The Fainting Room (8 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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She couldn’t tell him. Not about the rock, not about anything. She must do something to shore things up however she could.
“Ask her,” she said.
“Ask who?”
She could see in Ray’s eyes that even without knowing she’d thrown the rock, something in her face had made him afraid. She touched his cheek.
“That girl—Ingrid. Ask her to move in.”
5.
 
When Evelyn was a child, everyone in the circus had expected she would follow her parents and older sister, up the ladders to the top of circus tent and out onto the high wire. But the wirewalking gene’s appearance was sporadic: Evelyn’s sister Alice Marie had got the strawberry-blonde hair and the balance; Evelyn had got the carrot color and wobbly feet. Her parents hoped she would grow out of it, but as she grew it was more firmly into clumsy diffidence; by the time she turned nine it was clear she would never be part of the act.
So while the rest of her family did tricks a hundred feet up in the air, Evie sat in the trailer cutting pictures from magazines. She and her sister each kept a scrapbook they called “Dream Life.” The pages of Alice Marie’s Dream Life were filled with promotional photographs of famous high wire acts; her dream was to continue on her trajectory toward them. Evie’s scrapbook resembled a kind of personal decorating file. Some pages were filled with individual pieces of furniture arranged as if the page were a room; others represented the kind of neighborhood she wished she lived in, with cutout pictures of various houses pasted into the book in two lines to form a street along which she added crayon drawings of trees, people, and cars.
MY HOUSE she’d write above the one that was her favorite, an arrow indicating the window of the room that would be hers. It was a measure of the oddity of growing up in a circus that the wirewalking scrapbook held the fantasy more likely to be achieved. The dream of a stationary house, a canopy bed, a backyard swing set—Evie might as well have pasted in castles.
Every picture that she snipped for Dream Life Evie carefully slathered with glue, pressed it down into her scrapbook and held it there until she was sure it would remain fixed for good, something her real life could never do; every two or three days she woke to find the trailer in a new location, having moved in the night while she slept, rocked by wheels that carried her thousands of miles without ever delivering her from the place she did not belong, her home.
 
Now, standing in the spare bedroom that would become Ingrid’s when she arrived this afternoon, Evelyn thought of her old Dream Life scrapbook—this guest room needed some serious Dream Life help. It was the one room in the house that had always been, to her eyes, depressingly furnished: a threadbare quilt lay across an antique iron bed, both of which had belonged to Ray’s grandmother; on the floor was a rug Ray called a Kilim, which he said was very valuable but Evelyn thought looked ratty. When she first moved in, she’d thought she might make this room her own, a sewing room perhaps, decorated with things she’d picked out herself. But not wanting to do anything that might offend Ray and perhaps even make him change his mind about marrying her, she hadn’t said anything, and over time the idea had faded.
Ingrid’s arrival was the perfect excuse to change the furnishings. Now that the decision had been made and Ingrid was definitely coming, Evelyn was feeling better. Even if they hadn’t exactly hit it off at first meeting, maybe having Ingrid around would be more like what she was used to from growing up in Jones and Wallace, where you had other people around whether you liked them or not, and you sat around with them and shot the breeze or shared a Fresca and didn’t think too much about it.
At the Burlington Mall, Evelyn chose a cheerful yellow chenille for Ingrid’s bedspread and yellow plaid curtains for the windows. She bought a new bedside lamp with a yellow shade to replace the old brass thing Ray had in there, and an oval yellow throw rug, which would give her a way to move the ratty Kilim to the attic. If Ray asked where it was, she could tell him she’d put it away to protect it in case Ingrid spilled something. She even found yellow plastic clothes hangers.
When Evelyn had hung the curtains, plugged in the new lamp, remade the bed and changed the rug, she went out of the room and came back in again to admire the effect.
But something was wrong. It was not that the yellows were all slightly different colors, or that the brightness of the bedspread made the iron bed frame look dingy. No, it was a problem with the room in relation to the rest of the house—her furnishings didn’t belong. They were like the big-eyed ceramic cat she had bought on a whim at Woolworth’s last fall and set on the nightstand in their bedroom. It had stayed there all of one day, until Ray asked, “Where’d that come from?” Though his tone was mostly one of curiosity, she had suddenly seen through his eyes how tacky it was, how very trailer, and after he’d left for work, she’d gone out to the shed and thrown it into the aluminum garbage can where it smashed to hollow pieces.
Well, it was too late to do anything about the guest room now. Evelyn forced herself to take the clothes hangers out of their shopping bag and hang them in the closet. At least those looked all right. Then she noticed what was on the closet’s top shelf—Joe’s tattoo kit. She’d tossed the black case there when she first moved in, intending to deal with it later, and hadn’t.
Jesus, Evie Lynne
. All she needed was for Ingrid to discover Joe’s tattoo kit. She knew she should just get rid of it, even knew from experience exactly what she could get for it, having seen Joe put it in and out of hock a dozen times when he needed money for poker. But the problem, with both the tattoo kit and with the other things in the house that reminded her of Joe—his army tags, a tiny pistol with an inlaid wood grip, the box of ashes that had once been his body—the problem was that getting rid of these things entailed thinking about them again, picking them up and feeling them become part of you again while you remembered how it all went down.
Evelyn went into the fainting room and shoved the tattoo kit beneath a cardboard box Ray had labeled
checks/statements 1978–1981
. There was a lot of junk in that closet already—old files, old coats, shoeboxes full of junk. One more little black case wouldn’t matter.
The box of ashes was in the back of her bedroom closet with her winter clothes. It was terrible to keep it there, she knew. She had looked in at the contents just once, right after she got them, and the sight of the coarse gray powder interspersed with small chunks of bone had made her hold on to the edge of the Airstream’s Fridgette to keep from falling. Not with grief, though she had cried plenty. It was the suddenness and completeness of the transformation that made her feel the world was coming apart: This gritty dust had been her husband.
Cause of Death:
Broken Neck
. Evelyn had stared at the death certificate, amazed that the incident could be reduced to just two words, ten little scrawly letters holding hands along a tightrope of pre-printed ink. Joe had fallen from a height of three feet, down the Airstream’s four aluminum steps. Broken Neck did not begin to cover it—for cause of death, you might as well write,
Stopped Being Alive
.
“You can deliver the ashes yourself,” the circus manager had said kindly, as if this were a mission that would ease her heart. He bought her a bus ticket to Boston, where Joe was from, and gave her a hundred dollars for expenses. Then, just a few hours after the cremation was finished, the entire circus left town: the Jones and Wallace Big Top was due in Greensboro the day after and it was bad luck to miss a jump.
After the grueling bus trip, after figuring out how to get from the bus station to Winthrop, the home of Joe’s parents, after wandering around for an hour in the October rain and finally finding the address, the woman who answered the door informed Evelyn without opening the screen that no Cullens had been there for years.
“I knew ’em though. Terrible family, the parents always drunk and fighting in the yard. The boys was all wild. Wha’dja wanna see ’em for, Red?”
So that was that. She was eight hundred miles away from the only life she had ever known with nothing but a cheap suitcase full of cheap clothes and a box full of cremated husband.
Exhausted from death and travel, Evelyn dropped onto the hotel bed that was foreign in its size, its silence, and cried. She’d spent her entire twenty-nine years in the Jones and Wallace Big Top and Side Show as dead weight, a talentless hanger-on. The closest she’d ever gotten to the status of performer was to stand beside Joe in a spangled bikini, tattoos oiled up to catch the spotlight, and pass him his props—umbrellas, dull knives, swords. And now there was not even that to go back to. She found the Gideons’ Bible in the nightstand and let the translucent pages fall open.
My beloved spake and said unto me, Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth—
Evelyn threw the book on the floor: it was rainy October and the ground was brown and barren; her former beloved was bone and ash and no one called her name. There were no flowers anywhere. She cried herself to sleep.
Only in the morning, having slept all night in a structure without wheels attached to it, did it occur to her that she had at last done the thing she had for so long dreamed of doing.
By accident, without premeditation, she, Evelyn, had left the circus.
She would not turn around and go back.
That afternoon she found work doing manicures, the same job her mother had done during the winters when the circus didn’t travel. The Hollywood House of Beauty, with its cracked linoleum and acetone fumes, sat squeezed between a convenience store and a prostitutes’ hotel. For a week she went between the salon and the room she’d rented a few blocks away, with its stained sheets and smelly halls. After eight days of this she was almost ready to go back to Jones and Wallace after all; she was worn out with pretending she knew she would be all right, pretending she had anything that looked like a future, pretending she was not a circus freak. But then, walking home from work on Friday afternoon, she saw the poster, plastered to a telephone pole. An elephant draped in an American flag, a tiger leaping through a ring of fire, and at the top, the famous typeface:
RINGLING BROTHERS & BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH
And in smaller letters at the bottom: FINAL WEEK
She could not afford it; she could barely pay her rent. But there it was. Not just any circus, but the epitome of all circuses. And she had never seen it.
Thinking she might at least talk to some of the clowns after the show, and hating herself for being so desperate, she bought the least expensive ticket there was for the Saturday matinee and went to Boston Garden in the rain.
Laaaaaaaadies and Gennnnntlemennnnn!
And there she met Ray Shepard.
 
At a circus? And by himself? Ray?
He had gone under protest. Driving into Boston on a rainy weekend to watch elephants parade around was not the last thing in the world he wanted to be doing, but it was low on his list. He would never have been there—never have met Evelyn—were it not for his boss, George Dunlap, and the caprice of a client that Dunlap was trying to win.
In Ray’s first decade at Dunlap and Scott, the firm had been known for contextual architecture—designing buildings that looked as if they’d always been there, as Ray put it, as opposed to buildings that appeared to have been plunked down from an alien universe. But after Scott died, things began to change: first a commission for a Stalin-era style bank in the center of an old mill town, then a convention center whose smoked glass walls and boxy construction reminded Ray of a dirty fish tank.
Ray had so far managed to avoid these projects, working instead on zoning-sensitive renovations in the North End or on Beacon Hill. At the firm he was considered brilliant but impractical: an architect with a striking gift for design that was undermined by flagrant disregard for the realities of twentieth-century budgets. He had advanced perhaps not as much as he should have after fourteen years, due to his inability to finish a job without cost overruns, but this hadn’t bothered him, much: his over-budget designs, when allowed to be built, had won preservation awards and once gotten a photo spread in the
Boston Globe Magazine
; to Ray, this more than made up for his otherwise mediocre standing in the office. It also helped him avoid projects that offended his aesthetic sensibilities. But then Dunlap made him project manager of the Westbrook College sports arena.
Ray had protested. “Every one of Westbrook’s buildings is a windowless concrete blob,” he told his boss. “This isn’t the kind of work we do.”
“Yet we are, in fact, doing it. Thus there is a flaw in your reasoning.”
“But why put me on this? I specialize in period restoration, not the nadir of Brutalism.”
“You specialize in—but are not limited to—period restoration
at the firm of Dunlap and Scott
. I’m your boss, Ray. Remember me? George Dunlap.” Dunlap offered his hand; kept it there so long Ray was finally compelled to shake it. Dunlap’s hand was as cool as his expression.
“That’s all settled then,” Dunlap said, as if they’d been shaking on a deal. “Now listen, Ray. You’ve met Fergus Keeley, the Westbrook alum whose donation is funding this arena. Keeley played for the Celtics all of one season back in 1958, and he has some rather specific ideas about the structure that will bear his name. We’re going to humor him. I’m having Joanne get the two of you tickets for a Celtics game at Boston Garden. Let him tell you what he wants built.”

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