You’re Not Alone

The circus wouldn’t have liked anyone Sid married. He could date, yes, he fell in love sometimes, but not showily, nothing alarming, and not for long. While many of his employees were married and whole families formed and grew and shifted in his circus across the years, Sid himself had all their lives to stand at the edge of; he would not attend to them in the same way as a married man. He would soon turn fifty. He looked not much younger than his age. Lana came to him.

The circus didn’t want to know about Lana. Sid wanted to learn her. She loved plants and color, she loved music, tea, and a well-organized shelf of books. She had come to Sid to get help for her friend, and he knew right away that help wasn’t something Lana often sought. She understood business. She understood numbers. She was forceful and honest, and otherwise quiet. Her parents were old and had not been born in the States. Their house seemed to float in the middle of a garden, a small building like an afterthought and an island. They told him they couldn’t do without Lana. But Sid couldn’t move the circus again until she married him.

Unmarried, Sid rarely locked his trailer door. When Lana came to stay, he thought he had better not change that. Lana locked it. Sid unlocked. By the fourth week, she believed that her husband’s employees were trying, out of spite, to force them into celibacy. She asked Sid whether, possibly, they were being monitored. He said, “Of course not.” He lifted her, nuzzled her neck. The door creaked open.

Lana bought a length of blue gingham and sewed a curtain for their bed. Sid installed a curtain rod. In theory, they could close the bed off from everything else. They could hide there. The separation was visual and mostly symbolic, and Sid wished she would let it work better for her.

Behind the curtain, she listened for intrusion. They could be in the final moments of passion, he would hear and feel nothing but Lana, and then she’d pause, push away, call out, “Leave. Now. Whoever you are. Go away.”

She’d wait until the poor soul had crept out before she’d turn her attention back to Sid. Often upon emerging they’d find on the table the beginnings of a note. One or two sentences, leaving off even mid-word, always unsigned—but Sid knew the handwriting. He’d kiss Lana, dress, kiss her again, and head out to take care of the latest problem.

She was angry with him, but she would not argue behind their curtain. “I want to go somewhere else,” she said. “I’m never alone.”

“Yes, that’s right. You’re not alone. It’s a circus, Lana.”

“I’m begging. It won’t take long. Ten minutes. Could you find somewhere?”

So they took his truck and drove out. They were in Iowa. He drove for half an hour, and when they looked back, they could see the circus across the fields. He thought she was waiting until they couldn’t spot it. He said, “I’m pulling in at the next driveway. I promise you, they can’t hear a word.”

She covered his hand with hers. “Send me home. I need to go home to my parents. I can’t stand it. I don’t love you anymore. Your people tried to drive the love right out of me, and they did it. I had my suspicions, I thought maybe they were trying to make you hate me, and so I took precautionary measures, but they’re evil that way. Selfish. They made me hate you instead.”

He hadn’t bothered with the driveway. The steering wheel shook under his hands. “It’s an adjustment.”

“Slow down.”

He lifted his foot from the gas. “Thank you. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.”

“Did you hear me say I don’t love you anymore?”

“Yes. I also heard that you hate me. If you could wait it out, Lana. They will get used to you, and when they do, they won’t bother you anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“You should hate me back. It would be a relief. Do you?”

“No.”

“Not yet.”

“Not at all. What if I sold the circus?”

They drove another half hour. All the bugs that hit the windshield were little packets of clear blood and a burst of yellow like pollen. He told himself, It’s an adjustment, it’s an adjustment.

Lana said, “God damn.” Two distinct words.

He made a second turn, hoping she wouldn’t notice they were near to completing the square that would bring them back to the circus. The sun hovered above the horizon. The light was no longer in his eyes. He turned on the headlights.

It became dark. The tires kept up their one note against the road.

Lana said, “I’m afraid of the countryside in the dark. I never knew it before right this minute.”

He found her hand. She said “God damn” again.

She said, “Plus, I don’t think you’ll ever use any of my ideas.”

“I will. Later.” He turned back on the road that would take them to the circus. He could always drive past. He said, “Do you still hate me?”

“It hasn’t even been an hour.”

“I don’t mean to pressure you.” They passed a farmhouse lawn where kids were catching fireflies. Lightning bugs, they’d called them. Maybe one of these children would look out his bedroom window tonight, watch the circus lights, and wonder what they were doing.

Lana said, “Okay, take me back, Sid. To the God damn circus.”

He had already started to slow. “I’ll drive you to the train tomorrow if you want. You could see how you felt when you got away a while.”

“I’ll stay. They’d be too happy. You know, if I left.”

“I want you to like it here.”

“I know.”

“We can go for rides more often, to give you a break.”

“Yes, this was great fun, wasn’t it?”

And he was struck with terror, knowing someday he’d feel nostalgia for this night.

He wished that his old work director, Garrity, could be there to explain what he needed to do about Lana. Saying she hated him had perked her up a few days. Then she was back to full-time hating the circus. He supposed Garrity would say, “The girl needs hard work.” But Lana had that already.

Lana washed their laundry in buckets and hung it on a line run from the corner of their trailer to a stake in the ground. She read books while sunning and while cleaning. She tended her plants, sewed pillows and window curtains, knitted for him even in summer. She made special meals, though, for the sake of morale, they most often ate in the cook house. She made doughnuts, which the circus liked. They would queue up and bow their heads after they took their pick. She played cards, but never for money. When they traveled through the desert, she cried and cried, but mostly behind the bed’s curtain so that the circus wouldn’t see her grief.

He noticed how every bone in her body was perfectly formed, which made her look delicate, though she was strong. She endured.

Then two years had passed. She did more of the circus’s cooking. She drank coffee instead of tea and made it as strong as possible for whoever wanted. She had taken over the children’s studies, except for the circus parts. She and Sid went for a drive. She said, “I think, maybe, I’m being digested.”

He waited.

“By which I mean, this is how I understand the circus. It’s one big, slow-moving animal. Say it’s an elephant. A bull, as you people would put it.”

Sid said, “There’s an old saying, ‘When you live with an elephant, everything is an elephant.’ I don’t know that they’re slow moving in the wild.”

“They roam, I seem to remember. In gangs. Families. But this elephant I’m talking about is the circus itself. And an elephant is perfect because the circus has the thickest damn skin I’ve ever seen. Thick and baggy. So the circus has a very slow digestive process. You sit around in its gut for, in my case, two years.”

“And if you’re a part of the elephant to begin with, you don’t have to visit the gut.”

“Exactly. If you’re born in the circus, you are the gut. The gut of the bull. But forget that a second. I’m telling a story. All I could do while in the gut was wait. While, in fact, I was being broken down. Smaller and smaller, into tiny discrete pieces unrecognizable even to a husband.”

“You’re still the same to me.”

“Thank you. I know how you mean that.”

“Do you want to stop for a hamburger?”

“Yes, I do. Anyhow, the happy ending. I finally feel myself being absorbed into the walls of the gut.”

He wondered if she was having an affair.

She said, “Of course, I don’t know what parts of me will become part of the elephant, and what will be shit out.”

“I thought you were so refined when I met you.”

She patted his hand. “Surprise.”

He pulled in at the drive-through. When they had their meal, he asked, “Are you sleeping with someone?”

“Other than you? No.”

There was nothing better than eating a hamburger and french fries in a motorized vehicle with the love of your life. Sid suppressed the thought. “I could still sell the circus.”

“Ask me again next year. What I like about it at this moment is that since they all set out to hate me, I have a margin of freedom.”

He didn’t ask if she still hated him. It probably came and went. But her hatred would never give him freedom because he couldn’t hate her, and he minded knowing that he was hated more than the hatred itself.

She didn’t care anymore if someone came in while they were behind the curtain. She’d get quiet. He’d told her she would stop hearing the generator after a few weeks, and it seemed she had. She clung to him. Waiting, they’d fall into a stare-down, daring each other not to laugh as the visitor went about the trailer picking up books and magazines, sighing, coughing, crunching on a cookie from the plateful that Lana left out, finally taking pencil to paper. The longer the note, the more emphatic the pencil’s scratching, the closer they were to hilarity. Sometimes they did laugh, and then, most often, the visitor would say, “Hey, folks,” or sign with an audible flourish, and go.