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Some part of my mind worried I would never forgive Gigi or be able to adopt the casual perspective she applied to matters, like monogamy and marriage, that were quite serious to me. Over the next winter in Gulfy, though, spending so much time with her and Jim, I had the opportunity to reflect on the ways Gigi had proved herself a stalwart friend and to consider how, at the very least, my relationship with Jim was no more flawed than the one between Mrs. Schendel and her husband or even between my father and mother—the only two marriages of which I had any direct knowledge.
The next season, seeing Hinkle in the G-top after opening night, I had my first inkling that something had changed for him in the off-season. His aspect seemed duller, his presence more lifeless. The gold chain and medallion and the pinky ring with the diamond chip he liked to wear had disappeared. At some point over the winter months, Hinkle must have also decided to grow his hair long, unburnished with pomade, leaving it hanging in a sad, thin ponytail. He resembled a shuffling, older, defeated version of himself. The lateral incisor and canine teeth were also missing from the left side of his mouth, damage that he hadn’t taken the time to get repaired. Watching him shell peanuts and poke them between his lips while he played cards in the G-top nearly turned me off my own eating.
When I mentioned to Jim how different Hinkle looked, he told me that Hinkle’s luck had turned sour over the winter and that Hinkle had lost a lot of money gambling. In the weeks that followed, Hinkle tried to find consolation in Gigi’s company, seeking her out more and more often. Sometimes I would see him in the morning leaving her trailer, shirt hanging open, his bare feet stuffed into his boots, a bundled handful of socks and undershirt clutched in his fist. Other times he would be waiting for her to return home after a long night, a bottle of Jim Beam in his hand. If I were with Gigi in Ora Ann’s or Daisy’s trailer, he would show up there too. In response to this concentrated, unremitting attention, Gigi’s already-robust drinking took a sharp uptick.
Hinkle’s constant presence and obvious willingness to flood Gigi’s spirit with alcohol exacted a higher and higher price as the season wore on, making it more difficult for her to hit her marks on stage. I watched her act with great care every night, chewing my knuckles, while she slid the sword down her throat with shaking hands.
On one of our last nights in Grafton, Gigi was drinking under the stage before the show. She claimed the secret confinement of that space was comforting, the dust and heat no problem at all, and that downing a shot or two of whiskey before a performance helped steady her nerves and anesthetize her throat. But crunched up beneath the floorboards, sitting on an old cushion, her back against one of the support posts, she looked different—less steady, less like herself, more glassy-eyed. And she had a full bottle with her.
Gigi’s ankles wobbled the smallest bit when she walked out on stage in her high-heeled sandals, unnoticeable perhaps if I hadn’t been watching her with such a degree of attention. Wearing the white-sequined outfit I had made for her, the one that looked like a shiny one-piece bathing suit with a poof of marabou at each hip, she sashayed and twirled, stepping close to the front of the stage, letting the footlights bounce off the tiny sequins sewn into her clothes. She put the sword down her throat once and then again. The second time, she faced the audience so they had a good view of her pretty swan neck. She stuck one arm out to the side. The tips of her fingers and then her whole hand began to shake. When she pulled the sword from her throat, I thought I could see glistening teardrops in the corners of her eyes. Gigi curtsied to the applause. She walked around the stage and then circled again. She was delaying, hesitating, which as she had often told me, was the worst thing a sword swallower could do. Gigi inhaled, the profound depth of the motion visible to both the audience and me. The crowd grew restless with anticipation. Gigi dropped to her knees, tipped her head back, and swallowed the sword without flinching.
The people, the men especially, went wild with clapping, shouting, and whistling. Heavy, obvious tears flowed from Gigi’s eyes now. She pulled the sword from her throat, unable to restrain a sob as she walked back to the front of the stage, swinging her hips, tracing sharp figure eights in the air with the sword.
She went to execute her final move, where she tossed the sword into the air and caught it behind her back. Her reaction time was inexact, though. The sword rose in the air. Gigi took a misstep. The sword fell on a path to slice through the top of Gigi’s skull. She screamed and dropped down at the very last second, curling into a ball with her hands over her head as the sword clattered across the stage. Jim rushed out to help Gigi to her feet, making jokes about how the Milwaukee Brewers’ catcher Darrell Porter missed a few now and again. Backstage, I pulled Gigi into my arms as she sobbed and vomited down the back of my dress.
Jim walked Gigi back to her trailer and wouldn’t let her perform for the rest of the night. I sent Ike on next so I could clean myself up. As the passing minutes stretched on, my concern for Gigi grew, as did my fear that she had suffered a real injury on her last swallow. Jim was back at the microphone, though, by the time my act ended. When I had the chance to ask him if Gigi was okay, he only nodded.
Later that night, able at last to rest in my bed, I tried to ignore the lamplight from the living room and the weary sound of Jim’s amphetamine-induced pacing. I consoled myself with the thought that the situation had reached its lowest layer. We had to be in the deepest part of the trough. The wave would crash soon and release its energy.
The next morning, Jim was finally coming off his high. We sat on the couch together, drinking coffee. “Jesus, I need a break, Lola. I been running all over creation, spreading around money that we just don’t have. It’s getting to be too much, you know? Last night, I could have sworn I could hear little voices having conversations with each other in the walls.” Jim cradled his head in his hands.
I knew about those voices as well because sometimes after my father had died and I was alone, especially on long dark winter nights, I imagined I could hear mumbling in the background static of the radio, which might then become distinct as a noise within the house or as an extra voice straining to speak to me. I touched Jim’s ear with the tip of my finger to see if he was jumpy enough to flinch.
Then there was a banging on the door that startled both of us. Gigi pushed her way into the trailer before either of us could respond. She had walked over wearing just a pink nylon nightgown. “Hey,” she said. “I’m—” Gigi glanced down at her outfit. “I guess maybe I should have changed before I came over.” I also noticed that her feet were bare.
Jim stood up to get a closer look at Gigi. “What’s with you? You been drinking already?” It was barely nine o’clock.
“Don’t start with me, Jim, when you don’t know the night I had.” She sank down into the couch and smashed her face into her bare legs. “Besides, I came over to tell you both something important.”
Jim sat in the chair across from Gigi. “Lola, is there any coffee left for Gigi?”
Gigi grabbed the blanket draped across the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders, even though it felt like it was already eighty degrees in the trailer. “I don’t need no coffee, and Jesus, don’t get so mad at me for drinking.”
I took Gigi a fresh cup of coffee half filled with warm milk and five teaspoons of sugar because that was how she liked it. “How’s that?”
“Thanks, Lo,” she said then took a sip. “It’s nice and sweet.” Gigi squeezed the blanket tighter, wrapping her fingers around the coffee cup, while Jim and I waited.
“Yeah, well. You two saw what happened on stage. So later on, Hinkle comes by. He says it’s because he wants to check on me, to make sure I’m all right. I mean, I know that’s a lie because when has Hinkle ever been that nice to anybody?” Gigi put her coffee cup down on the table in front of her and extended the ends of the blanket out like a giant pair of wings.
When I sat down next to Gigi on the couch, my weight made it easy, logical even, for her to slide into my side and rest her head on my shoulder.
“We started drinking after that, even though I was already in rough shape. And...” Gigi glanced up at Jim, who had moved over to the other side of the room and was looking out the window with his back to us. “I told Hinkle I didn’t know what to do because, after what happened on stage last night, I won’t be able to get another sword down my throat without it killing me. And then Hinkle starts to get all funny and jokey, saying shit like he can get a sword down my throat. I’m sorry, Jim. I guess this is a lot to hear.”
Jim didn’t turn around, but I could see his right hand gripping the windowsill hard, the tendons along the inside of his arm standing out in violent relief.
“When it’s all done and over, Hinkle tells me he can see about getting me put back in the cootch show. I tell him I’m not going to do that no more, and he knows it. And then he goes, well, I guess you’re too old for that now anyway. He gets me confused—you know like how he does because I don’t want to be in no cootch show—but he’s got me mad thinking about how no one wants to see me do it anyway. And now I don’t know what to do.” Gigi began to cry, pressing her tear-wet face against me.
I stroked her hair, a soft gesture, as if she were a light, delicate thing, a special, spoon-fed creature requiring a gentle touch.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I came over to tell you that I’m leaving because I don’t have an act anymore, and I’m tired of Hinkle being around me all the time. And I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m such a goddamn mess that even if I could get back on stage, the only place that’d take me would be another fucking ragbag like this one.”
A piece of the window molding broke off in Jim’s hand. He threw it to the side and came to kneel in front of Gigi. He took both her hands in his, making them seem like small white birds in a welcoming nest. Had he ever shown me such exquisite gentleness?
“Listen to me, Geeg,” he said. “You steer clear of Hinkle, all right? Don’t get caught alone with him, and keep your trailer door locked. Don’t open it up for him no matter how sweet and nice he sounds or how sorry he is or if he offers you booze. Okay? You stick with me and Lola. You don’t go nowhere without one of us, and if you need a drink that bad, I’ll give you one. All right? We’ll see if we can’t figure out a new act for you.”
“Okay, Jimmy. Okay,” Gigi whispered. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have the two of you as friends.”
I kissed Gigi’s cheek while Jim pressed his face into the palms of her hands. The intimacy between them made a lump in my throat, but I couldn’t fault him for loving her, too, for how his own heart broke for her pain, not when mine did the exact same.
***
I had learned a lot about sideshows from Jim’s stories and from what I had heard and read about freaks during the calm winter days in Gulfy. Some of the pictures I had seen had made me cringe as I imagined those people eating breakfast and doing ordinary things, like licking envelopes or making telephone calls.
One image in particular replayed in mind with some frequency. It was a photograph of a four-legged woman. Dangling between her own walking legs were the foreshortened limbs of her parasitic twin, clinging to her more fortunate sister forever. If the look of it fascinated me, then wouldn’t other people feel the same? And what if the legs were backward? Then wouldn’t it also make sense that maybe the weak sister’s eyes and some other parts of her face would be at the back of the main woman’s head, shielded under her hair perhaps?
As far as I knew, there was no exact freak of nature like that, no such creature in existence, but the idea was perfect for a good gaff and a new act for Gigi. She could be as drunk as she pleased to sit in a chair wearing gross backward legs.
After Gigi left that morning to rest in her trailer, I gathered the materials I would need— opaque pantyhose, white cotton batting that I could stain dye with tea, a bit of children’s modeling clay, and old wire hangers to be reworked into tiny shoe frames. The eyes in the back of the head would be trickier. As I unpacked the portable sewing machine, I thought about Mrs. Schendel, wondering what she would think of my handiwork.
I was putting the finishing touches on the legs when Jim came back to the trailer. “Are we set for the breakdown?” I asked, biting off the thread from the last bit of hand stitching along the toes. “Are there enough people for it?”
“Um... what the hell have you got there?”
I laughed and waggled the grotesque little appendages at Jim. “It’s a surprise for Gigi. I figured she’d be good for a gaff if she can’t swallow a sword anymore. How do you like her new legs?” I kicked first one and then the other into the air. “Can, can, can you do the can-can?” I sang. “This is the bottom half of her parasitic twin. I’ve still got some work to do on the face.”
Jim reached over and tweaked one of the little shoes. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “That looks pretty good. You know there’s actual people who have funny shit like that.”
“Well, but unfortunately we don’t know any of them.”
Jim went into the kitchen to get a beer out of the refrigerator. “Hinkle’s in a lather, says everything is falling apart and that you and Gigi need to take a cut in pay if we’re going to survive.”
I stood the little legs straight up on my thighs. “And what did you say?”
“I asked him what goddamn difference it made when he couldn’t afford to make payroll as it was.”
I pulled a wig I had bought a few months ago from its bag and ran my fingers through the slippery polyester tresses, marveling at this unexpected strange ability of mine to create new beings.
“Well, he better like this act,” I said. The wig was a bright platinum blond. I plopped it onto my head and looked at myself in the hand mirror, liking the shining brilliance around my face, the drastic change in my appearance. “God, Hinkle is such an asshole.”
Jim tossed the empty beer can into the kitchen sink, a swirling metallic clatter as it circled the drain. “Yeah, well, tell me something I don’t know.”
***
When we finally packed up and headed to Gulfy for the off-season, such was my relief and my hope, too, that everything could return to normal that I wept when the town appeared on the horizon.
“What’s up with you?” Jim asked, his hands twitching on the steering wheel.
“Nothing. I’m just so happy to be home.”
Jim weaned himself off the pills over the next few days. He began to look and act unhurried, happy to be with me, to listen to me talk about my ideas for the sideshow or to tell him the plots of the many novels I had read, as if they were new and exciting stories that only just occurred to me in that moment. I cooked sizzling, elaborate meals for us, and Jim gained back the weight he had lost. His face transformed from ghoulish and hollowed out back to normal.
Gigi’s recovery appeared less certain. With nothing as edgy or sharp as sword swallowing to occupy her during the last weeks of the carnival circuit, she had managed to keep drinking at a hard, accelerating pace. Despite being stone drunk for every performance, Gigi had made a very appealing four-legged woman, dressed in a full, flouncy red skirt that fell past her knees when she was standing.
To begin, she would sit down facing the audience, her face impassive, and raise her skirt to show off the stumpy legs I had fashioned. The crowd loved it, the men especially. The grace of Gigi’s actions, part tease and part reveal, a holdover from her stripper days in the cootch show, made her seem sexy and repellent at the same time.
For the finale, she would face backward in the chair and part the long hair of the wig where I had secured a pair of beautiful glass eyes with some strands glued to them since they couldn’t withstand close-in scrutiny.
My belief that Gigi would revert to her usual self with the same speed as Jim proved to be incorrect. One afternoon when we’d been back in Gulfy for about three weeks, I got a call from Lonny at the Showstop to come pick up Gigi and drive her home. He left Luis to watch the bar and led me up the back stairs to his apartment, where I found Gigi wearing only her bra and panties, asleep on the living room couch.
“Now, don’t look at me like that, Lola,” Lonny said. “She took her clothes off herself. I brought her up here because she passed out on the pool table, and one of the fellows she was talking to looked like he was going to mess with her.”
The sound of our voices woke Gigi. She sat bolt upright on the couch. “Hey, Lola, hey. Let’s go on down and have a drink. You and me. Right now, okay?” Gigi tried to stand, but her bare feet got tangled in the bedsheet that Lonny must have given her. She fell back onto the couch. “What the fuck?” Gigi pulled at the sheet and kicked her legs free.
I grabbed the flower-print dress crumpled on the kitchen counter and handed it to Gigi. “Come on and get dressed now. I’m going to drive you home.”
“Hey, Lonny,” Gigi said, pulling the dress over her head. “I took off my clothes. Did you see that?”
“I saw it,” he replied, looking away.
“Hey, Lola, let’s have a drink. All three of us. Lonny don’t mind. Where the fuck are my shoes?”
“We’ll get them later. Let’s go,” I said.
“No, Lola, it’s okay. We’ll just have a quick one.” Gigi stood swaying in the center of the room. “You know,” she loud whispered to me behind her hand, “I think Lonny likes me.” She nodded. “No, really,” she continued. “I think he really likes me.”
I glanced at Lonny then away again when I saw his face start to color. “God only knows why,” I said, grabbing Gigi’s arm before she fell. The climb up the stairs had made it hard to breathe. The pain in my back and legs wore thin my patience.
“Lola, don’t get so pissy. Let’s just have one drink, and then we can go.”
Lonny shook his head. “Trust me. I know when someone’s had enough.” He put his hand on Gigi’s shoulder. “I don’t want to carry you out of here, but I will if I have to.”
Gigi grabbed Lonny’s neck and pulled his face close to hers. “I’d like to see you try.” She kissed him on the lips, putting her tongue in his mouth, and for an instant, Lonny kissed her back.
Lonny pushed Gigi away and flattened her arms against her sides. “Whoopsy daisy,” he said, slinging her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Gigi beat against his back, and her face turned red as the blood rushed into her upside-down head. I walked behind Lonny as he carted Gigi down the stairs, unsure whether to feel jealous that her graceful thinness made such a maneuver possible or relieved that I couldn’t be moved around like that against my wishes.
Lonny ignored Gigi’s pleas and slaps. “You probably want to ride with the windows open in case she pukes,” he said to me.
***
By nighttime, Gigi felt horrible, hungover and remorseful that she had caused such trouble.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll clean out the truck. I promise.” She had come over to the house to apologize and was trying to drink the cup of coffee I’d made for her, but she gagged a little bit every time she took the smallest sip.
“I hosed it out hours ago.”
“I’m sorry, Lo. Poor Lonny too. I ought to go apologize to him too. You want to come down to the Showstop with me?”
“You’re going to go like that?”
Gigi seemed to have given no thought to how horrible she looked and smelled. She unstuck her blouse from her body and tried to comb her fingers through her hair, but they got snagged on the tangles.
“Come on and take the night off. You got to ease up on the drinking anyway. Even Jim said as much.” I nodded to the empty chair where he usually sat at the kitchen table. “Jim drove out to see if he could help Scratchy and Thelma. They’ve been having more trouble with their neighbors.”
Jim’s way of helping them would no doubt involve what he sometimes referred to as “cracking skulls,” and even as I objected to that approach on some level, it was likewise impossible to imagine how deliberate conversation would be any help at all.
“I get antsy just sitting around. You know?” Gigi scanned the closed kitchen cabinet doors, wondering, I knew, what there was to drink in the house.
I pulled a deck of cards from the silverware drawer and started shuffling, liking the falling click-clack of the cards as they bridged together. I dealt out a hand. “We can play some gin rummy. I won’t even keep score.”
Gigi put her head down on the table and started to cry, big unexpected sobs that nonetheless didn’t surprise me.
I nudged her pile of cards closer to her. “It’s your turn.”
When she kept crying, I patted her shoulder and rearranged her cards into an organized fan and played her turn for her. Little by little, she began to pay attention to me, to what I was saying, answering when I asked what she wanted to discard and what she wanted to hold.
“I can’t do this no more, Lo.”
“Yes, you can.” I peeled a card from the take pile and pushed it facedown toward her.
We played for a good long while, until finally Gigi fell asleep on the couch. I sat in the recliner next to her, wending my way between dreams and wakefulness, not wanting to leave her unattended for fear she would find the Four Roses above the sink or leave and go home or, worse still, make her way to the Showstop.
My vigilance appeared to have some good effect because Gigi developed and refined an ability to go full days and nights without drinking. Something always came up, of course, to prevent her from giving it up entirely, but the truth of the matter was she wouldn’t have had much of a social life or much to do even if she had wanted to attempt such a feat.
***
March 4, 1979
Dear Sarah,
I haven’t written in months, and I surely apologize for that. You remember when I mentioned that Luther was sick and had awful stomach pains? Well, not long after I sent that letter, things went from bad to worse. First, Luther started sitting in his chair every morning and some afternoons, too, staring at the television. There’s nothing on that time of day except for soap operas, but he watched them anyway. And this from the same man who used to tell me to get back to work and not to waste daylight if he ever caught me taking a break to look at my stories.
No matter what I said or how often I walked between his chair and the television screen, dusting the furniture, he stayed right there in the recliner. He would get dressed in his barn jacket and muck boots like he was going to go do some work but then would just sit there holding his stomach. I should have known something was wrong sooner than I did, but I got caught up in keeping house and doing all the milking on my own and cleaning the barn and, well, in short, doing the work of two people.
Luther complained so about the burning pain in his stomach that he kept a pillow clutched to his waist. Sometimes he would bend forward with his eyes squeezed shut and rock back and forth, sucking air between his clenched teeth.
Doc Person sent us to Milwaukee to see a specialist. They did exploratory surgery on poor Luther. They no more than took a look inside than they sewed him back up. The cancer had spread all over his body by that point. I cried like a baby when the doctor took me into his office to tell me that. He said that even if I had gotten Luther in to see him sooner, it wouldn’t have mattered.
I had a hospital bed set up right in the living room, and I kept the television on from morning to night because I knew Luther liked the sound of it. I hired a few men to do the barn work so I could be in the house to take care of Luther. The morphine made him loopy, but I gave him plenty of it so he wouldn’t suffer.
Thankfully, the county paid for a nurse to help me take care of him. One afternoon after she left, I closed my eyes for just a second. When I opened them again the room was pitch dark except for the black-and-white snow on the television screen. I told Luther good night and went to bed without even remembering that I had skipped both his evening and bedtime doses of medicine. I still didn’t realize until I heard him moaning in the early morning. I knew it had to be around five o’clock because the men we’d hired had already turned on the lights in the barn.
I ran downstairs. We were in the last days. I knew it, Doc Person knew it, and even the nurse had stopped calling out, “See you next week,” every time she left.
I was so angry at myself for letting Luther suffer through the night. I told Luther I was sorry as I got his medicine ready, but he shushed me. “Sully,” he whispered. Luther used to call me Sully when we were growing up together and for the first few years we were married. Until that moment, I had almost forgotten about it. “I think I’m dying.”
I tried to tell him he was only having a bad spell but that we could pray together as soon as I gave him his medicine. You see, I wanted him to feel happy and hopeful in his last days on Earth, but I had to worry, too, about the state of his soul. He needed the chance to make peace with God, like we all do.
And then he said the most unexpected thing to me. “Sully,” he said. “I know something’s not going right. So I want to know, right now, once and for all, if there isn’t something you want to say to me. Tell me plain. Have you been a faithful wife? Don’t let me go to my grave not knowing the truth.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to reassure him again that he wasn’t dying, but I knew he wouldn’t believe me. I think people sense deep down when it’s their time, just like animals do. I knew what Luther wanted me to tell him and what he needed to hear on his way to the afterlife. I said that I had always been faithful to him and that I had loved him every moment we had been together.
And you know, Sarah, it was true how much I loved Luther. When I thought about how hard I had worked for him, about how much care I had given him, especially since he got sick, I knew I was saying the right thing. Anyway, he seemed relieved at my words.
He passed a few days after that. Even though we all knew what was coming, it was still a shock. I prayed for an end to his suffering, but then when it happened, I wanted more days with him, even bad ones.
All our friends and neighbors came to the wake and funeral. It pleased me to see such a turnout, and I think it would have made Luther happy too. It got me thinking about your father. I’ve outlived two men now. Some days, I can’t imagine going on or even wanting to go on, but that’s no way to think.
Anyway, I keep busy sorting out the house and settling the estate. Everything has passed to me, of course, so now I’ve a farm to run all on my own. I’ll have to make all the decisions, where before I never had much say in the matter. I know some women are left with a lot less. My brother-in-law, Harold, has said he will help, except his way of helping is really to take charge of everything. Honestly, Luther never cared for him that much.
It all just seems like such an awful lot of work. I’m strong enough to do it and to keep this place running and tell Harold to go to hell. I guess I don’t see the point, though. We don’t have any children to inherit the farm. It will probably go to Harold and Edna’s kids when I die, which hardly seems worth it.
I dread the thought of winter coming. The nights are so long, and the cold seeps into my bones. Edna came around to visit with me one day not long after Luther died. She almost fainted when I told her I was thinking of selling the farm. She even clutched a handful of her blouse, like the very suggestion might give her a heart attack. Edna laid on the guilt pretty thick about how I needed to preserve everything that Luther had worked so hard to build. I let her talk and just kept drinking my coffee.
I didn’t mention anything more about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about moving away—probably to someplace warm and sunny.
I keep my eye on Missy. In fact, she came with her parents to the viewing hours, and I saw in the paper last week that she’s engaged now to marry Steve Johnson. I think his family is from somewhere near Patawaunee, so I don’t know too much about him. Even so, I can’t imagine he would tolerate his fiancée running around and pining after some other man. It looks as if she has finally moved on now after Jared’s death.
I hope this letter finds you and finds you well. Please write to me as soon as you are able.
Love,
Ursula