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When we arrived in Beloit, I watched, fascinated, as the carnival world was built up around us in a horseshoe pattern, a sort of open oval with the games and food in front so that the visitors would see them first. The rides were in the center, and then the cootch show was toward the back on one side of the loop, and the sideshow was opposite it on the other. In the early morning, before the sun had even risen, a swarm of workers, like the parts of a ticking clock, moved around and crisscrossed what had been an empty field. They erected the rides and built the booths and set up the frame for and draped the canvas sheets of the tent where the sideshow was going to be. They built a raised platform outside the structure where the talker would give his spiel. Folding chairs were set up, and a stage was made. A world was created from nothing in a remarkable amount of time.
Posters in vibrant color and detail hung from the sides of the tent—one of Gigi, with her painted doll’s face and whipped-up hair, elegant neck pointing to the sky as she held the hilt of the sword she was swallowing. One of Ike, his painted body garish and eye-catching, with a caption calling him the tattooed wonder of Polynesia. And one of Freddy, the little magnificent man. Jim had a poster, too, showing him as a glass eater with a jagged broken bottle in one hand, his mouth bright red and bleeding. I asked him about it when I saw him later on the back lot. He told me he didn’t do it much anymore but that he had gotten the idea to do the glass eating after Charlie-Charlene, the man-woman, had gotten angry at Hinkle for not paying him-her enough, and they were left with only three acts.
“It can be a tough racket,” Jim admitted. “Sometimes, enough tickets don’t get sold, so Hinkle takes the difference out the performers’ pay, which ain’t exactly right.” Jim had a worn red handkerchief that he kept half stuffed in the back pocket of his dungarees. He mopped his bald head and the back of his neck in a distracted, repetitive way.
“But that’s not fair,” I said, thinking of how Hinkle had thrown his dirty shirt at me.
“That’s how it goes. Hinkle and Chuck didn’t like each other much, so that was part of it. The sideshow ain’t what it used to be anyway. Time was you could sell hundreds of tickets, and people believed in what they saw. If you said it was a crocodile boy, they said it was a crocodile boy. Now, everybody wants to stay home and watch TV.”
I thought about the image of Jim as a glass eater, the author of his own misfortune with blood running down his chin. “Those posters are really something,” I said and meant it. “Will there be one of me?”
“We’ll see,” Jim said. I guessed that Jim didn’t want to commit to spending any money, to anything really, until he had seen me onstage, until an audience had bought tickets and loved my act enough to stand up from their chairs and nudge up to the stage to get a closer look at me.
***
“Take a look at yourself,” Gigi said, nudging me closer to the full-length mirror on her bedroom wall. Her trailer was cramped and so small that we couldn’t both stand in the bedroom without having the sliding divider open. The beautiful magenta dress, sewn with such painstaking care, no longer seemed so wonderful now that it was draped over my body. At Gigi’s insistence, I had raised the hem higher so that it fell well above my knee. The mirror was narrow, and my image overflowed the sides, even when I took one step away then another until my back was against the opposite wall of the trailer. Mrs. Schendel would be proud of my sewing, but my giant exposed legs, beaded and rippling with dimples and bumpy slabs of fat, made me want to cry. The dress had no sleeves, just a pair of sequined straps, leaving me astounded at the ham-like solidity of my arms. I couldn’t remember ever seeing myself like this in my fullness. Gigi had liked the idea of high heels, but that was too dangerous a walk for me, and so we had settled on frilly ankle socks and a shiny pair of patent leather Mary Janes.
Gigi had also worked a deep henna into my hair, giving my ordinary brown a reddish flair. I focused on that and on the dramatic perfection of my makeup—the deep color on my lips and the sweeping blue under my brows that made my eyes seem more green. The big false lashes clung to each other when I blinked. Gigi had even drawn a beauty mark for me. Such a pretty face, I heard Mrs. Schendel say.
“You look good.” Gigi pulled one of the straps closer to my neck. “I’m glad we did that curl in your hair. It’s nice.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “So, um, I don’t know. Now what should I do?”
Gigi opened the snaps of her housecoat. “Well, I’m going to be just a few more minutes to put on my dress. You head on over to the tent and go in the back. Jim will introduce me, then when I leave the stage, you’re up.” Gigi leaned over and hugged me. “Just stay relaxed, and you’ll do fine,” she said with such conviction that I wanted to believe her.
With precious few ideas for my act, I figured my best bet was to do a little dance. That way people could get a good look at my fat, which was what they were paying to see, while I could stay silent and at least partially hidden behind loud, blaring music. The only problem, of course, was that dancing was another one of those things I knew nothing about. I had listened to the radio quite a bit, though, turning the dial away from the stilted AM stations that my father favored as soon as he left the house, and then later, after his death, abandoning them altogether. I remembered raising the volume on the heart-thumping sound of Grand Funk Railroad belting out the song “Locomotion.” The beauty of that song was that its lyrics were a type of instruction in movement, telling me what to do, exhorting me to put my hands in the air and swing my hips before making a train. So I wrote a list of body movements and practiced them.
My plan was to prance out on stage then introduce myself, tell some stories about how much I ate, about how it was that I came to be so hugely fat in the first place. People wanted to know that. Then I figured I could hold my arms over my head and do a few twirls so the crowd could see me from every angle. Jim would start the music on my cue, and then the dancing would begin.
I had wanted to watch Gigi do her act, but once I was inside the dressing room, my panic and sense of disbelief made it impossible for me to do anything other than breathe in and out. In and out. In and out. Moments passed. The heat built in the tent, making me wish for a tall glass of delicious icy water. Time carried on, and at last, I had a dim but growing awareness of hearing applause. Walking up the steps to the back of the stage, I was in time to see Gigi rise to her feet and toss her sword into the air before catching it behind her back. The trickiness of the maneuver, the skill behind it, was astounding. How had she ever managed to practice such a thing? The crowd ate it up, cheering, with some of the men whistling through their teeth.
Gigi walked off the stage, waving to her admirers. She passed by me, her face pink and hot when she pressed her cheek against mine. “Knock ’em dead, kid.”
Then Jim stepped to the center of the stage, microphone in hand. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “We’ve got a brand-new act for you this evening. We’re about to show you something you’ve never seen, something no one has ever seen. We have a lovely young lady here with a figure so big and robust—why, you could sew together three of an ordinary wife’s dresses, and it still wouldn’t cover this girl’s big backside. I tell you, I found this girl eating a stack of pancakes ten high at a church supper social. Because, folks, that’s the nice sort of wholesome girl she is and well-mannered, too, with her knife and fork. You’d have thought maybe that she was at the queen’s house to dine. And I said that’s mighty strange, eating pancakes for supper. Then the deacon told me it was because the lovely Lola Rolls had ate all the ham steaks and potatoes they had fried. She had five ham steaks and another eight pounds of fried potatoes and a dozen ears of corn. So when she was still hungry, there was nothing left to give her but pancakes and syrup. It’s all true, her father told me. I can hardly afford to feed her...”
I stuffed my fist into my mouth, shocked and appalled at this mention of my father, even just as some imaginary character in Jim’s talker spiel.
“So I told her father I would give her a job here in the carnival where she could meet you kind people and help her aging father to boot.”
As soon as I was alone with Jim, I was going to tell him to back off my father, make it straight that Jim had no right or reason to mention him.
“And now it’s my distinct pleasure to present to you, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Lola Rolls.” Jim half turned toward me, extending his right arm in my direction.
I took his hand and stepped onto the stage—and then I saw them all. The faces looked shiny and globular, like raw poultry. The glare from the lights drenched my body in immediate sweat. All eyes were on me, just like they had been when I sat on the schoolroom floor, when I sang in church. Really, whenever I went anywhere out among people. Jim stepped to the side. My first instinct was to walk right back off the stage, to go back to Jim’s trailer to wash my face and take off my beautiful, ridiculous dress. There was a long cotton nightgown I had sewn two years ago and brought from home with me. I wanted to rinse my body in cool water, tucking a fresh towel into my folds to dry my skin, then cover myself from head to floor in that fine white material. Instead, I made up my mind to pretend that I was wearing a costume, by which I didn’t simply mean the absurd new dress that was like nothing I had ever owned—rather I viewed my entire body as a cover to hide me. Plucking up the hem of my skirt in a delicate pinch of thumb and forefinger, I experienced something similar to what I imagined was the sensation of being inside a submarine, looking out at the wavering water but not getting wet.
I crossed the stage and took Jim’s hand. He held the microphone away from his body. “Make this good,” he whispered then handed the microphone to me.
After Jim left the stage, I stared at the crowd and smiled. “Well, thank you, Jim, for that lovely introduction. Now, folks, I would have been here a bit sooner, but I baked these two big old cream pies this afternoon. And well, I had to get a spoon and eat them up right away. You see, I only had one roasted turkey for lunch, and I was so hungry I thought I would die.”
The audience gasped and laughed at me, at my fat, at the overt audacity of my imaginary food binge. Gigi was right. These people were nothing but a bunch of goddamn marks. When the noise died down a bit, I apologized again, this time for having a nonexistent blot of whipped cream adhered to my upper lip. I lifted the front hem of my dress to wipe my mouth, giving the people a pretty good look at the upper part of my legs and the frilly undergarment I wore. That really caused a stir, especially among the men. I feigned girlish embarrassment, twisting from side to side. My movements felt outlandish and idiotic, but the crowd appeared to love it.
I cued Jim to blast Grand Funk Railroad and swayed my body to the beat, making a train and moving on.
When the carnival closed for the night, after I had done my act several times, everyone filed over to the G-top. This time I was able to join them. Gigi called me over to a table where she was sitting with Ike and two other women. She introduced me to Ora Ann, the fortune teller, who offered me a tarot-card reading whenever I was so inclined. The other woman was Daisy, one of the cootch dancers, who, it seemed, was friends once again with Gigi. Daisy filled a plastic cup for me with beer from the pitcher on the table. I had never tasted beer before, and to the laughter of the others, declared it not too good but not too bad either.
Some of the people were playing cards or shooting dice. The “G” in “G-top” stood for gambling. Hinkle sat at a big table toward the back, a fan of cards half hiding his face.
Gigi noticed me glancing in that direction. “Gambling is Hinkle’s thing. When people play with him, they get cleaned out.”
Seeing Hinkle as part of the scene I also inhabited ironed out some of the rough resentment his presence had ignited in me until then. I saw that, in one sense or another, we all had the same way of life. We were all with it.
My performances that night were, to put it plainly, not fabulous or even especially great, but they were good enough to cement my place in the sideshow and to make Jim happy. The full extent of this measured success became apparent the next morning when Jim asked Ike to help him move an extra box spring and mattress from his truck into the trailer.
When I got tired of standing there watching the two of them work, I went to sit down in the truck. Ike saw me struggling to pull myself into the cab, so he ran over to help me by pushing on my backside with his left shoulder, his face pressing against me in an awkward way. Jim laughed so hard he had to bend at the waist to rest the flat of his hands on his thighs. I could imagine what Jim saw—the incongruous image of a painted man with his bald, rainbow-bright head mashed against big, waving buttocks until it seemed his face would get lost in them.
“Stop giggling, Lola. I’m gonna lose my grip on you,” Ike said, also laughing. The hilarity of the situation only further decreased my ability to help pull myself into the truck. I couldn’t remember when anything had ever been so funny to me or even the last time I had laughed at all. The joy of the sensation created an open lightness in my chest. The sheet of calm blue sky filled my vision when I looked up to try to catch my breath.
Later, when Jim flopped back on the new mattress, pushed up against the existing one to make a sea of bed big enough for me to swim in, I crawled on all fours toward him. Jim held out his hand to steady the mattress. Still on my hands and knees, I pressed my face into Jim’s chest, my forehead compressing his heart.
“Home sweet home,” he said.