Circus (5 page)

“There’s room for one more!”

“That’s okay. Would you girls like a snack?”

“No food in the tent,” said Annie.

“Except space food,” her father countered.

“Not now, Dad.” Annie closed the door flap, but not before giving her dad a wink.

After a couple of months, people in the neighbourhood started to ask questions. Mrs. Mooney noticed the tent through the living room window of the house next door when she and her
husband were walking their dogs (she suspected hoarding), while the Jacksons, who drove past the plain brown house every day on their way home from work, wondered whether it was some kind of religious shrine. Some of the other neighbours started to ask one another if the tent had always been there and they’d just never noticed. No one knew Annie or her dad quite well enough to inquire.

It was the mailman who finally investigated one afternoon after working up the courage to do so for a very long time. For months, instead of delivering the mail to the box, he rang the doorbell every day. When Annie answered, he’d open his mouth as if to say something, but would pause for too long before holding the mail out to her and asking “Your mail?” It took Annie a few weeks to catch on that he was angling not just for an explanation but for an invitation.

“You’ve really got something here,” he said after his first tent experience, hoisting his bag of letters back onto his shoulder.

“Don’t I just?” said Annie, avoiding eye contact so as not to seem too proud.

The postman loved the tent so much that he brought his wife over the next day so that she could experience it too. It was a sensation. The postman told everyone he could about it, and in the days that followed, all of the neighbours came over to give it a try. Of course, Mrs. Mooney was the first to arrive.

“I hear you’ve got ‘quite something’ set up here,” she said, miming air quotes with her fingers. “The postman won’t tell me what it is, so I thought I’d come see for myself. I brought chocolate-caramel-coconut squares.” She handed over a paper
plate full of sticky confections and made a quick beeline for the tent.

“Well, thank you, Mrs. Mooney. Come on in,” said Jake, shrugging at Annie as they followed behind her. When they peered in through the front flap, their busybody neighbour had plopped herself down in the very middle of the tent with her arms and legs crossed.

“So?” asked Annie.

“Well, I just never knew it could be so …” Mrs. Mooney spontaneously adopted a yoga pose, with both hands on her knees, palms facing up. “Actually, I would prefer to be left alone, if you wouldn’t mind, so that I can have an authentic experience,” she said, before zipping the front flap closed.

The day after Mrs. Mooney’s visit, the Johnstones from #38 showed up on their doorstep with a fistful of freshly picked begonias from their garden, which they offered in exchange for some quality time in the tent. Even the neighbourhood curmudgeon, Drew Kendal, gave up on his reclusive habits and made the epic journey down the street on his walker, bearing chocolates filled with liquor. He spoke as if somewhere along the line he had been given lessons in elocution, and was always encouraging: “I’ve always thought exceedingly well of you, sir,” the old man said, peering up at Jake from beneath his tufty eyebrows, “but now I feel quite confirmed in my supposition that you have been an excellent father and a true gentleman all these years. My sincerest commendation on this triumph.” Mr. Kendal came back to the tent three more times and was not so
cantankerous after all. Annie and her dad quickly found themselves surrounded by tokens of appreciation – bottles of wine, homemade pumpkin bread, and a frozen Quiche Lorraine – all within the first week. None of the neighbours had ever been inside their home before, so except for the fact that they had been living there for over a decade, it felt like a housewarming.

Much to Jake’s surprise, the visitors did nothing but compliment him on the success of the birthday present and on raising such a fine young woman. He had expected somebody to comment on the unusual location of the tent, or at least to ask what was so special about putting an ordinary tent that anyone could buy at a department store in an ordinary living room that could be anyone’s living room. Nobody reacted like that, though.

On the second Saturday that the tent was open to the public, Jake made lemonade and left a jug with Styrofoam cups by the door so that people could have a refreshing drink while they waited for their turn. By the end of the second weekend, they began to implement a system so that each visitor was guaranteed an equal amount of time in the tent. Jake was in charge of manning the door and restocking the refreshments, and Annie ran the egg timer, which made a clear, bright “ping!” when tent time was over.

Miss Bee, Annie’s art teacher, started crying while she was in the tent. “It’s simply astounding. A performance piece!” she said, hugging Annie afterwards. “I’ve never seen anything so sophisticated in my entire teaching career! The way you’re involving the viewer in sensuous experience, Annie, and with no training in artistic practice.”

“Hi, I’m Annie’s dad,” said Jake, sidling up to the two of them and extending his hand to the teacher.

“Your daughter has real talent,” Miss Bee said, still clasping Jake’s hand in both of hers. “I hope you realize how truly gifted she is.”

“I didn’t know I was being graded,” Annie joked.

“Grades are hardly the point,” said Miss Bee, finally releasing Jake’s hand so she could wipe her eyes with a tissue. “But yes, A+.”

By the fourth week, people began to drive from across town and gather in droves on the lawn to try out the tent. Because there could be quite a wait, Mrs. Jacobson, who worked at the Rec Centre, brought her face-painting supplies to keep the children entertained, and Mr. Reynolds set up a picnic blanket (complete with a romantic meal for him and his wife) on top of Annie’s seedlings. There were even overly beloved pets waiting in line with their owners, including a ferret on a leash and a Labradoodle belonging to the Kinsey twins, who took turns holding onto her collar while the other twin went inside. Parking was a problem. Just as things were starting to get a bit chaotic (little Debbie Millhouse rode her tricycle off the front porch and two teenaged boys from Annie’s class pummelled each other in the driveway), Mrs. Mooney took charge and shouted commands until everyone formed an orderly lineup. “Two by two!” she howled. “Johnny, I
see
you sneaking around the back …” The unruly crowd settled into a series of awkward pairings. Reverend Allott from St. Joseph’s, still wearing his robes, made conversation about heavy garments in hot weather with his partner, Jonah the Goth, whose eye makeup
was melting in the heat. Cindy Johnstone was allowed to take her teacup Yorkie as her partner, because she was too shy to go in with another human being.

Later that day, Annie got a phone call from the local newspaper asking if they could run a story. Annie was firm: “No reporters in the tent.”

When September came and Annie went back to school, they could keep the tent open to the public only on the weekends. A tone of begrudging acceptance descended on the neighbourhood like a humid spell. They thought that was the end of it until Jake went outside to pick up the paper one morning and found an envelope taped to the door. It was a letter of complaint from the local seniors’ centre, suggesting that to keep the tent open only on weekends was stressful and inconvenient for retirees and nurses who worked night shifts.

There were about thirty eager tent-goers gathered on the front lawn the morning Annie drew a sign in purple marker that said “CLOSED” – in what she hoped were friendly yet assertive bubble letters – and taped it to the door. Instead of letting the hype die down, Annie and her dad made the decision to close the tent at the peak of its fame, so that there was no let-down, no dwindling, just triumph. “With a bang, not a whimper,” said Annie, reversing the T.S. Eliot line she’d been studying in English class. When she stepped aside to reveal the sign, the crowd erupted in disappointed jeers, and Annie apologized before closing and locking the door. “This is not what I was promised!” someone yelled from outside. People
knocked on the door and pounded on the windows, shouting abuse and arguing with one another as they trampled what was left of Annie’s front garden. As the day wore on, the would-be tent-goers began singing protest songs to the tuneful drone of Crafty Alex the kindergarten teacher’s tissue-box guitar. “They’ll be standing outside with banners next, protesting the injustices they’ve suffered,” said Jake, and the two of them laughed so hard they had to hold each other by the elbows to stay upright.

“We don’t need to worry, right?” Annie asked, still recovering from her fit of giggles.

“Of course not. They’ll go away eventually,” Jake replied, suddenly looking a little concerned.

After about six hours, as dusk began to settle around the bungalow and it became clear that the door would not open again, the crowd slowly started to disperse. A small group of unusually persistent stragglers sat on the doorstep for three more hours. Having exhausted their 1960s repertoire they had moved on to singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” over and over until it was well and truly dark, each protestor hoping that he or she would be the last one allowed inside.

The next morning, Annie and her dad got up early and, after checking that there was no one left on the lawn, they cleaned the tent carefully. They vacuumed the interior with a hand-held DustBuster, aired out the sleeping bag, and even sprayed air freshener inside. They still had a dozen cans of frozen lemonade in their freezer and about four hundred Styrofoam cups. They were lemonaded out, but they figured they could
encourage Mrs. Mooney’s seven-year-old son to start a business. “I guess it was overkill on the cups,” Jake said.

Back in the living room, they stood in front of the tent and thought again about taking it down, now that it had had its fifteen minutes. Annie leaned into her dad and he wrapped his arm around her.

“So, are there instructions for disassembly?” Jake asked.

“I don’t think we even need them, do we?” Annie replied. “But I’m sure there’s a sheet in the stuff-sac. Should we check?”

“Yeah,” said Jake, without making a move towards the tent. “Okay.”

“Are you ready?”

“How about we try it out one more time?”

“Sure, Dad,” said Annie. “One last time just to make sure it’s good inside.”

Annie and her father closed the living-room curtains. They stood in front of the tent and gave each other a small nod before climbing in. Then they lay down side by side and settled into the blue.

E
VERY TIME THE NORTHERN LIGHTS WHISPER
across the sky, Edward goes outside to listen. Since he moved north, it has been his retirement project to read all of the research on magnetic fields and auroral electrons, and now he knows all there is to know about them. Whether or not the lights make a real sound that is audible to the human ear is an open question, scientifically speaking, but Edward is sure he can hear a fizzling noise accompanied by a buzzing sensation that seems to course through his whole body. This is the empirical evidence on which he bases his conclusions, but the sound is something more, too. It’s sparklers lighting up in his blood, flashing from his fingers up to his earlobes, and radio waves inside his eyelids. Nothing else has ever made Edward feel the way he does when he’s standing under the big green sky – like he’s at the very centre of the hum, as if the curve of his inner ear contains the whole known universe, spiral galaxies bouncing off his eardrums. But surely even his ecstasy can be explained. When he finds a way of measuring vibrations to prove that we can really hear the lights, that there may even be a stimulation that causes synesthesia, he will publish it to great acclaim in
Science
. It will be his last article: his swan song.

It remains a great disappointment for Edward that his daughter, Jess, has never been sufficiently impressed by natural phenomena. “I know, Dad, they’re nice,” she says, checking her grocery list on her iPhone as he tells her about his discoveries. “I can’t hear anything, personally, but if you want to measure the waves, you should.”