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One night in early December, about three weeks before the baby was due to be born, Gigi and I were sitting at the kitchen table, sewing up a batch of pot holders for the Christmas bazaar at the Episcopalian church. One of the bulbs in the overhead lamp had blown, so I had to squint to see what I was doing. A tidy stack of finished pot holders sat near my elbow. Gigi took a break to smoke a cigarette, the sharp snick of her lighter extra loud in the quiet room.
“That pot holder looks like shit, Geeg.”
“Language, language,” she said. “You be nice to me, or I won’t make you my maid of honor when I get married.” Gigi held her pot holder, the one she had been working on for more than an hour, up to the light. “Yeah, I guess it doesn’t look that great.”
I took the pot holder from her hand and used the stitch puller to undo Gigi’s shoddy work. “You’d marry this Doug guy?” I had never met him. That fact alone made me wonder how happy he would be to see me standing next to his bride at the altar.
“Well, I don’t aim to go back out on the road.”
“I know,” I said. Nothing on earth could have made me go back to the sideshow either, if I could even land another fat-lady gig—a far-fetched assumption indeed. Gulfy was a safe place, miles away from any repercussions for my past actions. Besides which, the house where Jared had died no longer existed, and Mrs. Schendel, the one person who supposedly kept up with my whereabouts, had also moved away. “I’m just saying maybe you could find something else to do.”
Gigi rolled her eyes at me. My document business had expanded in Scratchy’s absence, with Thelma telling me in a letter that he was glad to hear it. The two of them seemed to be settling in well with Scratchy’s brother, but there was no way to know, of course, how much of their account was fact or fiction. In the meantime, I had a good stream of income, better even than when I had worked the sideshow and certainly more reliable. Feeling as comfortable as I did with my new way of earning a living, meeting with people right there at the Showstop, maybe Gigi found my suggestions about what she should do with her life sanctimonious, and maybe she was right.
“Well,” Gigi said, “I think the real problem is that you’d miss me too much.” She reached over and poked my finished stack of pot holders with her index finger, making it slip to the side.
“Ha! You’d miss me too much, you mean.” I picked up the completed pot holders in my fist and held them up between us. “What does this goddamn church want with so many pot holders?” I laughed.
Gigi joined in, not bothering to correct my bad language for once, which I think I had started to use more of in response to her admonishments. “They’re going to sell them, I guess, and give the money to the church.”
“They’re only made out of fabric and cotton batting. You’ll burn your hand if you try to take something out of the oven with these things.”
Gigi stubbed out her cigarette. “Just keep sewing. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
As our laughter died down, I reorganized the fabric, cotton, and sewing tools on the table. “I need a break anyway,” I said. In the new quiet, we heard a vehicle, a heavy one by the sound of it, like a truck pulling a trailer. Gigi and I exchanged glances, both of us wondering, I thought, if maybe Jim had finally found his way to Gulfy.
The door burst open in such a sudden explosion of sound that Gigi jumped to her feet and ran a circle around the table.
Jim walked into the kitchen, calm and unhurried, a big double bouquet of pink and white carnations in his arms. “I’m home,” he said.
“Holy shit, Jim!” Gigi yelled.
“Jim,” I said, struggling in near desperation to stand up from the kitchen chair. Getting up and sitting down, never easy for me, had become nearly insurmountable tasks of panic and fear.
Gigi rushed over to pull on my arm. Jim tossed the flowers onto the table to come help her.
When we were all standing, we huddled together in a close knot, holding on to each other in the silence until I said, “You’re home.”
“I’m home,” Jim repeated.
Gigi pulled away from the group then. “It’s good to have you back.” She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the table, placing the strap of the purse she had slung over the back of the kitchen chair onto her shoulder. “I guess I’ll leave you two alone for a bit. I’ll be over in my trailer if you need anything.”
Jim waited until the door slammed behind Gigi. “These are for you.” He pressed the flowers toward me. “I thought you might be mad at me because, you know, I meant to get here sooner, but I figured... Well, I guess I should have tried to call.”
I took the flowers from his hands. Two of the white carnations already had crumpling brown edges. They were all completely odorless when I raised them to my face. Jim kissed my lips twice then pulled me close and tried to put his tongue in my mouth, the dilapidated flowers between us. “Hey, don’t be mad.”
“I had no idea where you were or if I’d ever even see you again,” I said through teeth clenched so hard a jolt of pain, like a snapping spring, shot through my jaw.
“Come on, Lolly. I always turn up. You know that.” His arm was still across my shoulders, and he massaged my neck roll in a soft, insistent motion, like water moving over sand.
“Well, let’s see you,” he said. Jim touched my stomach, giving me an unexpected, involuntary shot of pleasure. Even with a nearly full-term baby inside me, few people would know or guess that I was pregnant. “You look good, Lolly. Really good.”
I felt, or imagined I felt, a singing reverence in his fingertips. “Jesus, Jim, where the hell have you been? I’m here, not knowing if you’re dead or alive.”
Jim put his lips on my forehead to quiet me. He must have stopped off to have a few drinks, with Lonny probably, because I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “I’m here now,” he said. “And don’t worry, all right? I got Midstate closed up and made sure everybody got some pay. Everything and everybody were cleared out before dark. And that was the end of all that.”
Jim sat down at the table. “What’s all this shit?” He pushed the pot holders and sewing articles to the side and took some beer out of the paper sack he had brought. He filled a glass from one of the forty-ounce bottles. “Let’s have a drink. There’s no sense wasting time being pissed off.”
“Beer’s no good for the baby,” I said. Jim was never going to be the faithful, handsome young man I had dreamed of marrying when I was a girl, while I would never be the thin, elegant woman who would be at such a man’s side. We were both something else, it seemed. “Do you want to see the baby’s room? Gigi and I did it up together.”
With the money I was making, I had been able to set up nice things for the baby, like I could only have imagined during my childhood. The slats of the crib were wooden spindles worked on a lathe to make a repeating pattern of bumps and dips that I liked to skim with my fingers. Everything in the baby’s room was white, like mounded sugar or the winter snow I saw only in my memory. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked.
“That baby will be lucky to have such a soft, sweet mama like you.” When Jim kissed me again, I saw that I had a choice. I could cling to my impotent rage, which would only delay our reconciliation, or I could love Jim as he was rather than how I wished him to be.
“I hope so,” I whispered. “The doctor says there’s a lot that could go wrong.”
Jim stretched his arms around me as far as they would go, squeezed me in a tight embrace. “You’re going to be just fine. Trust me.”
I wanted to believe Jim, to think that his unabashed optimism held some sway in the grand order of things, but I couldn’t shake the fear that a woman who had taken two lives was more likely to get divine retribution rather than reward.
Later, stretched out next to each other on the bed, I leaned back on a stack of pillows while Jim pressed his face to my naked chest. The room was dark and still, with only the ticking of the bedside clock to break up the silence.
“So, you’re sure everything worked out okay with Hinkle, then?”
Jim paused before answering. “Yeah, nobody asked too many questions. Some carnie dies, these townspeople don’t exactly give a shit.” He rubbed his nose back and forth across my breasts. There might have been a wetness near his eyes, a drip from his nose. “Hinkle got a nice burial down with his people near Evansville. I helped his mama arrange to get the body over there. I didn’t want to say nothing while Gigi was here because I wasn’t sure she could take it.”
“Right.” I wondered if I really was that much stronger than her, unable to stop myself from suspecting that my actual physical bulk made it impossible for anyone to perceive in me the requisite delicacy needed for suffering.
“He wasn’t all bad, you know. I ever tell you how I met him?”
I shook my head, not because I wanted to know but because I wanted him to stop talking. I dreaded hearing him praise a man it was easier and more expedient to hate.
“You know I done hard time, right? So, back when I first met Hinkle, I’d just finished with a ten-year stint for manslaughter. It was one of those things, you know. A bar fight got out of hand, and the other guy pulled a knife. He cut me first.” Jim paused and traced his finger down the scar on the side of his face. “But I was the one who stabbed him. Anyway, I couldn’t get a job nowhere, and my wife, Becky, wouldn’t take me back either. Not that there was much to go back to. Her family hated me. The only jobs were coal mining, and I sure as shit wasn’t about to go underground. She also took up with somebody else and had a kid with him, pretended like the new guy was her husband. I gave him a pretty bad beating. When Becky called the police, I ran. Fuck, I was sleeping on benches in Chicago and eating mission soup when I met Hinkle. He told me what a great life it was traveling with the carnival and how most of these truck shows, especially the small ones, wouldn’t even notice or care that I had a record. It was a good life, but then when Hinkle took over Midstate, I guess it wasn’t as easy as he thought it was going to be, but he worked hard until he didn’t want to anymore. And then there was the gambling, so he would try to save money and cut corners, but he still couldn’t make a good go of it. He kept skimming off the top, which only made it worse. And then I started doing the same thing because any idiot could see that the whole operation was going to hell in a handbasket. Still, he got me out of a lot of jams when I thought for sure I was going to be thrown back in the clink.”
Jim sat up and rubbed both hands over his face. “Yeah, old Hinkle. I guess he got his.”
I pressed my hand against the flat muscles of Jim’s back. “I’m sorry. I wish all the time that Gigi and I could have just gotten in the car and driven away or that he really did only have enough pills to fall asleep and that... God, I don’t know, half the time I can’t sleep at night, thinking about all the things that could be different. It’s like there’s this animal that lives in my skull, and it gnaws at my brain. And then it breaks my heart, you know? Because I can’t fix things. I can’t take back any of it.”
Jim leaned over to kiss my forehead. “Don’t do it to yourself, Lola. That’s what prison was like—long nights wondering how you ended up there, thinking about all the things you wanted to change, about everything you should have done. You worry too much, and it’ll keep you from the good thing you got going here.”
I tried to smile in the dark. “Sometimes, I wonder if I’m not still back in the house where I grew up, imagining all this.” The person that I had been, alone and confined, waiting and hoping for my real life to begin, seemed almost like a stranger now. “I guess that sounds a little crazy.”
Jim squeezed my fingertips then put my hand on his penis. “See that? It’s all real. What sweet young girl like you were would imagine something so nasty?”
I yanked my hand free and started laughing until I had to bury my face in the pillow to blot the tears running down my face. “My God, you really are a dirty old man.”
***
Jim, Gigi, and I went to the Showstop for dinner the next day. The place was mostly empty, the windows and back door open to air out the smell of old cigarette smoke and to dry the floor, which smelled like it had just been washed with a strong pine cleaner.
“Well, look who’s here,” Lonny said. He came out from behind the bar to shake Jim’s hand and kiss both Gigi and me on the cheek. “Luis, get Big Mama her chair!”
Luis also did us up a good fish fry made with a rich, fluffy batter and slathered in mayonnaise-thick tartar sauce. Between Gigi’s religious conversion and my pregnancy, the two of us hadn’t been going out at night like we used to. As the Showstop filled with customers, being part of a crowd, sitting in the center of it because people wanted to cluster around Jim, made me feel wonderful in the literal sense. I was filled with wonder at being among people, eating a big meal in front of them with no shame, and being a part of their group.
I learned a lot about where Jim had been and what he had been doing from the stories he told that night. He had spent some time in Arizona. The searing desert heat nearly killed him when his truck radiator sprang a leak and he had to walk long, high-sun miles on a stretching lonely road until a Navajo couple, so old that their mouths collapsed in equal toothlessness, gave him a ride to the next town. In Louisiana, Jim met a man named Sammy Winestone, who had forgotten more about the carnival business than most of us would ever know.
Jim talked, too, about driving Highway 1 the entire length of the California coast, about how much bigger and frothier the Pacific seemed in comparison to the Gulf. People loved his stories, leaned forward into his pauses, breathless to know what he would say next. A squirm of exhaustion snaked through me, but still I tried to match Jim’s energy to keep pace with the singing newness of his vitality and presence, ignoring the constrained restlessness that seemed to lurk right below his jovial demeanor. He had crisscrossed the entire country, traveling from one place to the next, succumbing to a continual attraction to the next thing.
***
Our daughter was born on December 18, 1979. None of the dire predictions of what could happen if a woman my size gave birth proved true. She was healthy and strong, able to raise her little fists in the air, crying in a way that required an immediate response. Once she had been cleaned up from the birth and wrapped in a featherlight blanket, I held her in my arms, awestruck to realize that she was a beautiful child.
I had prayed for my baby to be born alive and healthy, and I had received this additional gift as well. I decided to name her Emma after my own mother, that pretty woman who had had so little in life and had given me so much in the delicate perfection of this breathtaking child that Jim and I had managed to produce.
As I stroked Emmy’s flower-petal cheek, I found myself thinking about my father as well. I remembered how, after I had been forced to leave school, he had knelt before me and said that I had a wonderful, glorious mind and that no one could take that away from me. Maybe he could have loved Emmy in a fierce, protective, uncomplicated way.
My little family, the feeling of being a part of it, at times seemed like a dream—something I would have imagined in the solitude of my own childhood and adolescence. I remained resolutely and irrevocably fat, however, and in my fantasies, I had always been some other thin woman. For the first time in my life, I begrudged that fantasy woman my happiness. Instead, I kept it all for my fat self, the actual me.
Fatherhood seemed to have changed Jim. He demonstrated a natural proclivity for it that I had not expected, toting Emmy with him wherever he went, exercising limitless patience, content as well to walk the length of the house with Emmy pressed against his shoulder while he engaged in an endless stream of nonsensical conversation with her. “Is that so?” he would ask. “Well, I have to agree with you there.”
Then, one fine morning in May, hot but not too hot, a salty breeze blowing, after Jim had played ickle tickle on Emmy’s fingers and toes and she had drifted off into the soft pastel of her morning nap, I found him in the bedroom, arranging his clothes in tidy piles on the bedspread.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m packing up my things here if you want to help me.”
The beating of the ceiling fan blades was the only sound in the room. “What? Where are you going?”
Jim, backlit by the sunlight streaming in from the window behind him, wouldn’t meet my eyes as he pulled a stack of clean undershirts from the dresser drawer.
“What? You’re going to work with Sammy Winestone, aren’t you?”
Until that moment, Sammy, who ran Bright Star Southern Extravaganza, had seemed like just another character in Jim’s endless trove of stories, a human series of actions and mannerisms meant to entertain me, Gigi, and the drinkers down at the Showstop. All of us, really.
“Jesus, Jim, you need to be here with me and Emmy. Do you have any idea how much she’ll change when you’re running around out on the road? You won’t even recognize her come winter.” The idea that Jim could know and love Emmy and still be willing to absent himself from her for months at a time had never even occurred to me.
Jim stared at the mounds of clean, fresh clothes on the bedspread. “I’ve got to go, Lola. You don’t need me here. You and Emmy will be fine. I wouldn’t leave if I thought any different.”
“No, we won’t be fine!” I shouted. “You don’t have to go anywhere, goddammit.” I went to the bed and swept all the stacks of clothes together. I held the whole mess of them in front of me, like a shield. “You don’t get to leave us again with me waiting around, not knowing if you’re dead or alive. You’re too damn old to be doing this. It’s time for you to retire already.”
Jim tried to tug the clothes from arms, but I held on tighter.
“Goddammit,” he said. “I just got that stuff organized. You need to stop acting so crazy all the time. And listen to reason for a change.”
The realization that Jim somehow viewed himself as more balanced and mentally stable or competent than I was hit me like icy water thrown in my face. Maybe he had always felt that way, going way back to when he had first given me a place to sleep and food to eat.
“Really? I’m the crazy one?” My voice was cold and steady as I took a small step forward.
Jim wouldn’t want five hundred pounds of force smashing down on his delicate foot bones. So when I advanced, he had no choice but to retreat.
“Who are you to tell me that I’m not reasonable? Like I don’t how anything works? You’re the one who’s being stupid and irresponsible.” I moved again. Jim backed farther away until his body almost touched the wall.
He grabbed my forearms hard, each finger of his digging down in a painful way. “Knock it off, Lola. You keep trying to back me into a corner, then we’re going to have a real problem.”
I pulled away from him and threw the clothes in his face. “Fine, take all this shit, then.”
I turned to walk out of the room as Jim bent down to pick up his shirts and socks. Looking back at him on the floor like that, it reminded me of the time my father had cried on his knees in front of me, desperate to have me understand and agree that there had been nothing wrong in his relationship with my mother. I saw Jared, too, calling me fat and worthless, hitting my face because he could.
To hell with all that, I thought. I had my own work, my own money, my own life. “You were right about one thing. We don’t need you.”
I went into the kitchen and started spraying the counters with cleaning solution because I didn’t want to look at Jim anymore or watch him get ready to leave us. I focused instead on making everything tidy and well-ordered. Jim came out of the bedroom as I was sprinkling scouring powder into the sink.
“You know, I could have left without telling you anything.”
I found an old sponge and started scrubbing. Such an idiotic and ill-timed assertion as that didn’t deserve a response. The fact that Jim had deigned to inform me of his plans meant nothing.
Jim down on the couch and watched me. “All right, come and leave that and sit down next to me. Please.”
I did as he asked, but I wouldn’t touch him. I kept my hands stuffed between my knees so he could see that and turned my face to look out the window, watching the calm waters, hearing the occasional seagull call.
“Look, Lola. I’ve got to go, okay? You don’t want to be on the road. I get that, but I can’t stay all cooped up here. I don’t want to go away with you mad like this. I’ll be back when the season’s over, and I’ll do better this time, okay? I’ll call. You can take lots of pictures of everything Emmy’s doing. All right?”
Jim hated confinement of any kind. I knew that. It could have been the time he spent in prison, or maybe that stalk of his personality had been imprinted on him all his life. I had allowed myself to believe, however, that being a father, especially to sweet Emmy, would make a difference. Somehow, though, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Nothing was.
“I just... I think of all the crazy shit out on the road. You’ve been with it for so many years I can’t understand why you want more of it.” Here, I started crying because I knew that Jim wouldn’t change his mind and that his luck couldn’t last forever. “I’m worried that something bad will happen to you when it would be the easiest thing in the world to avoid it.”
Jim grabbed my chin. “Don’t you curse me, Lola,” he whispered.
“You don’t need me to curse you.”