointing outward. He wanted me to use the microphone to talk to the crowd. I nodded toward him.
“Hello,” I said again, with no clear idea of what to do next. These people had paid to look at a fat lady. I had poundage enough not to disappoint. “Here’s the fat,” I said, drawing in a whistling, amplified breath. I raised both arms above my head, eyes squeezed shut, my mouth open and teeth showing. The first burst of laughter erupted somewhere in the third row.
An old man close to the stage cupped his hand around his mouth to yell toward me. “Hey there, look at the jiggle girl.” His comment drew more laughter from the people around him.
The woman sitting next to him, his wife maybe, fanned her red, fleshy face. “My God,” she said. “How could anyone let themselves get like that?” The fat along her upper arm swayed with even that slight movement of her hand.
Their comments and the unexamined hypocrisy of her words in particular caused a familiar anger, as deep almost as the rage Jared used to incite, to rise up in me. They didn’t know, as I did, what it meant to be a target for ridicule. They hadn’t grown up in extreme isolation with a father who never wanted or would never have permitted me to leave home and have a separate life. In that thin, barren existence, only food, vast quantities of it, had brought me any solace or joy, stronger even than the shame and self-hatred eating it inspired.
A person toward the back called out to me. “Come on and do something. Don’t just stand there, fatty.”
The crowd laughed again, bigger and wider, feeling both surprising and familiar at the same time. My assumption that maybe people would express more interest than derision since they had paid money to see me had been wrong. I wanted to walk off the stage to hide myself, just like at home, but Jim was making a frantic gesture off to the side. Whatever literal message he was trying to convey, the meaning was the same. Do better. Be better.
“Hello there,” I said. Some man near the entrance yelled that I had already said that three times, but I ignored him. “My name is...” Even though Jim had referred to me as “Sweet Sarah,” there was no sense in repeating it, in making myself more memorable or identifiable. What did these people want to hear me say? “So, you’re probably wondering how I got so fat like this, and, well, it’s because I just never feel full.” Studying the room again, I did recognize someone near the back—Hinkle Musgrave, the owner of Midstate Traveling Amusements Carnival. His arms were folded across his chest, holding that posture so tightly it looked as if he were hugging himself.
“Anyway, thanks for coming.” Reasoning it was the appropriate and usual thing to do, I took my bow, both arms raised straight up with my hands toward the top of the tent and out to the sides and then flung them down and back while I leaned forward, as deeply as possible.
Passing the microphone back to Jim, I walked off the stage to the sound of some half-hearted, confused applause, passed through the dressing room, and was already standing outside before realizing that I had no idea what to do next. Jim had locked the trailer when we left, so I couldn’t go there. There were lights on in some of the other trailers. Out on the midway, some places were still open, some rides still running. As I was trying to decide where to go, I pulled my skirt back into its correct position, fumbling to rebutton it.
“Hey, Sarah.”
The sound of Jim’s voice startled me, making me scream a bit.
Jim placed his hand on my wrist where I was trying to pull apart the jumbled mess of my hair. “You doing all right? You’re shaking an awful lot.”
I realized he was right. My entire body was trembling, so much so that I was afraid to answer him for fear I might bite off my tongue. I stopped messing with my hair to stare at him.
“Ah, Jesus,” Jim said. He looked down at the ground with his hands on his hips. “The sideshow’s great. It gives work to people who otherwise maybe couldn’t get a job, you know? The thing is, though, it’s not for everybody. And there’s nothing wrong with that.” Jim reached over to smooth my hair. “I got Monty to finish up in there because the crowd’s shit anyway. We can pick up your stuff from my trailer, then I can give you a ride home. How does that sound?”
It sounded like, improbable and absurd though it was, that I had failed as a fat lady. “No,” I said in a quiet voice, clasping my hands together to minimize the shaking of my body. “There’s nothing at home for me. I can’t go back.”
Jim half smiled. “Come on. You could be in your bed in less than an hour, and things might look a lot different in the morning.”
I thought about what I would see at my house in tomorrow’s daylight. “I. Can’t. Go. Back,” I repeated, spacing the words for emphasis, enunciating each one with force to make sure Jim understood me.
He didn’t ask what I meant. Maybe as old as he was and running a sideshow like he did, Jim took it as a matter of course that every person must have some trouble somewhere, some kind of compulsion, a backstory.
“I can do better the next time. I think it’s just because before this, I didn’t get out of my house too much. It’s a kind of, you know, stage fright.”
Even though I didn’t sound very convincing, Jim said he would walk me back to his trailer. His face registered a familiar emotion, easy for me to recognize—pity. His expression reminded me of Mrs. Schendel, of how she used to tell me I could have a husband and children if I lost weight.
I thought Jim would stay with me. Instead, he disappeared out into the night again after he told me to get some rest. Even as I stretched out on Jim’s mattress, thankful for an end to what had been the longest day of my life, I knew I would never sleep, fearing the sights that awaited me in the realm of the unconscious.
***
“Get up, Sarah.” The firm persistence of Jim’s words and the vigor of his shaking my shoulder made it apparent that he had been trying for some time to awaken me, giving me a dim recollection of the sound of his voice and the touch of his hand in my dreams.
Morning really had arrived. A chink of pale light crisscrossed the room, a line from the outside world streaking across the floor and bed, bisecting my face. My dreams, half-remembered fears and illusions, were like knotted ribbons, suggesting a jumble of characters who only now in the light of day were packing their bags, rolling their sharp instruments into cloth kits, and retiring to wherever it was they rested during waking hours.
My heart banged in my chest. I shouldn’t have slept for so long, wasted time when Mrs. Schendel would already be up working before anybody, even Missy, would have been inside my house yet.
“Okay,” I said. “What I’d really like to do, though, is find a telephone. I need to make a call first thing.”
I hoped I hadn’t used up Jim’s good grace and indulgence the night before by sleeping in his bed. It never occurred to me that I could have left a sliver of space, regardless of how slight, for him to join me. Neither did I question my assumption that it would have been acceptable, preferable even, for me to sleep on the floor. Jim seemed different this morning, less solicitous and less interested than he had been the night before.
“Later. I’ve got some stuff to care of. You can go outside and take a look around, say hi to some people maybe.” Jim radiated a sort of intense alertness that made me wonder if he ever slept.
When I came out of the bedroom, Jim was leaning back against the bar separating the kitchenette from the living room, holding a yellow coffee cup in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, tapping his boot toe in obvious impatience. “All right, then,” he said.
I stood in front of him like I was presenting myself for inspection and waiting for some pronouncement on my suitability. Seeing Jim standing there like any other man on the street or in this world reminded me of what he looked like without his clothes and how he had seen me and what we had done the night before. Shame and empathy for the disgust Jim must have felt, like the revulsion I experienced when I touched my own flesh, flared inside me, highlighting the uncomfortable burning sensation in my crotch. Despite that, I wanted to smash my face against his chest and to feel him grip my back—as close as I could come to being wrapped in a man’s arms, of being enveloped and sheltered in a way that only a thin, beautiful woman could be.
“I’ve got some business to take care of. You’ll need to talk to Hinkle at some point today about your contract.” Jim stubbed out his cigarette. “Just so you know, he saw you up on stage last night, and he’ll probably try to use that against you, so make sure you stand up for yourself.”
“Okay,” I said, mostly to get him to stop talking about these other things that didn’t particularly interest me. “I really do need to make a telephone call right away, though, because, you see, I left without telling my stepmother what I was doing, and I would hate to have her worry.”
“Later, like I said.” Jim opened the door, pushing on my shoulder to get me moving. Even though there was no resemblance at all between the men, I felt a flash of Jared in the impatient stiffness of Jim’s hand, heard a familiar frustration in his sigh.
I had to do what Jim said. I needed his help. Wanting to take matters into my own hands didn’t make me able to do so. My father might have taught me far more than your average high-school student, but I didn’t know enough about how things worked to be able to cover my own tracks.
Outside, the sun was only a dull orange shimmer on the horizon. A white haze hovered over the ground, like a dreamscape. I thought Jim might kiss me goodbye, but instead he gave me a simple pat on the back before walking away with the easy, distance-eating strides of an unencumbered person.
The surface under my feet was piebald grass in some parts, while other areas had gravel spread over patches of dirt. Last night’s rainwater had filled in the deep ruts, leaving wide puddles between and behind a lot of the trailers, which when the wind stirred, gave off a vaguely unpleasant odor like sewage. Tripping and falling on such uneven ground were easy likelihoods.
I had been to the carnival exactly one other time in my life, when I was about eight years old, but it was hard to imagine that experience being any help to me. Riding the Ferris wheel then had been a terrifying experience, certain as I was that my weight, which had already made the basket feel unbalanced, would cause it to flip backward and Jared and me to fall to the ground.
“And it’ll be your fault if we die, piggy,” Jared said. The two of us were alone together in that tight space, with me terrified, hating every minute of it and despising, too, the ride operator, who was smoking a cigarette and talking to two teenage girls in shorts instead of paying attention.
My father did buy me a nice caramel apple afterward. The sweet creaminess of the caramel against the tart crunch of apple felt good and right in my mouth. I was taking small bites when we ran into Mr. and Mrs. Schendel. She smiled at us, while Mr. Schendel glanced away, pretending not to notice how my father had reached out to shake hands with him.
“Really, Abraham,” Mrs. Schendel told my father, “you have to be more careful about what you feed this child.” She reached over to pull the apple from my hand, but I wouldn’t let go of the stick and took a giant bite while there was still a chance to eat it. She wrenched it from my grasp. “Sarah, stop it,” she said. “You’re behaving like an animal.”
I lowered my head, noticing the different shoes of men and women. My tears made soft divots on the dusty ground. My father’s feet shifted from side to side.
“If Sarah can’t eat her apple, then I can take care of it for her,” Jared said, and then, incredibly and horribly, Mrs. Schendel handed it to him and even smiled.
“No!” I screamed. “That’s not fair.”
My father pressed his hand against my shoulder. “Enough now, Sarah. People are staring.”
The world was an unjust place in which even then I knew I had fewer rights. It was only a caramel apple, yet it was a lesson in the sin of wanting, the pain of enjoyment, and the horrible knowledge that everyone was always looking at but never seeing me.
Later that night, Jared pulled back the quilt that divided our bedroom. “Hey, Sarah,” he said, the half-eaten caramel apple in his hand. He must have hidden it somewhere when I wasn’t paying attention. He took a big bite and waved the apple near my face. “I bet you wish you had some of this.” The lithe outline of his body could be seen through his cotton pajamas, his wrist a network of bumps and bones. I rolled over to hide the hot, salty tears stinging my face, which was red from too much sun.
“Yum, yum, yum. Here’s the scraps, piggy.”
The apple core and stick hit the wall near my head, stuck for a moment, then landed on my mattress, leaving an icky brown stain on the wall. Jared laughed, letting the quilt fall back into place. I could hear him climb into his bed. The caramel along the top and bottom fringes of the apple core still tasted sweet and good. When I was certain that Jared was asleep, I ate the remnants, even the seeds, and tucked the stick up my nightgown sleeve so I would remember to drop it into the burn barrel the next morning.
Thinking about Jared was an unhelpful distraction from the situation at hand. Smoke or steam rose from a trailer near the edge of the parking area farthest from the carnival. The smell of coffee and frying bacon wafted from that direction, or maybe it was my imagination. If there were food and drink at that trailer, there might also be a telephone. I was afraid of doing the wrong thing, though. I wouldn’t know any of the people who were there to eat or have Jim with me to do introductions.
There was a vacant weedy field behind the trailers and, in front of me, to my left, the quiet, empty carnival. The unmoving rides and the booths closed over with plastic sheeting or squares of plywood exuded an eerie, almost haunted feeling of abandonment. My best bet, not to mention the easiest course of action, would be to walk around to try to find someone who could maybe help me look for a telephone or to keep moving until, at the very least, I found a safe place to sit and think of a plan.
“All right, then.” I walked in the opposite direction that Jim had gone, partly from fear of running into him and having to watch him extricate himself from me again but mostly because I had to pick some way to go, and it seemed as good as any. The drumming pull in my knees was still bearable, but I knew it would soon become painful. I would need to find a place other than the ground to sit because getting back up on my feet was a tricky maneuver all its own. The muted stillness of the scene made me think everyone must still be asleep, then a voice called out to me.
“Hey there,” a woman said. “Yeah, you. Come over here, will you?”
She was sitting on a lawn chair on the hard-packed dirt outside a small white travel trailer. The seat and back of the chair were made of interwoven green and white nylon strips. It would never have supported me, even if I could have managed to squeeze myself between the aluminum armrests.
She gave a low whistle. “By shit, will you look at you? You must be the new fat lady.”
That word “fat” had been a wounding weapon, a destructive device plaguing me through my brief school years, in my own house and in my own mind. It made me look away from my reflection or sometimes grab handfuls of my lapping, avalanching body and twist and pull until it hurt, until it felt closer to the punishment I deserved for being blobbish and repellent. After the previous night’s onstage debacle, however, the pain and memory wrapped up in that small word stayed curiously dormant. I saw that identity was simply its axiomatic self. A fat lady had to be fat.
“Come on over and have a seat.” She gestured to a log someone must have rolled over to sit on alongside the trailer. Empty beer bottles and clusters of cigarette butts littered the ground, with a few starbursts of broken glass near the log, very close to the woman’s bare feet. She seemed not to notice or care. The log, though, looked as sturdy as the tree it had once been, even down to the network of hairy roots attached to its bottom. Someone had looped a black brassiere over one of the roots, and a few pairs of white underpants had been arranged in a line over the top of the log.
“You can just move that stuff out of the way,” she said. “I brought it out here to dry because there’s just no goddamn room in the trailer.”
I rolled the underwear in a straight line so that all the clothes were twirled together in a single cylinder and left the brassiere to dangle from the roots. Sitting down on that log was no easy task, and possibly, I looked like a giant squatting bullfrog, but the goodness of finding a reprieve from the strain on my body prevented me from caring.
The woman dug around in the sides of her chair to find her pouch of loose tobacco. She shook some into a rolling paper and cracked a wooden match to light her cigarette. The woman was wonderfully thin and wore a cotton housecoat pushed up above her knees. The garment looked old and flimsy, worn out in patches, a little shiny across the chest. Her feet were covered in dried dirt, her knees and elbows red, a little scaly maybe, with flaking white skin. Her hair, a cascade of color from the thick ridge of dark brown along the top to the hot, deep red at the tips, was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I wondered what unusual beauty made it grow that way.
The woman rubbed the dark smudges around her eyes. “My name’s Gigi, by the way,” she said.
I remembered Jim mentioning her the night before. “I’m Sarah... just Sarah,” I said, not wanting to tell her my last name.
“Nice to meet you. I don’t know about the ‘Sarah,’ though. You need something better than that,” Gigi said. She took a long drag on her cigarette.
“Excuse me?”
“You need something jazzier for the show. The last fat lady was Fat Fanny—and man, she really did have an ass the size of Ohio. You’re bigger, though.” Gigi nodded in appreciation.
“Well, thanks,” I said. “I don’t suppose you know where I could find a telephone?” I looked down at the ground so Gigi couldn’t see how much I wanted her to answer yes.
“Huh? Oh well, I guess your best bet would be to head into town for that.”
“Oh.” I wished I could think of something else to say or do to help myself.
“I don’t suppose you have any aspirin, do you?” Gigi asked.
“No.”
“Aw, that’s too bad. This fucking hangover might kill me. The worst part is I can’t even sleep it off. Every time I put my head down on the pillow, my eyes pop wide open.” Gigi tipped her head back and exhaled a long plume of blue smoke. “So, how’d Jim find you, then?”
My face immediately reddened at the sound of Jim’s name, at the casualness of Gigi’s reference to him. “Oh well, he and Mr. Musgrave came to my house to visit, and—”
Gigi burst out laughing. “Mr. Musgrave? Jesus, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call Hinkle that. Exactly how old are you, kid?”
“Seventeen.”
“Don’t let on to Hinkle that you’re underage.” Her tone had shifted, her words harder, urgent, making me pay attention. “He’ll get to thinking you’re easy pickings.”
And he would be right, I thought.
It occurred to me then that I didn’t even know Jim’s last name. I was a thousand times worse than my brother’s fiancée, Missy, ever thought to be. What kind of woman would do what I had done with a man she barely knew? I tried to picture Jim’s face, but aside from the memory of his scar, I couldn’t do it, couldn’t paint a vivid recollection in my mind. I recalled only bits and pieces of his person—the horizon of his shoulders and head with the wall, the windows rising behind him, and the otherworldly image of his closed eyes, making him look fetal and pre-human in the half light.
“Well sir,” Gigi continued, “Fat Fanny left about two—no, three—years ago. She’s living somewhere out in Washington State. Or maybe it’s Oregon. Anyway, I hear she married some short little Portuguese fisherman who goes out on these trips for weeks at a time and that his skin’s so dark he looks like an Injun. But there’s no accounting for taste, I guess.”
This knowledge of following in someone else’s footsteps, of feeling an improbable competitive edge to be the better fat lady, to be better liked, was unexpected. So, too, was the realization that, having focused nearly every moment of my existence on becoming smaller and pinning every shred of future happiness on the thin body that I thought I would someday have, I could take such pleasure in the plain knowledge that I was fatter than some other woman.
“So, Fat Fanny then. Did she leave because she got married, or did she get fired or something like that because she couldn’t get along with Jim...” I could feel my face heat at the mention of Jim Last-Name-Unknown. At the very least, I knew that Jim must like me, or he wouldn’t have done such intimate things with me. I missed him with a sudden intensity and wanted to feel his hand stroking my hair—an action that had never taken place but that would have been soft and sublime—and to have him kiss my lips. This time I would caress the side of his face.
Gigi laughed. “No, she didn’t get fired. Fat Fanny was no Dolly Dimples or anything, but she got along with Jim all right. But that’s nothing. I mean, he gets along with all the girls. Short, tall, skinny, fat, black, white, whatever.”
It slowly dawned on me that Gigi meant to say that Jim slept with different women all the time. I hadn’t known a person could be that way, could put his body in one situation after another like that with no thought for the consequences. The thing he had put inside me had been in many women, meaning he could compare my naked body against his memory of any of them. I looked down at my hands, at the nubby nails that didn’t even reach the tops of my fingertips.
“Hey, kid.” Gigi leaned toward me. “Did I tell you that I’m a sword swallower? There aren’t too many lady sword swallowers around. In fact, I might be the only one. I used to be in the cootch show. Hinkle wasn’t too crazy at first about me working the sideshow, but the men in the audience love it. I have this bit where I get down on my knees, and I get a lot of inside money for that.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “But you don’t really swallow a sword, right? I mean it’s some kind of trick.”
Gigi smiled. “No, it’s real, all right. No trick. You could do it yourself. You just tip your head back and open your throat, and you get used to it. The cootch show, now that was a crazy gig.”
“The what?” I asked this time.
Gigi laughed. “The cootch show,” she repeated. “A girl show. It’s sort of like the sideshow, except only men go in. The talker comes out and gives his bally, and the girls walk around in their costumes while he talks them up. And then you get up on stage and dance and take off your clothes.” Gigi narrowed her eyes and flicked the ashes from her cigarette. “You see these men out on the street or sitting in church. They’re so nice and polite, but you get them inside that tent, then they’re nothing but a bunch of disgusting, snorting pigs.”
“Oh.” My mouth felt so parched that it was difficult to speak. I tried not to picture Gigi naked, dancing in front of a crowd filled with these dirty animal men who might have been identical to the ones I saw in church or the grocery store or to Mr. Schendel or Jared or even to my father.
“Well, you can see why nobody in their right mind would want to keep doing it. Before I thought to learn the sword swallowing, Jim and me did this act for a while with me in the blade box. The sword swallowing, though, that’s a real skill.” Gigi shook the two fingers holding her cigarette at me. “You’re lucky you got something special like being so fat. It’s a hell of a lot easier than being a working act. Anyway, if you’re looking for a phone, somebody will probably take a ride into town today. Although I do know that some people around here are probably going to want to lie low for the next few days until we blow out of here. The cops were around here last night, so there must have been some beef with a townie.”
“The police were here?” A crow called overhead. “Is that normal?”
Gigi stared at me, smoking, considering maybe the expression on my face, how my hands clutched the fabric of my skirt. I relaxed my grip and looked away—just an easy, expected question from a new girl trying to figure out how everything worked. A warm breeze stirred my hair. It’s only the wind, I thought to myself.
“I don’t know that it’s normal,” Gigi said, “but it happens often enough. We’re always getting hassled for some shit or other.”
I had combed my hair into its usual braids before leaving the trailer, and I pulled one of the plaits over the front of my shoulder, twirling the unbound fringe of hair at the end of the rubber band, trying to think. No matter how I probed the parts of my brain responsible for imagination and conniving, no ideas were coming to me. Meanwhile, Gigi talked on about her life before the carnival, about growing up in the flat, open land of central Kansas, about the terrifying storms that would roll across the sky—the unexpected tornadoes. Gigi told the story, too, of how one day her restless, unhappy mother decided she had had enough—at least that was what she had told Gigi, who at the time has been called Jenny.
“Jenny, I want you to know that I won’t be here when you get home from school. You’ll stay on with your father.” Gigi repeated her mother’s words, adding that she, Gigi, had worried each minute of the school day, wondering what exact moment her mother would pick to leave.
I pictured Gigi with simple brown hair and no black makeup staining her eyes and wondered how a mother could leave like that. Or how one like mine would rather be dead than with her children.
“I never saw her again,” Gigi finished. “She went away and never looked back. No letters, no ‘I’m sorry.’ And then five or six years later, I left my father too. We didn’t have much to say to each other, and if I had stayed around, I would probably have married some other dirt farmer and ended up doing the same thing my mother did. So I got out while the getting was good and ran off with the carnival.
“Anyway,” Gigi said, batting her fingers in front of her face to tear through the spiderwebs of bad memory. “Here I am. And now I’m a blade glommer.”
The sun made its way up the sky. The heat started to swell, seeping into the back of my shirt. I wanted to drink a tall glass of wonderful cold water, with delectable drops of condensation on the glass that I would smear on my face and neck. Gigi shifted in her lawn chair, yanking on the waistband of her underpants beneath her nightgown. Did she want me to leave? Was I acting like the tedious Mrs. Person, one of the neighbor ladies who used to sit in our kitchen and talk until she had drunk three cups of coffee? Mrs. Schendel had hated that and hated her too. Was Gigi thinking that about me? I didn’t know. Maybe. Probably. I tried to come up with something else to say.
“I didn’t do too well on stage last night,” I confessed.
“Yeah, Jim and me talked about that a little bit after the show. It’s nothing to worry about, all right? You just need a few pointers is all. For starters, them people watching ain’t nothing but a bunch of goddamn marks. They don’t matter. Also, you gotta be the one in charge of them. Not the other way around.”
“That’s a good way to look at it, I suppose.” This approach made me consider the sideshow might be more like a good source of employment, the way it had been pitched to me, than something that presented me as an object of disdain.
We sat in companionable silence until my thirst got the better of me. I was about to ask Gigi for a glass of water despite my strong suspicion that if she went into her trailer to get it, she simply wouldn’t come back out and would fall asleep in her bed, when I saw Jim walking down the grade from the midway, making his way toward the trailer lot.
“Hey, Jimmy,” Gigi called out to him.
“So this is where you got off to,” he said, sitting on the log beside me. Jim reached over to grab Gigi’s bare knee and moved her leg from side to side. “Gigi here can tell you everything you need to know.”
Gigi stood up and laughed. She stretched her arms over her head. “I guess I’ll take a couple of pills and get some sleep then. I tell you, Jim, this drinking will kill us all one day.” Gigi arched her back, held her hands up to the sky, and rotated her wrists in small circles. “Nice to meet you, Just Sarah. You need any help getting a good act together, you come to me, all right? Jim here don’t know shit about what gets a crowd, especially a bunch of men, going.”
Jim laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, at ease and relaxed, an endless smooth operator. “You get me going, Gigi girl,” he said, reaching over to swat the back of her housecoat. They were like friends, but the brush of Jim’s fingertips, almost skimming Gigi’s backside through her ratty night clothes, was unusual, unexpected—familiar.
I needed more air and wished that I could draw enough of it into my lungs. “I really have to find a telephone to use,” I told Jim as soon as the trailer door closed behind Gigi. My voice wobbled in opposition to the casual nonchalance I hoped to feign. “Please,” I added, touching the top part of Jim’s leg.
“Huh? Oh well, the gal down to the county office is pretty good about letting us use the telephone.” Jim seemed unsure whether this unnamed county worker would be as helpful to a sideshow performer waddling up alongside her desk, while I was terrified the woman would recognize me. Would she see me as just the carnival fat lady or connect me with that girl Sarah, the one people talked about and spotted at the grocery store or at Woolworth’s once in a while?
I couldn’t afford to press my luck again. “No! Please... I mean, isn’t there some type of pay phone or something? Somewhere, you know, where no one will see us?” I squeezed Jim’s hand. My voice was too loud. Jim’s annoyance that my simple request was changing into this time-consuming undertaking was apparent, but what choice did I have but to convince him?
“Please,” I whispered while I silently prayed, Let him do this for me. Help me, Jesus. I wouldn’t let go of Jim’s hand until he said yes, until my prayers were answered.
“All right, fine. Okay. Okay,” he repeated but with less irritation in his voice. Maybe he could feel my desperation. Maybe Jesus really had interceded on my behalf. “We’ll take care of it.” Jim stroked my arm and kissed the top of my head.
Maybe every man wanted to be a hero, especially when so little was required to achieve that status.