Circus (11 page)

When her mother talks about her circus days, it is with a kind of dutiful resignation. “Yes,” she says, “it was difficult being brought up a bear cub. Harder than you can really imagine, you of a regular human childhood.”

Her mother was twelve years old and preparing for a life as a contortionist when Susan’s grandfather ceased to be a bear. After they left the circus, however, her father was distraught, and wanted no reminders of his former vocation. So Susan’s mother was forced to walk on her feet instead of her hands, and to keep her back in a shape more like a human back than like a snail shell. This was a painful and incomplete adjustment, and from time to time, at boring parties or while Susan’s father was at work, she would yawn with her whole body – nonchalantly flipping her back over until her head appeared between her legs. It wasn’t about showing off, it was just the way it happened sometimes, and Susan never
really blamed her for not being like other mothers. One of Susan’s own phases had been contortion. She found that she had none of her mother’s natural gift, and sprained her neck, though she refused to get one of those foam things to hold her chin up. Instead she got an empty shoebox, labelled it
Contortion
, stuck it under her bed, and walked around for a few weeks with her head lolling a little to the left.

Leon is Susan’s boyfriend. He comes home every day at exactly the right time, even though this is a different time almost every day. Sometimes Susan is already home and sometimes she isn’t, but he has a way of opening the door, or of sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, that seems freakishly coincidental. If Susan needs a long bath and some time to herself, he comes home late. If she wants to play cards or make dinner, he’s there right at five. Susan’s favourite arrival, though, is when they both approach their apartment building at the same time, from different directions, and avoid eye contact as they walk towards the entrance. Then, without speaking, they get in the elevator, cough awkwardly as they ascend, and walk down the hall. When they arrive at their common destination, he presses her up against the door, her head right next to the brass 1216, and they make out as though they are strangers who have just met in an elevator and discovered that they live in the same apartment.

Leon is a marketing executive for a company that makes organic chocolate products. Their apartment is full of tins and wrappers, all dark brown with gold lettering and bars of colour at the edges to indicate flavour. The brown was Leon’s idea: “The colour of chocolate,” he said at the interview, and
so they hired him. Leon mostly ignores Susan’s quirks, which is comforting and necessary. When Susan says things that don’t make sense, or when she makes sock monkeys for days and days without doing anything else, Leon just rolls his eyes and carries on reading, or shaving, or doing whatever it is he’s doing at the time. He does intervene when necessary: he bought a bed skirt to conceal the shoeboxes for when company comes over, and had a gentle word about the crack-cocaine phase before it got too out of hand. Yesterday, he tried to come to her rescue by buying a new pair of loafers and leaving the box suggestively beside the laundry line on the carpet. But Susan is not ready, not yet, to give up on the tightrope.

At her new job, Susan draws cartoons about the apocalypse on a pad of Post-it notes. In her previous job, she also doodled, but she drew the End Times on the backs of invoices for European Hardwood flooring. At the job before that one, she rendered scenes of destruction on the bits of paper that were left for testing pens and highlighters at the University Book Store. Usually the apocalypse involves a lot of ants and, naturally, a spirally explosion with rockets emerging from it. She’s not sure how to explain the ants, but they are absolutely vital to the proceedings. They look like the fire ants she saw on her trip to Toronto Island last fall, and they bite. Of course, after the apocalypse they won’t have much to munch on, and Susan is sorry about this. She never draws what happens after the apocalypse. She doesn’t presume to know. In a graduate English seminar two years ago, Susan met a girl who announced that she “was engaged in examining deconstructionist analyses of post-apocalyptic fiction.” This deeply alarmed Susan,
who had just declared that she “quite liked Laurence Sterne.” The girl’s academic interest also had Susan worried that she’d somehow missed the apocalypse. She left the room after an agonizing two-hour discussion about globalization and culture, experiencing a small panic attack as she tried to get out of the building. That day, Leon arrived at their apartment before she did, and greeted her by handing her a wine glass. “It’s okay,” he said, “you’re home now.”

She quit her English degree two days later.

Susan often worries about whether she actually loves Leon and whether he actually loves her. There have been signs pointing both ways. Her worry led to a phase last month of picking the petals off daisies one by one, but never saying, “he loves me” or “he loves me not.” The last time she did this she was in elementary school and had had no one in mind. This more recent time was much more distressing, and she hated herself for doing it. Still, she sat in front of the TV and picked at the petals, tossing them onto the coffee table one after another, no longer even keeping track, and vowed never to do anything superstitious again. She simultaneously broke and repeated the vow each time she tore off another petal. Leon came home just as she was about to change the channel. He bent over and kissed her hair, then went to the kitchen. He returned with the dustpan and brush, swept the coffee table clean of petals, and emptied them into the trash.

Cartooning the end of the world on Post-it notes is not what they pay Susan to do at this new job, but it may as well be. She
sits at a computer all day while hundreds of dots pass across the screen representing numbers. Sometimes she answers the phone, and sometimes she lets it ring. When she first arrived at the job two weeks ago, she tried to make her cubicle more homey by sticking black-and-white postcards to the walls with sticky tack. A starlet dressed in sparkling silver, a team of synchronized swimmers in a star formation, a cowboy straddling a fence. Now the cards fall off slowly, one corner at a time, with a little fluttering sound, onto her desk and her lap and her keyboard. She doesn’t put them back up.

Susan doesn’t often speak to her co-workers in the cubicles on either side of her, although they sometimes flirt across her, their heads poking out the top of the cubicles like the plastic gophers people beat with soft mallets at fun fairs. Not Susan’s kind of fun fairs, of course, but the cotton-candy kind. She often goes to lunch with colleagues but isn’t very good with names, so all she can ever manage to think about while trying to eat her sandwich gracefully is whether this man is called “Frank” or “Rick.” Whenever anyone says “Susan” she cringes because she feels guilty that he knows her name and she doesn’t know his. Mostly people at work think Susan is self-deprecating and shy, but her hunching and shuddering is actually on account of her terrible memory.

As Susan smushes her toes into the carpet on either edge of the makeshift tightrope, she thinks about the manager of her department at work. He’d been unusually talkative earlier today when she met him at the coffee machine, and he’d told her all about his daughter’s school play, in which she was going to be a star. “Not
the
star,” he said, “an actual star! Her
costume is made out of chicken wire! She has five points!” He’s an extremely small man, though perfectly formed, and Susan is always tempted to touch his wild, wavy hair, which circles his bald spot like an eagle’s nest. She’s never actually reached out and done it, though. This is not an attraction thing. “It’s just a thing,” she’d told Leon last night, who had replied by looking up from his
New York Times
and saying, “Sixteen across: Meddlesome. N_ S_.”

“
Nosy
. Don’t patronize me,” Susan said, without pause.

“I wasn’t,” he said, circling around the
O
. “Just drew a blank.”

Susan has never been good at crossword puzzles, and has been trying very hard to get better. This is another thing she does at work. There is no shoebox for the puzzles because it’s an ongoing quest. Her ex-boyfriend was the best crossworder she’d ever known, and could even do cryptic ones with clues about the Anglo-Saxon word for “helmet” or a type of Gregorian chant or the anatomical term for the space between the upper lip and the nose. She never showed an interest until she was about twenty-five, when her roommates started reading clues out loud at the breakfast table, and she’d felt anti-social for not joining in. Leon had never done a crossword before he met Susan, and now he usually finishes them before she has a chance to see the paper.

Halfway through Susan’s thirty-seventh trip across the living room, the phone rings. For a moment, she’s uncertain about whether she’s allowed to leave the tightrope to answer it. After three rings she jumps and runs to the coffee table, snatching up the phone just as the answering machine beeps in.

“Are we being recorded?” her mother asks.

“I’m afraid so,” Susan replies.

For precisely two minutes, neither of them speaks. Susan sighs. Her mother coughs. The answering machine beeps again, and they both say “Hello” at the same time.

“So,” says Susan’s mother.

“So,” says Susan.

“Well. The thing is,” she pauses, “you know I miss it.”

“I know. What is it this time? Has Dr. Harman seen you?”

“Well, Susan, it’s my hip. I’ve dislocated my hip. Dr. Harman seems to think I can’t really manage this sort of thing on my own. So I was wondering. Where’s Leon? Is Leon home?”

“He’s at work.”

“So late? Is he always this late?”

“No. What do you need?”

“I need you to come, just for a week or so. I mean, I imagine a week would just about do it.”

“Of course.”

They hang up. Susan goes to the bedroom and begins to pack her suitcase. What’s in there already is:

One spoon.

One marble hippo, palm-sized.

Thirty-seven cents.

One unused tissue.

A list.

She packs the rest of her belongings and pauses for a minute, her fluorescent pink lacy underwear that she bought as a joke (but secretly quite likes) dangling from her finger. It occurs to her that maybe this has been the apartment phase,
the job phase, the Leon phase. She packs as much as she can fit in the roll-along suitcase, and heads to her mother’s.

Before she goes, she leaves a Post-it note on the counter.

Contortion accident. Love
.

I
T WASN
’
T THE SPORT
I
WOULD HAVE CHOSEN
. That’s the thing about being an Olympian, or any kind of serious athlete, musician, or artist. You don’t decide. Maybe your parents do, or your teachers or your coaches or your friends. One well-timed suggestion and the course of your life is set. But it’s never really you who makes the call. Many people, I’m sure, can’t fully explain why they do what they do for a living. Or they might have a great deal to say, but none of it gets to the heart of the matter. Maybe someone says she became a doctor to help people. But there are lots of useful jobs. Postal workers are immensely helpful, for example. That’s why I find it bewildering when people ask: “Why did you become a lugist?” I just don’t know how to answer that question. I embarrass myself every time. All those repetitive hours of training, those doleful looks from friends who wanted to hang out during sliding times, and I simply have no answer. I didn’t even like toboggans or crazy carpets as a kid, which is a reply I’ve heard my teammate give. No, luge is not something that occurs to a child when he’s at swimming lessons or riding his bike in endless circles in the driveway so his grandmother can keep one eye on him and one eye on
Coronation Street
. Hockey is the stuff of
childhood fantasies. Kids dream of snowboarding, skiing, and speed skating, even. But two-man luge?