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For many months after reading Mrs. Schendel’s letter, I struggled against the nearly inescapable urge to write and tell her the truth of what had been going on in my life. During that time, I came to view keeping secrets from her as a terrible form of isolation. The thought of unburdening myself, of telling Mrs. Schendel what happened the night Jared died, made me dizzy with imagined relief. If nothing else, though, life in the carnival had taught me the value of being a sensible person, of living as and asserting myself as nobody’s fool. There could be no higher form of idiocy than a written confession. I realized, too, that Mrs. Schendel would suffer having to view me in such a way, so I extended her the same self-abnegating grace she had given her husband. I could see, certainly, how some people might have thought we were both putting on a performance or simply liars avoiding the truth to protect ourselves. They didn’t understand, though, the relief we were denied by keeping secrets.
The Tuesday before we planned to get back on the road, Gigi and Lonny came over to drink and play cards with Jim and me at our kitchen table. It was the one night of the week that the Showstop was closed, and Lonny said he liked to get out from behind the bar and have someone pour him a beer for a change.
The late-spring heat of the day lingered in the kitchen, filling the corners of the house in a clinging, uncomfortable way, making me unable to draw a deep-enough breath. I reasoned that the hot, edgy unease I felt must be my trepidation about the coming season, a byproduct of wanting to believe that Hinkle had fared better over the winter, acquiring wins and riches enough to underwrite all our satisfaction. The pendulum had swung far out when Gigi had nearly been sliced in two on stage and when Jim had suffered auditory hallucinations because of the extreme number of pills he had popped. It would have to swing back now. That was how pendulums worked.
To be on the safe side, I had been doing a bit here and there with Scratchy to learn how to create plausible identity documents for people who needed them.
Gulfy was the perfect place for that type of business. People reasoned that carnies, travelers, gypsies, and showmen knew about shady undertakings, like pills or false documents, so they would go to the Showstop, and Lonny would figure out what they wanted and point them in the right direction. Scratchy had begun to talk about how he and Thelma would probably be moving on before too long, so he was content to share what he knew with me.
The kitchen table where we sat was strewn with stained, crumpled napkins and used butter knives, some with hardened mustard or mayonnaise on the tips and another one sticky with grape jelly. There were also two dirty ashtrays with speckled ashes ringing them, a loose cigarette butt here and there, a plate with individual cheese slices gone limp in the heat, a plastic mold with two curled pieces of bologna in the bottom next to a sleeve of crackers, and an army of glasses—tall ones with beer and water and squat ones, nearly empty, with the barest brown rind of whiskey in the bottom.
“Are the critters ready to go?” Lonny asked, tipping his head toward the big glass jars lined up along the counter. He appeared cool and sleek, wearing only a sleeveless undershirt on top, his dark-blond hair combed back from his face, looking damp and clean.
Gigi clucked her tongue. “Don’t talk about those gross things to me,” she said. “It turns my stomach just to think of them.” She watched Lonny shuffle, concentrating, it seemed, on how his big hands moved the shiny backs of the cards apart and slid them back together.
“Good.” Jim laughed. “That means people will probably pay a fair amount to look at them.”
They were talking about the set of pickled punks that I’d made to earn some extra cash, in case Hinkle didn’t pay us on time or every time we were due to receive money from him.
Jessup, a retired knife thrower, had told me about pickled punks one night at the Showstop. They were essentially malformed fetuses floating in glass jars. As it turned out, people liked to gawk at that sort of thing, making me certain that I could earn good inside money by displaying them.
My punks weren’t actual fetuses, of course. One of them, Veronica, was a tiny plastic baby doll. I had grafted a second doll onto the body then melted them slightly and adhered flesh-colored nylons to take away their fake, plasticized look. It was a good gaff, even though I did have to cook a dozen or so dolls before I got it right, nearly poisoning Jim and me in the process with the toxic fumes.
Gator had started out as a baby alligator that had been stuffed by a taxidermist, an easy-enough item to find in the state of Florida. I had cut off the head and hollowed out part of the torso and replaced it with a clear plastic sack of translucent gelatin, formed into the suggestion of a face—dreamy, ethereal, and smiling—on the surface.
Meaty was the most gruesome, though, and Gigi hated him in particular. He was the baby with no skin, his shape carved from a large roll of liverwurst and preserved with salt and vinegar, like a pickle. He was horrible to see, and I usually kept a towel draped over his jar.
The apparent squishiness of the bologna remnants on the table reminded me of the day I had made Meaty, recalling to my mind the horrible, porous softness of his wretched body. The room was too close and smoky, the memory of eating that derelict food suddenly unbearable. I hardly made it to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet, blaming Hinkle the entire time for my stomach upset, my ponderous discomfort.
“You doing all right in there?” Gigi asked in a quiet voice, tapping her knuckle on the door.
“I’m okay.” I opened the door to talk with her while I washed my hands and face and brushed my teeth. “I think it’s just worrying about how we’re all going to do next season, you know? What if Hinkle loses big again this winter and then there’s even less money to pay anybody halfway decent or keep stuff running or looking good?”
Gigi stood in the doorway, watching me as I applied a fresh coat of deep-red lipstick. “You sure that’s what it is? I mean, you throw up if you drink too much or you’re sick, but from being worried?” She watched me in silence, concentrating hard on my movements. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
My hand stopped, my mouth frozen in its open position. I closed the lipstick and dropped it in the wicker basket on the counter. “No.” I rubbed my lips together to spread the lipstick. “I mean, maybe. I suppose.”
The idea that I could become pregnant from sleeping with Jim had crossed my mind, especially in our first months together. Even though my cycle had always been erratic, I had wondered every time my period had been late or unpredictable, and every time, I had been wrong.
“I’m... I mean I think I’m too fat. It hasn’t happened in all this time, so why now? You know?” Even as I said the words, various unexamined twinges or physical sensations formed an instant pattern, making pregnancy seem a certainty.
“Jesus, Lola.” Gigi reached over to rub the top of my arm. “I just figured you were taking care of yourself. I don’t know about that whole being-too-fat thing. I’d venture what’s kept you safe until now is that Jim’s so old.” Gigi leaned in to hug me, squeezing hard. “Don’t worry, though. There’s nothing that says you have to have a baby if you don’t want one. It’s not like how it used to be. You want to get an abortion, you can get a real doctor to do it and everything.”
Gigi’s words shocked me, both because of her assumption that my weight might not have been the sole culprit in my failure to get pregnant and because of her casual talk about erasing a possible baby that had been an abandoned fantasy until then.
“I wouldn’t want to do that,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know that I’d get another chance to have a baby.”
Gigi held tight to me. “We’ll figure it out,” she said.
Neither of us wanted to get involved in the tricky logistics of trying to get a pregnancy test done while traveling with the carnival. The simple thought of visiting a doctor, of hearing him gasp at my size or of a tiny-waisted nurse telling me to be ashamed of myself, made me think the better course of action might be to wait and see. Gigi nixed that idea, though. Lonny, whom she had sworn to secrecy after explaining in careful detail that, no, she wasn’t the one afraid she might be pregnant, hooked us up with Dr. Arnold, an old guy who had lost his medical license sometime in the early sixties. For many years, he had had a brisk trade in illegal abortions and a solid reputation for clean, infection-free results, but business had long since dwindled. He was happy to blood test me for a reasonable amount of cash, and after bouncing back from his initial disappointment that Gigi wasn’t to be his patient, he still evinced a certain game enthusiasm at the prospect of giving me a pelvic exam. I told him no thanks, pressing my clothed knees together as tightly as I could.
Dr. Arnold called the house to deliver the happy news on the same morning we were packing our things to head back out on the road. “Congratulations, I suppose.” His words slurred. “I should tell you, though, in all the years I practiced medicine, I’ve never seen or even heard of someone so fat able to birth a normal baby.” He sounded drunk.
***
“Now, folks,” Jim said, “I’m sure you all enjoyed meeting this dear lady here, Lola Rolls.” It was opening night in Greendale, our first date of the new season, and the main part of my act had ended with a bopping, fat-jouncing dance to the song “Ease on Down the Road.” The people clapped and whistled as I waved to the crowd and walked off the stage down into the dressing room, where I would still be able to hear Jim’s voice loud and clear as he talked up the pickled punks. In the usual course of things, I would have made my own pitch for the inside money, but unable to think of any other angle to tie the punks to my act other than to describe them as my own malformed fetuses, I was loath to do so. Even if the punks were all gaffed, speaking words to that effect seemed blasphemous, like the invitation to a curse.
Jim had no such compunction. Maybe this nonchalant indifference of his could be excused because, in the complicated maneuvering of closing up the house in Gulfy, of folding up clothes and sheets and stacking cleaned dishes, no real opportunity had arisen to tell Jim about the actual human fetus I carried.
“Now, folks,” Jim intoned, “I know when you look at the lovely Lola Rolls, you see a jolly gal who likes to laugh and doesn’t need anything more than a big fried chicken dinner to make her happy. But she has sadness in her life, just like we all do. Like most women, her greatest desire is to be a mother. Now, you might ask yourself how exactly such a big lady could have a baby. And you might even wonder what business an unmarried girl has trying to do that. Who’s to say, ladies and gentlemen? Who’s to say? All I know is that three times, Lola Rolls has tried to bear a child, and three times, she has failed. Her only consolation, slim though it may be, is to keep these poor misbegotten children who never got to be born with her at all times. With recent advances in science, they have been preserved, and they’re here with us today. For the price of one dollar, just one measly dollar, I invite you to step behind this flap here to view them. If you have a weak stomach or a heart condition, though, you’ll want to stay away because, I must warn you, they do not look like normal human children. They are aberrations of nature so extreme you might think them God’s punishment.”
Jim’s gruesome pitch made my mouth feel sandy, spurred my heart to hammer in my chest, and caused the ground to appear to rise and fall. Even absent knowledge of the factual child growing inside me, Jim should still have realized and cared that in the alternate scenario he described, he would be the father of these freakish lost souls. There was a good solid bench in the dressing room, a match to the table Chicky, the new Ferris wheel ride boy, had lugged in for the pickled punk display. He had done that favor in large part because he wanted to see for free what would have cost someone else money. Judging by how he slapped his knee and removed his trucker cap to lean in to get a better look, he was impressed by the punks. He said he had never seen anything like them, then he made the sign of the cross over his chest.
A lot of workers, the regulars, the familiar faces around the cook trailer and G-top, already angry about missing or delayed pay from the previous season, had disappeared, driven away at last by the anemic wages Hinkle was offering this season. Hinkle had had to do his hiring on the fly, giving people like Chicky, who, if nothing else, could be talked into a bad deal, a coveted gig, like Ferris wheel operator, despite little or no experience.
Thinking about Chicky distracted me at least from what Jim was telling the audience about the pickled punks, helped to push down my superstitious fear. It was stupid, I told myself, to think that my life’s course of events could somehow be altered by allowing this talk of my imagined misfortune. This whole endeavor had been my idea, I reminded myself. Jim was only helping because I had asked him to do exactly that. The bench where I was sitting had been placed in the dressing room by Jim. Except for that first night when there had been nothing but a weak folding chair, the dressing room had always had a sound piece of furniture that could bear my weight. Jim had seen to that, something a solicitous man, conscious of small considerations, would do.
At the end of the night, though, after performing various times and having listened to Jim talk about the monstrous half children I had expelled from my fat body, I felt no more accustomed to the process than when it had begun. I left the sideshow tent and skipped the G-top without a word to Jim or Gigi or anyone else, opting instead to rest in quiet darkness, eyes wide open, wondering if a woman like me could ever have a normal child.
Nothing could quiet my mind—not eating or reading or dreaming—leaving me to wait for a long black stretch until Jim came home. In the smallest hours of the morning, he flopped onto the bed next to me, not bothering to turn on the lamp or change out of his clothes.
“Jim,” I whispered, clicking on the light. “We need to fix the pickled punk act.”
Jim held his hand across his eyes. “Tell me about it tomorrow.”
There would never be a good or correct moment to talk with Jim, so I reasoned there couldn’t be much harm in selecting the wrong opportunity. “I’m pregnant.” An intense relief surged through me for having said those words at last, for no longer adding to the growing tally of days that Jim didn’t know.
Jim sat up to stare at me. “Shit. Are you serious? I mean, you know that for sure?”
I could only nod, averting my gaze from the taut energy of Jim’s body, from the straining disbelief that pulled it tight. Most of me hadn’t expected that Jim would squeeze and kiss me, pausing only to burrow his head into my abdomen in rapt adoration to be closer to our child—or that he would offer marriage. I was unable to stop myself, however, from wanting more, a grander, happier reaction, a reflection of my own secret joy. Tears dripped down the sides of my face, fresh ones sliding down already wet tracks, as I did nothing to clean them away.
“Come on now, Lolly.” He was the only one who called me that. Hearing it made me feel better, but it didn’t erase the tired resignation in his voice, conveying maybe better than words ever could that my pregnancy was an obstacle, a sticky complication, the last thing he needed right then. “It’s not as bad as all that. I know a guy—”
That was a thing about Jim. He always had a friend somewhere he could contact to help out in any situation. “I’m not getting an abortion,” I said to avoid hearing Jim make the suggestion or listen to him expound on the ease with which the matter could be resolved. My idiotic hope, thin though it had been, that Jim would somehow rise to the occasion, had been stupid. I saw that now.
“Besides, you know, we probably won’t have to worry about it. Doc Arnold says someone as fat as me can’t have a baby anyway.” Then I truly was crying in earnest, swiping at my tears with both hands.
“Well, fuck him, all right, Lolly? Arnold’s so goddamn old he can’t even see straight. And what the hell does he know anyway? I seen midgets and cripples and she-men have babies with no problem. Shit, Sweet Chenille had a beard so long she could braid it on hot days, and she had eight kids.” Jim pressed the top half of his body against me and kissed my lips and wet red cheeks. “You’re gonna be just fine.”
The feel of his mouth and hands comforted me, made me want to believe his words, have faith in his conviction. I found myself thinking of Mrs. Schendel instead, of the children she had wished for but had never had. She had wanted more from life than she had gotten. So had my own mother, for that matter. Why should I succeed where they had faltered? Those grim thoughts, compounded by my suspicion that Jim would view the pregnancy and possible baby as my project, which, much like the pickled punks, he would be content to discuss or assist with but not plan for or make decisions about, kept me from telling him any of my nascent, improbable ideas of how I could have a child and still travel with the carnival. Others had certainly done so before, but the ones I knew about had tended to be with bigger, more stable operations than Midstate.
***
Hinkle asked to talk with me in his office the next day. I had only seen him in brief spurts and from a distance since we had set up in Greendale, so I wasn’t quite prepared for how he looked from a close-in perspective. He had gone another winter without getting his teeth repaired, having changed during that time from looking like a man who had suffered a mouth injury to one who was habitually toothless, a condition highlighted and made worse by the clump of chewing tobacco in his mouth. Hinkle was wearing his usual pair of gabardine trousers, but they had a white, stringy stain on the front and deep wrinkles at the tops of the legs, as if they had been worn many times without being washed. He matched them with a faded navy T-shirt that had a peeling white design of three seven cards and a pair of dice under which the words Lucky Las Vegas appeared in neat cursive script. Even if I hadn’t known about the substandard, last-minute hires, Hinkle’s appearance would have been enough to let me know that he was still on a losing streak.
I eased my body down into the chair in front of his desk, trying to keep my face expressionless, to betray no reaction to how different the office also appeared since the only other time I had been there. It seemed that, for whatever reason, Marva had given up on helping to keep the place organized. Gone were the wooden trays with the neat stacks of paper, the bulletin board with the map of Wisconsin, and the tidy desk with the green blotter and a stapler and small tub of paper clips lined up along the top. Now the surface of the desk had disappeared under a blanket of paper. A calendar with a topless woman had been taped to the wall, and the trash can overflowed with papers, a banana peel, and a closed Styrofoam container that gave off an unpleasant smell of old onions, which may have also been Hinkle’s own odor.
“Well, I would say ‘have a seat,’ but it looks like you’ve already made yourself at home, Sarah.”
No one had called me Sarah for a very long time. I could feel the tendons in my neck tighten to taut cords at the sound of it, the longing and fear it evoked. Hinkle couldn’t know why being called Sarah discomfited me, but he was like a dog in many ways, a smart one who didn’t require an explanation to be able to spot a weakness.
“Lola, please.”
Hinkle gave a slight smile. He was trying to arouse some strong emotion in me to keep me from thinking and speaking in a logical way. “Okay, Lola, then. Now, my dear, first thing I want you to know is that I am doing my very best to be patient right now. Chicky told me you’re running your own show out the back of the sideshow tent without ever paying me a privilege to work on this lot, without ever even asking me about it. I told him there must be some kind of mistake, that you wouldn’t cheat me like that.” Hinkle’s voice was low and cold. He pressed on the edge of the desk and leaned forward toward me so that I could see how the muscles in his shoulders and upper arms bunched together. “That money belongs to the carnival. Not to trouble you with the details, but Midstate sure could use some cash right about now.”
No kidding, I almost said but stopped myself in the nick of time. “That’s just the blow off after my act. That counts as inside money, so it’s mine.”
“There you have it, then.” Hinkle smiled, a sudden, jarring gesture, as he sat back down, his menace deflated. “A simple misunderstanding. You haven’t been with it as many years as I have, so I’m going to bet you haven’t walked a lot of different lots. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I admitted, even though that sliver of truth felt like a concession I’d rather not give.
“Let me tell you, then,” Hinkle continued. “There’s plenty of these pickled punk shows. Usually, there’s a recorded voice playing, people pay up, walk through, and come out the other side. It can be a good money maker.” Hinkle paused to spit into a paper cup sitting on the edge of the desk. “You can see, then, how any person with common sense would consider this type of thing its own show. Now, if you’re interested in running a concession, that’s something we can talk about—”
“Let me guess. And I have to pay up front whatever outrageous price you want to charge me so that I can do that.”
Hinkle looked surprised at having his speech cut short, his antics curtailed before he had the chance to execute them. “Well, yes. That is the way it would work. You’re always free to try your luck somewhere else, but you seem so comfortable here with Jim I can’t imagine you’d want to do that.” He smiled again, not showing his teeth, his lips tinged brown from the tobacco.
“Jim helped me do all this. Did you know that?” Even as I spoke, part of me doubted the wisdom of claiming Jim as my staunch supporter when he was already failing me as a willing and enthusiastic father to our child.
“Jim knows that we’re running a business here. And there’s no need for you to get hysterical, not when you haven’t heard my plan. How about we set up a concession for you, and you don’t have to pay me one cent for it? I’ll even let you keep the money you made last night. How does that sound?” Hinkle’s voice had a happy lilt, his expression pleasant, but something about him, the rigidity of his posture maybe, or perhaps how he seemed to be scanning my face with his eyes in a quick side-to-side motion, belied the image he wanted to project. I knew in that instant that this was a desperate man.
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch. You get the concession for free. Just pay me back through the ticket sales. And you’ll need to make at least two or three more of the punks.”
If I went along with what Hinkle suggested, I wouldn’t have to hear Jim talk up the atrociousness of the punks night after night. Maybe I was wrong to be so suspicious of Hinkle. He was a gambler and a scammer, but at his core, he was a businessman. “How much do you want?” I asked.
“See there, that’s what I like about you. You get right down to the heart of the matter. Now, let’s see. To make it worth my while, I’m going to have to say ninety percent of the ticket sales.” Hinkle spit in his cup, leaned back in his chair.
White-hot, milky rage surged through me. “I want at least fifty percent.”
Hinkle was trying to get the better of me, to put himself in charge of the punks even though I was the one who had made them. If I were their mother, then Hinkle had somehow made himself their father—overbearing and bossy without consideration for the love and effort that had created those children, ready even to dictate how many of them we would have.
“Get out, then,” Hinkle said. “Waddle your fat fucking ass on out of here. And I better not hear anything else about you running a concession on this lot without my say-so.”
The bitter rage, the quiet savagery of his words, stopped me cold and extinguished my own anger and made me think the whole punk venture wasn’t worth any amount of money. My father had often said that superstition was a type of ignorance, but should I tempt fate by peddling deformed babies or listening to them being described as freaks of nature? I stood from my chair.
“Wait, Lola,” Hinkle said, his voice softer. “Sit back down, sweetheart. I don’t want there to be any bad blood between us. Tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll give you fifteen percent. How about that?” Hinkle drew a deep breath. “Now, before you tell me again that you want more, you just remember that the only reason you’re even here at this carnival is because I allow it.” Hinkle stood up from his chair and extended his hand toward me. “Do we have a deal?”
“No,” I whispered. “No deal.”
Hinkle hadn’t been expecting that response, and he didn’t say another word to me as I left. I had no idea what to do with the punks. Repellent and deformed though they were, I didn’t want to destroy them. Even after a full night of hearing Jim describe them as my benighted offspring, I had developed a type of affinity for them, the sort of mother’s love that obviated the pain of having horrible children. I could keep them with me for a while in the trailer, but if I continued to cart around those pointless counterfeit fetuses for too long, I feared becoming just as Jim had described me—a sad, childless woman whose only comfort was her wretched jarred babies.