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The house had a quiet, deserted feel after Jim left. Eventually, as many of the other carnies—like Ike, who hadn’t fared too well in Sacramento, and Ora Ann, who couldn’t see into her own future—packed up and left for the season, the town of Gulfy began to seem the same way. The retirees were still around, and Lonny opened the Showstop every day. Gigi and I went there for lunch with Emmy four or five times a week.
It was hard to know what precisely Lonny thought of Gigi’s religious conversion, but he sat by her side whenever business was slow. The quiet piety she hoped to achieve looked remarkably similar to a type of prolonged boredom as weeks and then months passed without her finding work or any useful activity beyond Bible study group. Gigi hated to be inactive, and the relative sobriety, which she viewed as necessary, integral even, to godliness only made the problem worse. I worried that she would marry churchy Doug to break up the monotony, to have something to do besides playing with Emmy and drinking iced tea at lunch.
I often wasted my precious nighttime hours thinking about Gigi and her future when I should have been sleeping through the exhaustion of caring for a baby. Staring at the dark ceiling one night, I considered her situation and how much she had changed in such depth that, when I heard the front door open and the sound of Gigi whispering my name, I felt certain she had come to haunt me as a living apparition.
Gigi flipped on the hallway light, a black silhouette that leaned its head forward to peer at me. “Hey, Lola, hey. You awake in there?”
“Gigi... is that you? For real?”
Gigi laughed. “Who the fuck did you think it was? My ghost?”
I followed her out into the kitchen, shocked and wondering what had happened to make her say the word “fuck” again after working so hard to excise it from her vocabulary. Gigi was wearing one of her church outfits, a green rayon dress with miniature cream polka dots. Her hair was pulled back and shaped into a tight curled bun, but thick sections of strands had escaped the net mold she used to hold it in place. When she turned to face me, I could see that the front of her dress was rumpled and buttoned incorrectly. A dab of purple-blue, like a sleeping iridescent mouse, had appeared under her left eye and would probably darken still as the hours passed.
“What the hell happened to your face? Who hit you?” I motioned for Gigi to sit down in the kitchen chair while I dug around in the freezer. The trays of ice cubes had evaporated long ago. “Shit. We’re out of ice. But here, take this.” I handed a wrapped grape popsicle to her. “Put it against your eye to take down the swelling at least.”
“Good thing you told me, or else I might have ate it.” She tipped her head back and pressed the popsicle to her eye like I told her. When she did, the overhead light caught the ring on her hand and glinted off the enormous square-cut diamond in the center.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Look at that goddamn thing.”
Gigi extended her fingers. I didn’t know much of anything about jewels or settings, but the perfection of the stone and the fineness of the platinum band were obvious. “It must have cost a fortune. Where’d you get it?”
She leaned back in her chair and repositioned the popsicle on her eye. “Are you sure you want to know?”
I swatted her forearm. “Tell me already.”
Gigi laughed. “All right,” she said, chucking the popsicle into the sink. “Well, I got this ring here from Doug. I guess that part’s no surprise. Not that he gave it to me but that it’s no secret he has lots of money. So, anyway, we went to dinner at the Fairhaven Country Club, where everyone in his family has been a member since forever, and he’s ordering really big stuff, like this expensive steak and red wine. He wants me to drink some, but I tell him no, and I guess he thinks it’s because I’m all prim and proper. That’s part of it, but the other thing is that red wine tastes like piss and vinegar to me. I’d go for a beer or the hard stuff, but I don’t tell Doug all that. Then right before dessert, he gets down on one knee to ask me to marry him. Right there in the middle of the crowded restaurant, he pulls out this big fucking ring. I say yes because it’s like something out of a movie, you know? The whole place is cheering, and everybody is congratulating us. I even cried a little bit. Some old lady gave me a hanky to wipe my eyes. I got real caught up in the moment. We went for a walk after that out on the golf course. I knew Doug was thinking he was going to get something out of me now that we were going to be married. I mean Doug’s a good-looking guy, so that wasn’t a problem really.” Gigi paused and laughed. “He would always joke, though, about me being too young and pretty for him because he’s thirty-three. I shaved ten years off so he would think I was twenty-five instead of thirty-five. I got this idea in my head that I should tell him my real age, especially when he started talking about wanting kids but that we could wait a year or two. Then he says we could have the wedding reception right there at Fairhaven. ‘I already got a place in mind,’ I told him. I was thinking of the Showstop. You should have seen Doug’s face when I suggested it. He said only dirty carnies and people looking to do shady business hung around there. Part of me thought about keeping my mouth shut, but then I wondered what he’d say about you as my maid of honor or Ike showing up as a guest with all his tattoos.”
Gigi got up and filled a glass with water from the tap. “I wasn’t about to turn my back on my friends. You know that.” She sat back down at the table. “The other thing, though, was I realized if I didn’t say something, I’d be stuck in the role of churchgoing lady for the rest of my life. It’s like I’d be invisible. Maybe that sounds strange.”
“No, not at all.” I covered Gigi’s hand with my own, taking the opportunity to smear my fingertip on the surface of the perfect diamond. “So, finish the story.”
“Well, anyway, I told Doug I used to work for a traveling carnival. He wanted to think like I was just some local who sold tickets or something, but I told him no, that I moved from town to town with them in the Midwest and that I still lived in a travel trailer parked on someone else’s lawn. I thought he might die from the shock. He couldn’t even open his mouth to say anything, so I just kept on talking. It felt good to get it all out. I told him about the sword swallowing and doing the blade box and even how, before that, I was in the cootch show for a few years.”
“Huh. I bet he never even heard of it.”
Gigi laughed. “Are you shitting me? He knew exactly what it was because he’s one of those upstanding men around town and church that wants you to squat right next to their face. He said something like ‘Are you telling me that you danced naked in front of strange men, that you exposed your...’ He stopped midsentence like he was at a total loss for words, so I said, ‘Pussy.’ That’s when he hit me across the face, and I got this shiner. He called me all kinds of names, horrible insults like nobody should ever say to another person. ‘Where’s all your Christian forgiveness now?’ I asked him. Instead of answering, he pushed me down to the ground and started kicking me. I’ll probably have bruises up and down my legs and back by morning. He might have killed me, except this other couple that was out on the golf course saw what was going on, and the man stopped him. Doug yelled at me to give him back his ring, so I threw it into his face. The couple took me to use a pay phone because there was no way I’d go back into the country club looking like this and worrying that I’d run into Doug or that he’d told people all kinds of shit about me. I called Lonny because I figured he could get there the fastest. He was pissed like you wouldn’t believe. So, anyway, he showed up with Luis. The three of us drove around until we found Doug’s nice green Mercedes parked outside some bar. We drank in Lonny’s truck for an hour or so, waiting for Doug to come out. Then when he does, the three of us jump out, and Lonny and Luis start beating on him. It was sort of awful, but at the same time, you know, that shit had it coming to him. The whole thing happened fast because we were worried that someone might come out of the bar or call the fuzz. They took Doug’s keys to open the car door to put him inside it. Doug’s nose was bloody, and his eye was all puffy. He was still trying to swing a little bit here and there. Lonny halfway lowered himself into the car so he could press his knee against Doug’s chest. ‘Hey, asshole,’ he said. ‘You owe this lady an apology.’ ‘She’s no lady,’ Doug said. Lonny punched him good in the face again. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ Then it was like he couldn’t apologize enough, you know? ‘And give her back her ring,’ Lonny said. Doug started blubbering because he was near to breaking, but he shut up and handed it over when Luis flicked open his switchblade. Then we headed back to the Showstop to have a few more drinks, and Luis cooked us some breakfast.”
Gigi reached her arms up to the ceiling to stretch her back. “I brought you some shrimp salad sandwiches.” She pointed at a brown paper bag with a rolled top and a splotch of grease on the side that I hadn’t even noticed.
I started eating while Gigi poured herself some vodka with a splash of Tab. That mixture was her morning drink, the one she liked to have at the end of a long night that lasted until sunrise, sometimes even beyond.
“It’s good to have you back, Geeg.”
“Don’t you want to hear the rest of the story?”
Some of the filling had dripped from my sandwich. I pinched up the globs that had fallen onto the table. “There’s more?”
Gigi nodded. “This is the best part. So, we’re back at the Showstop. Luis is in the kitchen, frying bacon, and Lonny and I are sitting at one of the tables, drinking a little seven and seven. I thank him for everything he did, you know, because he helped me out of a tough spot. I can’t help thinking about how Lonny has always been there when I needed him and how I never had to put on some act for him. I told him the ring was pretty, but I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to look at it. ‘Well, then give it to me,’ Lonny said. So I did. Then do you know what he did? He got right down on one knee, just like Doug, except he wasn’t doing it in some crowded restaurant to get attention. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked. ‘I know we could be happy together.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know it too.’ So that’s what we’re aiming to do.”
I laughed then, a big, wide-mouthed noise. For a split second, Gigi blinked in surprise at the suddenness, the hugeness of the sound, then she joined in with me until neither of us could stop, gasping for breath, gripping our stomachs.
“Not a bad story, huh?”
“Not bad at all.”
***
June 8, 1980
Dear Sarah,
Saul and I got married and only just returned from our honeymoon last night. Did you get our wedding invitation? I sent it not knowing if you’d come.
The ceremony had to be at the courthouse, of course, because we couldn’t find a minister or a rabbi willing to marry us. The one rabbi we talked to actually called Saul a traitor to his people. My sister, Edna, wasn’t much better. “I can’t believe you’re marrying a Jew!” she yelled at me when I called to tell her the good news.
In the end, though, she and Harold drove all the way down with the kids, which I know must have cost them a pretty penny. “Well, he’s certainly not a handsome man,” she told me, “but he really loves you, Ursula. I can see that plain as day.”
Saul’s two grown daughters, Rachel and Samantha, were there too. Rachel told Edna that her driving all the way down with the whole family was the sweetest thing. Edna likes to get credit for the stuff she does, so that certainly made her happy.
The reception was out on the patio of our beach club. We did all the decorating ourselves and spent hours stringing strands and strands of white lights. Our families were there. We invited all our friends, too, and we drank Chablis and ate shrimp and crab legs. I wish you could have been there with us.
Edna and Harold were here with the girls for almost two weeks, so we had plenty of time to visit. She told me that every once in a great while, someone might mention Jared or how you disappeared but that even in a town as small as ours, that’s old news now. The house where you lived is gone, and the sheriff retired last year to go live in Arizona. Edna says, too, that Missy got married in the spring to that Johnson boy, then the two of them moved to Minnesota. They got a nice big place near his uncle, where they grow corn. I was never a big fan of Missy’s, but I sure don’t envy her becoming a farmer’s wife.
Come visit us, Sarah. Saul would love to meet you. I don’t rest easy at night wondering if I’ll ever see you again.
Love,
Ursula