The School of Beauty and Charm (31 page)

I saw myself in one of Tic Toc's distorted mirrors: sweaty red face, hair on end, huge, bulky, hairy body.

Then I looked back at Sunny's pale rat face and screamed. It was a shrill rattle that hurt my own ears, burned my gut, razed my throat. And still, I hollered. Other carnies stepped up, poked their heads through the curtain, moved their mouths, gestured with their arms, and finally left. Only Eva remained on her stool, watching me with the dispassion of a music
teacher. When I was finished, she nodded her head and said, “Now we are ready.”

That night, the Most Beautiful Teenager in America was so beautiful and the Gorilla was so beastly that the rubes gave us a standing ovation. We drew such a crowd that Arthur decided to spend an extra night in Asheville before moving on to Johnson City, Tennessee.

Z
ANE ASKED FOR
my hand in marriage in Johnson City. We were on the chaise volonte, just the two of us, after the show. Earlier, Zane had scored a bag of cocaine, and we'd been doing lines for hours. On the flying chairs, we ditched the razor blade and snorted it through a straw straight from the bag. The painted lady above my head smiled as Tic Toc washed her in green and purple lights. Tic Toc, bribed with his own small bag of toot, played “Fly Me to the Moon,” spinning us around and around the sky. The stars were so bright that my eyes ached. Zane could not stop talking.

“I told you about my friend Herman, right? Herman Lamont. Everybody called him Skip except his dad. Paul Lamont, chief of police, president of Little League. Mr. Lamont came around when my parents died; I was seven. All the sudden, he takes an interest in me. Shows me how to choke a pat. Cuts the meat on my plate. Takes me frog gigging with Skip. Crab boils in his backyard. Every Saturday afternoon, in his basement, he gives
me a glass of bourbon and fucks me. Tells me if I tell anybody, he'll tell Aunt Mary Esther that I've been drinking. On Sunday morning, he picks me up and takes me to mass. He lights one candle for my mom, and one for my dad.” Zane began to cry.

“You were seven?”

“Seven, eight, and nine. Then he stopped coming to the house. Maybe I got too old, or maybe he found somebody else.”

“He doesn't deserve a dick!”

“I don't think they're issued out for good behavior.”

The chaise volonte turned around the starry sky. Suddenly, it all seemed sinister: the purple and green lights, the painted ladies, Sinatra. I wanted to get in a car and find Paul Lamont and kill him.

“Have a cocktail,” said Zane, handing me the bag and straw. “I've upset you.”

“How did your parents die?”

“Car wreck. Drunk probably. Good Catholics at Mardi Gras. Aunt Mary Esther moved in to take care of all five of us. She'd never had any children, and she had no idea what to do, so she just played the piano all day. Played “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “Ain't Misbehaving.”

“Inspirational stuff.”

“Yeah. Whenever she went to the bar, she brought home an accompanist. ‘Children,' she would announce, ‘this is my accompanist.' He might actually sit down beside her on the piano bench for a few minutes; then they'd go to the bedroom to fuck or fight. She beat up several guys.”

“Didn't the neighbors help?”

“I told you about the neighbors. Here, you take the straw. My nose is going to bleed. I can always feel it.” I took the straw and snorted a long cold line. The sky was gorgeous. “The Catholics in Villa Platte let us slide for a while because Aunt Mary Esther was a good Catholic. Whenever they forgot this, she dropped a load in the collection plate. But the Baptists got her.”

“You have to watch out for them.”

“They snuck right up on the old girl. Sent her to a rest home. All the way there, she yelled, ‘I am not tired!' So they put her in a straitjacket. Can't play the piano in a straitjacket. When they took her bourbon away, she died. Want to hear the sad part?”

“No. I want to laugh some more. Let's laugh.”

“The piano went to the Baptist church.”

“Where did you go?”

He shrugged. “Here and there. A roundabout way to you. And who might you be?”

“Same as you.”

“But with breasts.” He pushed his hands under my shirt.

“Warm, round, wonderful breasts. What happened to your Aunt Mary Esther?”

“Didn't have one.”

“Mom, Pop, a closet full of ex-husbands?”

“I had a brother, but I killed him.”

“Shit.”

“It was an accident.”

“Fuck.”

“You would have liked him.” I kissed him slow and deep,
past the cool frost of cocaine to the hot flames he licked, the broken glass, the red wine, the warm wet flesh. I stroked his thigh, hard beneath his worn jeans. Tic Toc turned off the music, and I could hear Zane's breath as I touched the zipper, in and out, between the rapid beating of his heart. The chair lifted; I pushed my hand into his pocket and through the lining felt the stiff rise of his cock.

“Go down,” he said, unbuckling his belt.

“Not here.”

“Here.” When he pressed my mouth against the metal zipper, I felt my nipples tighten into points. As I took his penis into my mouth, I imagined that it was a sword, and I was him, that I could die any minute.

When we came, the car jerked on the rail, and Tic Toc shouted, “I'm turning this thing off! You want me to leave you up there?”

“Marry me,” said Zane. He was crying. “Please be married to me.”

It seemed like a good idea.

A
LL EVENTS FALL
short of their anticipation; my wedding was no exception. The preparations went on longer than expected because on Sunday night, at the scheduled hour for the carousel ride, we were all too drunk to stay on a horse. Arthur bitched and moaned about renting the lot for an extra day, but he'd been the one to open the case of champagne on Sunday morning, and he was secretly pleased to extend the celebration. Beside the fact that Arthur loved a carnie wedding, he considered his odd assortment of employees a family, himself
the father. “How many more of these girls do I have to marry off?” he'd groan as he proudly counted us on his fingers: Eva, Madge, Sunny. He spared no expense.

It was Arthur who designed my wedding gown. “That is a marvelous ensemble for a kootch show,” he told Eva when he saw her design. “File it.” He drew up something elegant and chaste, and then barked directions over Eva's shoulder as she stitched it up on her treadle sewing machine.

“Put it in reverse!” he cried like a backseat driver. “Go left! Not there! There's a ruffle over there! Stop!”

Eva ignored him. With her dark head bent close to the cream silk, she treadled with one foot, held the train on the floor with the other, and kicked Faith away with her third foot. “Felix!” she cried. “Take this cat away before I make a guitar!”

Felix was photographing the scene. He insisted on being the photographer even though he cut off heads in all of his pictures. We all tried to help him tilt the camera, but he was an impossible student; he cursed our mothers, then stomped off in tears. Finally, Arthur declared that headless was the artist's style, and we let him be.

Lollibells and Madge created a cake in the shape of a man and a woman copulating. You couldn't really tell that was what they were doing after the frosting went on, but the thought was there.

Tic Toc repainted all the horses on the merry-go-round. Jungle Jim, who felt guilty about saddling me with the Gorilla Girl suit, tried to throw a bridal shower, but no one would go into his trailer because of the smell. We ate cashews and pillow mints outside, and he brought me my presents, one by one, whenever he felt inclined. There was a big bag of leftover pillow
mints, and a smaller one of cocaine. Wrapped in newspaper, tied with a piece of dirty string, was a gold-plated Tiffany alarm clock with someone else's initials engraved on the back.

“I tole ‘em your name, but they must of got it wrong,” he said bashfully.

“I love it,” I said. ‘I'll change my name.”

“I got more stuff for ya,” he said, “but I got to go work with the kids.” Daisy and Spencer were in training to become flower children. They were to ride on the roof of the car—a souped-up Oldsmobile with huge speakers and a new paint job—which Zane had gone to purchase. Arthur had decided to buy the car from one of his nephews and give it to us for a wedding present.

Sunny had disappeared. Rumor had it that she planned to quit the show and go to culinary school.

“Now you tell me who's gonna pay good money to eat that girl's food,” said Madge as she added the final touches to our cake. “She don't know how to boil an egg.”

“Someone can teach her,” I said, feeling magnanimous. Madge pushed a raisin into the spot where Zane's belly button was supposed be and said nothing.

Zane had gone to get my wedding present and didn't get back in time for the wedding supper, but we all crowded into Madge's trailer and ate anyway: filet mignon wrapped in bacon, twice-baked potatoes topped with melted cheddar cheese and sprinkled with dried parsley, and two spears apiece of canned asparagus. On the side of each plate was a wedge of lemon, which most of us squeezed into our tequila. I ate in Lollibells's smoking jacket so I wouldn't get my dress dirty.

“Now,” he said, when we had finished eating, “come into my trailer and let me do you.”

“No, me,” said Tic Toc, who was drunker than usual and had lost his shyness with women. “Let me do you.”

“Hush y'all dirty minds.” Lollibells brushed a crumb from the collar of my dressing gown. “I am going to dress her hair, apply her cosmetics, and help her into her gown.”

“Then you come right over here and do me,” said Madge, snorting helplessly.

“Do me right . . .” someone began to sing, but we were out the door.

When he wanted to be, Lollibells was an excellent girlfriend. He was frank: “I am not even going to try to curl that stringy hair. We're going up.” He was lavishly supportive: “To die. Look at you. Turn around one more time. Gorgeous. You are
it
.” And he was practical: “Hush. I am putting this bib on you. Don't sass me. I've worked too hard on you to see you wearing that margarita.”

When I was dressed, with a towel clipped to my dress and a fresh drink in my hand, he put on Diana Ross and the Supremes and asked me to dance. I declined. He demonstrated. In the small trailer, he rocked on his heels, twisted his hips, waved his hands. Rhythm coiled through his body. It was as if he couldn't stop moving. “Come on,” he said, pulling me to my feet, swinging his lean hip against mine. “Dance, little sister, dance!” My face burned to the tips of my ears. How could he know what it was to be a Peppers on the dance floor? We were like frogs in danger: dead still. There was no dignity in it, and no escape. You had to try not to try. I began to rock
on my heels, like a child who has to go to the bathroom, and to clap my hands shortly after determining a beat in the music. I didn't know what to do with my face, so I closed my eyes. Lollibells turned off the music.

“Stop laughing.”

“No, it's cute.”

“I can't help if I can't dance. It's not genetically coded. I'm sure there's something you can't do.”

“Don't pout. If you can screw, you can dance, and y'alls trailer be rattling every night. Come here.”

He pulled me close to him and held me tight against his chest and hips as he swayed back and forth.

“One, two,” he was saying as he turned us around the room. “One two, relax goddamnit, one two . . .” I stepped on his foot. I backed us into the bookshelf. I missed the beat, every time.

When Eva walked in, I was standing alone on the floor, trying to clap when he clapped.

“Stop!” she cried, “Stop! In the name of love . . .” and began to swing me around as she danced. When I could get free, I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her shimmy and twirl. She lacked the athletic grace of Lollibells but had her own three-legged rhythm, and her face was ecstatic. That was the worst part of not being able to dance, you saw how much fun people had doing it, how they forgot themselves. I fixed myself another drink and left to find more philosophical company. It would be nice to find the groom.

“Louise!” called Eva, running after me. She was breathing hard and still breaking into shakes and twists from the dance, humming “Love Child” under her breath. Fucking cheerleaders.
“What's the matter, darling? You feel sad?” She adjusted my dress. “Don't be sad when you are so pretty on your wedding night.”

“You can't have a wedding without a groom.”

“Oh him!” She waved her hand as if Zane were a fly.

“That boy always late. He think of this, then he think of that, then he go here, then there, and
vroom
! The time. You know? I bet right now he is buying something very nice for you.”

“I bet he is at a bar.”

“That, too.”

“Funny that Sunny isn't around either.”

“We are not interested in Miss Sunny. She bores us, no? Tonight, we find interest in Louise and Zane, bride and groom.” She smiled brightly and did a half-step turn. “You want to dance with Eva?” I watched her.

I had reached the point of intoxication where I knew the truth. Each time I got drunk, I reached this point, and each time it was the same, but each time I thought it was different. The truth! It hit me like a rock. I had to share it.

“Eva,” I said quietly as I staggered toward her. “Zane is an alcoholic. Everyone in the Arthur Reese Traveling Show is an alcoholic.”

“As we say in Italy, you have discovered water.”

A
T TEN O'CLOCK
that night, I opened a fifth of bourbon, and by midnight, I was drinking straight from the bottle, alone in Zane's trailer. Outside, fireworks lit up the sky. Someone was playing “Here Comes the Bride” on a harmonica, and someone else was singing a Zappa tune. Every once in a while,
Felix would climb up on a stool and try to take my picture through the window.