Sideshow (7 page)

Star Wars
epics. In cosmopolitan places, in urban areas, where the abnormal was ordinary, wonder at the bizarre had been lost.
In rural areas, however, eyes still widened and mouths still gaped. There the birth of a two-headed calf was still cause for a visit from the neighbors, hexing was a day-to-day possibility, the evil eye a fact. There credulity reigned and one of
them
was born every minute, fair target for the one-ring sawdust circuses, the dog-and-pony shows, still playing beneath canvas, their often dilapidated but brightly blazoned trucks moseying from smallish town to smallish town, their performances long on smaller animals and acrobats and totally deficient as to elephants or tigers. There, the snake charmer was still good for a three-dollar admission, and the cooch dancers brought out the boys who had no local topless bar for their after-work delectation. There, though the glitter was tarnished, the glamour faded, and the repair budget was always in arrears, the authentic aura of circus enchantment could still be found.
Mulhollan’s had all the essentials, albeit on a small scale:
taped calliope music tootling over the P.A. system, the whir of a cotton-candy machine, the shout of the straw-hatted ticket seller from his high booth, the barker’s spiel outside the sideshow tent, the hum and mutter of the crowd; the smells of wet canvas, hot grease and caramel corn, horseshit and sawdust and hay; a dangle of trapeze ropes, a strut of plumed horses, an awkwardness of ruff-necked dogs dancing on their hind legs. Mulhollan’s had Clown Alley, oleaginous with greasepaint, spider hung with fright wigs and balloony pantaloons. It had Sizzy’s souvenir stand, its roof striped red and soiled white, its tattered sides emblazoned with peeling silver stars. The shelves inside were crowded with gimcrack junk: whistly whirly-birds on a stick, clown-faced coffee mugs, silver caps with horns and ears, plastic boomerangs and Frisbees, tiny wooden acrobats that swung around a bar when one squeezed the uprights together, ashtrays with pictures of dogs and snake charmers on them and the words MULHOLLAN’S MARVELOUS CIRCUS in curly P. T. Barnum letters.
Mulhollan’s circus was Sizzy’s circus, where long ago she had found refuge from small-town memories, ultra-pious kin-folk, priests, nuns, and people who had to be lived up to. Mulhollan’s circus was Sizzy’s circus, where neither she nor the twins had any history requiring explanation.
“What are we going to do here?” asked Bertran, looking around himself in a mix of awe and amazement, prey to an unfamiliar bubbling feeling he did not recognize as elation.
“You’re going to be in the sideshow,” said his aunt. “You’re going to earn a living, the only way you can, until you grow up and they maybe cut you apart, and then you can do what you want.”
“I don’t think child labor’s legal,” said Nela, without conviction, feeling what Bertran felt and recognizing it no more than he.
“You’re not going to labor,” said Sizzy. “You’re going to stand on a stage, all dressed up. After everybody’s had a look at you, we’ll put a curtain between the two of you, and the women in the audience can take a peek at Nela and the men can take a peek at Bertran. For five dollars extra.”
“Look at me naked?” screamed Nela, shivering pleasurably.
“Naked,” said Sizzy. “Just a peek.”
“She’s got hair on her chest,” said Bertran.
“That’s what Nair is for,” his aunt announced loftily. “And hot wax treatment, and maybe even electrolysis.”
“She doesn’t have much boobs.”
“So she’ll get implants,” Aunt Sizzy said, undismayed. “Look, kids, be practical. Nobody wants the responsibility. Nobody’s ever known what to do with you, including my poor fool of a sister. At least here, there’s some purpose to your life, right? And some enjoyments too, I’ll bet. Marla was my favorite little sister. She wasn’t long on sense—none of Mom’s babies born after she was forty had good sense—but she had a good heart. I owe it to her to see you get some enjoyments. Fun, you know?”
They didn’t know, but they learned. After the initial shock, it turned out to be not bad. Good, in fact. The best thing was that the circus was completely matter-of-fact. After all those years of strain and prayer, circus life was sensible and acceptable. No giggles. No pointed fingers. No labored three-party consultations in the confessional. No arguments about what bathroom they were going to use. Just, “Hi, Berty. Hi, Nela,” from a clown. Just, “You kids going to eat or what! Get over here before I throw it out,” from the cook. Just, “Try on your new costumes before noon so I can get them done before the show tonight,” from Mrs. Mangini. The Manginis were mostly trapeze or horse people, but Mrs. Mangini was too fat to ride or fly, so she did a lot of the circus sewing instead.
The twins had a new double fold-out bed in Aunt Sizzy’s trailer. They had a wire-haired fox terrier named Flip who belonged to them but also did acrobatics in the clown act. With them in the sideshow was a hairy-nosed geek named Ralph, who ate live chickens and was billed as the Alaskan Wolf Boy. They had Sappho and Archimedes Lapin, billed as the smallest man and woman in the world, even though they weren’t nearly the smallest. They had the cooch girls (any female below the age of thirty who wasn’t otherwise occupied) as the opening act, including the girl who doubled as Madame Evanie, the World Famous Snake Charmer. They had the marvelous Timber Head, who could drive nails into his face. They had Countess vampira, with her long, long fangs that not even the dentists in the audience could tell from real because she’d had them done in Los Angeles where dentistry had attained the status of an art form. They had Tiberias, the mind reader, who usually didn’t but sometimes could. And they had Bertran and Nela Zy-Czorsky (which Nela had made
up out of the letters of their own name and pronounced Zee-CHORsky), the Eighth Wonder of the World, the only malefemale Siamese twins in the universe.
Bertran’s costume was midnight-blue, bow tie and tails, with a gleaming white shirt. Nela wore a shimmery pink dress, all sequins and ruffles. They stood side by side on the platform, long enough for people to get restless and start to question the whole thing, then they turned away from each other, just a little, showing the broad pink band of flesh that joined them. Aunt Sizzy would shout, “Is there a doctor or nurse in the audience?”
Sometimes there was. Aunt Sizzy always insisted on seeing identification if anybody claimed to be a doctor or nurse. If there wasn’t one, somebody from the circus would claim to be, come up on the stage, feel the flesh, look where it joined, act astonished. “My God. They really are!”
“Yeah, but maybe they’re both men or both women,” some smartass would inevitably call. If someone didn’t, a shill would. “Yeah, but.”
“For five dollars,” Aunt Sizzy would say, starting into her spiel. She had a chart and a pointer. She explained about chromosomes and how all other Siamese twins were either boys or girls, and how Nela and Bertran were a miracle, a one of a kind. Then she’d pull the curtain, the one with the slit in it to go over where they were joined, and all the women who wanted to pay five dollars would go to one side and all the men would go to the other and look.
It wasn’t bad. Even the peeping wasn’t bad. Aunt Sizzy wouldn’t allow any touching, and it was only women on Nela’s side and men on Bertran’s. Bertran would unzip and unbutton, showing the hair on his chest, the genitals, small, but masculine-looking. Nela would untie, showing her androgynous chest (depilated the night before by Aunt Sizzy) and her own organs, unmistakably nonmale. Then the audience would leave, men asking their wives and girlfriends, “Was she?” Women asking the men, “Was he?” Each assuring the other that he was, she was.
The school authorities caught up with them, of course. Aunt Sizzy, who had been meaning to phony up a birth certificate to make them two years older than they were, had to lay out a bribe plus enough to buy an acceptable curriculum, and they had to study it enough to pass the semi-annual tests, but it was nothing. Nothing! They could pass the tests without half
trying. Whoever laid out that curriculum had never been to parochial school under Sister Jean Luc!
That first year, when they went into winter quarters, Sizzy arranged for Nela to have breast implants. Not very big. Too big, said Aunt Siz, and nobody would believe it. Kind of small ones. Just right for a teenage girl. Nela had electrolysis too, to get rid of the beard and the hair on her chest and to straighten out the line of reddish-blond pubic hair across the bottom of her belly, so it would look more feminine. Aunt Sizzy put them both on a diet, so they wouldn’t have a lot of what she called “unattractive podge.” Bertran dyed his hair dark, all over, to emphasize the difference between him and Nela, who stayed blond. After Nela healed up, she and Berty visited back and forth with the other circuses, the big ones, where there weren’t any freaks who were called freaks, and the little ones like theirs, where there were. They made a lot of friends.
Also, starting in Florida and continuing everywhere they went, they frequented the bargain counters in bookstores, always leaving with an armload of books. In their trailer at night they lay side by side in the double bed, each with a night-light and an eyeshade and a book. Nela read romances and natural history, reveling in love and zoology. Bertran read history and math texts and biographies. Both of them read about religion, fascinated by it, not as a belief but as a subject. Though the matter had never been discussed with them by their parents or the priest or any of the nuns, they both realized that religion had paid no small part in letting them be born as they were. Sometimes they even talked about that, wondering whether, if they’d had the choice, they’d have been born this way at all. Sometimes, when it had been a good day, they thought they would. Other times, despairing, they were sure they wouldn’t. Aunt Sizzy, who overheard one of these conversations, told them everybody felt that way. Some days, she said, everybody wished he or she hadn’t been born or wished he or she could just die and be finished with everything. The smart thing to do was wait and see if a few days didn’t change things. If it didn’t, well, then it was up to people to do what they had to do, and she didn’t believe anybody went to hell for suicide, not as overpopulated as the world was, but, she emphasized, usually a few days was enough to change a point of view.
Sometimes they thought she might be right. Other times, the few days stretched to weeks and they despaired. It was
possible, they told one another, to be so depressed by what they were that they were incapable of doing anything about it even though they wanted to. That’s why they went on, they said, sometimes capable of laughing about it. They went on because they were too depressed to kill themselves.
Sometimes they mitigated depression by holding long involved conversations about Turtledove, how he was doing at school, how he was doing at Little League, whether it was sensible for him to keep up his lessons on the violin.
“So expensive!” said Nela.
“But his teacher says he has genius,” said Bertran. “What would we think of ourselves, years from now, if we denied him his chance at genius.”
Meantime, no matter how they felt, they took dancing lessons from one of the Mangini girls, and learned elocution and comebacks from Matt Mulhollan, owner and ringmaster, and picked up a few sleight-of-hand tricks from one of the clowns. Their act was fine as it was, but as Sizzy said, mere titillation was limited by both prurience and credulity, while entertainment had no boundaries. “If you entertain people well enough, they don’t care you’re a fake,” said Aunt Sizzy. “Most people don’t give a damn about the truth, anyhow.” She mentioned some politicians, including a recent president, as examples. “The world’s biggest phonies, not very bright, but they entertained people, so nobody cared.” The others in the show agreed, helping the twins practice their routines over and over, until the two of them oozed charm at every pore.
It helped that they were bright. No one, not even themselves, had ever doubted that. They turned their minds to the task, realizing their own welfare depended upon it. They worked on their voices, Nela raising hers, Bertran deepening his. They developed a sharp line of patter and a clever way with hecklers. They made the magic tricks sparkle.
“It’s not easy being a power sander,” said Bertran. “Not easy being a polisher.”
“Don’t tell Turtledove,” said Nela. “He’d be so embarrassed if the other children knew his mother was an edger and finisher.”
It was not long before their act began to draw, began to bring people in, began actually to increase attendance. A marked increase, commented Matt Mulhollan to Sizzy, during one of their regular late-evening conferences over a few beers and a little habitual sex. A steady, marked increase.
Sizzy passed this along to the twins. When they began to preen a little, she said, “Now, don’t go feeling important. Sure, you’re a draw. Anything new is a draw. But you’re not the main event. You’re in the sideshow, not under the big top. It doesn’t do to puff yourselves up too much, because you’d just be setting up for a fall. Remember, no matter how classy you think your act is, there’s always something bigger and classier coming along!”
Matt Mulhollan, who was no fool despite having been a little down on his luck recently, plowed most of the increased income back into the business. He bought new costumes. He repaired equipment. He added some acts he’d been unable to afford previously. Almost as an afterthought, he raised Bertran’s and Nela’s salary, and Aunt Sizzy went on doing with it what she’d done from the first: investing it in their names in blue chip stocks with a conservative brokerage firm.
Good fortune continued. The circus began to attract notice. During the twins’ third year, it was featured as one of three notable small circuses in a nationally televised special on educational TV. The twins avoided the TV interviews. They still weren’t of age, and they didn’t want to risk someone from their hometown coming after them, not that they considered it likely. Not long after, Matt Mulhollan called everyone together to make an exciting announcement. Mulhollan’s Marvelous Circus was to tour the European continent during the following year, a kind of exchange program in return for a Czech circus coming to the U.S. and Canada. Also, there was a possibility they might go to China the year after that. If the circus was granted permission to do so, certainly one reason, said Matt, being kind, was the attractive presence, among the more standard fare, of the Eighth Wonder of the World, Bertran and Nela Zy-Czorsky.