“What is this?” he asked.
In its way, it might have been worse than seeing my father looming before me, holding the book in his hand. This was Mary, acting like a slut. My mother’s voice echoed in my head: a tramp, she’d said, a black-haired Jezebel. I had never felt so betrayed, in all my life.
“You’re a slut!” I screamed, my teeth mashing together. “How could you?” My insides were teeming, boiling. I had no idea what would come out of me next, what I would do. “A goddamned whore!”
Tears nipped at my eyes, but I fought them back, translated them into rage and heartbreak.
“Tessa!” Mary cried. “Tessa, stop!” Her face looked crushed with worry. “Tessa, come here!”
She reached for me, but I backed away. “Don’t come near me!” I turned then and ran: up the stairs, through the basement door, the stacks, the back door. I heard her calling out for me, but I trampled straight through the herb garden, into the grass. Past the lumberyard, through the town square, and onto the road that led to home. The air was like fingers swatting my face. The moon was like an assault. I thought of Sister Carrie in her factory, longed for the world to be as flat and dull as that, a place where I would never have to feel anything at all.
I cut through one of the farms near my house and then slowed, slumped in the grass. I felt completely unmoored. I could not go back to the library, and I could not go back home, where I knew my father was waiting with his leather belt. I could feel him peering into the dark night, and, irrationally, crouched down in the grass so he wouldn’t see me. I knew that the sooner I got back, the less of a beating I’d get, but the dread seeped into every pore of my body. Where was there to go? Every minute I was gone made his anger worse, and yet I prayed that with each new second a new possibility would emerge. Could I leave? Go somewhere new? Run off to the circus? Sobs wracked my body, and then finally I went numb, resigned myself to my fate. There was no other place for me but home.
I walked back to Riley Farm and pushed through the front door. The house was silent. I tiptoed through the hallway, peered into the living room. My mother sat on the couch, working on the bright orange sweater she was knitting for Geraldine, who sat on the floor playing dominoes. The house was too quiet.
Then I heard my father behind me. “Let’s go, girl,” he said. I looked back at my mother, but she just stared at the orange yarn, moving the needles up and down.
I woke the next morning aching all over. My arms were tender and bruised. I tried lying on my back and then winced and sat up. The sun glared in. The night before I had thought I would never return to Mercy Library, but now I yearned for it so badly I was almost in tears. I was late for work already. I could not stay in that room, that house, another minute. I didn’t even wash, just pulled on a skirt and top. My heart thudded as I descended the stairs, but one glance out the back window proved that my father, mother, sister, and brothers were already in the fields.
The walk was slow going; every step hurt, moved my body in a dozen directions it didn’t want to go. A weight was pressing down on me, too, a deep sadness I had never experienced before. As I walked along the main road, past one of the neighboring farms, I looked up and saw Mary, bending back branches, ducking, and walking from behind a line of trees and into the road about a half mile down. She was wearing a bright red-and-white checked dress with a full skirt that fell to her knees. Her black hair tumbled past her shoulders. When she saw me, she waved and started running. I thought I was seeing things. I blinked, shook my head. Mary never came to this part of town, and would be way too busy opening the library by herself.
“Tessa!” I heard. I looked up and there she was, in front of me. “I was worried half to death.” She knelt down and threw her arms around me, and her scent of cinnamon and cloves made me start crying. Her arms pressed into my wounds. She leapt back, stared at me, frantic. “I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to come after you, but I didn’t want to get you into trouble. What happened?” She seemed to see me then, my wounds and bruises. Her face registered everything at once. I felt like she could see right through me.
“My father found a book under my mattress,” I said.
“Come,” she said gently, taking my hand. “Let’s go.”
I nodded, numb, wiping my face. “I’m sorry, Mary,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean those things.”
“I know, sweet child,” she said, squeezing my hand. “And if you had, that would be okay and we could talk. You know that, right? Nothing you could say could make us stop being friends.”
“Okay,” I said. “But I didn’t mean them.” The image of Mary on the bed flashed through my mind, pulling at my heart, but I blinked it away. “Really.”
She nodded. “Anything,” she said. “Don’t forget that. I’m your friend, Tessa. I love you. Okay? Even if I have other friends, it’s not the same. You and I are friends for life.”
Tears fell down my face, and I just let them. I clutched Mary’s hand, didn’t even care when we passed through the town square and people saw me crying. When we got to the library I saw that Mary had set a sign out in front, saying the library was closed until the next day. I looked at her, confused. “Come,” she said. She led me to the back of the library, to the kitchen. She pointed to the stool. “Sit.”
I watched dully as she opened the ivory box that sat on the table and took out two small pouches. Her face was serious, focused. She shook them up and measured about a teaspoon of powder from each one into her palm, then set a pot of water to boiling. She took a small vial from the box and poured oil into the powders in her palm. I smelled lavender, some type of flower scent, as she rubbed the powder through the oil. “Now just sit still,” she said. And then carefully, gently, she pulled off my top. I just sat there as she leaned in and rubbed the oil on the tender part of my right arm, which became warm and then burning hot in an instant. “Shhh,” she said, when I started to squirm. She walked around and spread the oil into my back, and then down my other arm.
Next, she lifted my skirt and rubbed the oil into my left thigh, where a long bruise trailed to my knee, and into my calves. She pulled my skirt back down, turned to the pot of hot water, and sprinkled in handfuls of herbs from two of the jars on the shelf above, ones I did not recognize. A few minutes later she drained the herbs through a strainer and wrapped them in a cloth that she pressed down over my right arm, where she had rubbed in the oil. The arm went from hot to cool immediately, and suddenly I felt no pain at all. She repeated the process all over, on my back and legs. Finally, she leaned down and patted the cloth over my face, my closed eyelids, my forehead and chin. She sat back, gently pulled my top back over my head. “There,” she said, kissing my forehead. “Now I’m going to show you something. Come on.”
I slipped off the stool and was astonished at how different I felt. My skin tingled and buzzed; almost all the pain was gone. I pulled up my sleeve and glanced down at the bruise on my right arm, saw that it had already faded from purple to pale pink. “How did you do that?” I asked. Suddenly I felt more alive, back in the world.
“Herbs,” she said, smiling. “Magic.”
“But I thought you said they didn’t work.”
“I said that the herbs have a mind of their own,” she said. “That’s all.” She winked mysteriously, then grabbed my hand and pulled me deeper into the library, all the way to the back of the stacks where there was extra space. I saw a long ladder propped against the shelves, a stool, and a small box filled with hardware. It slowly dawned on me what was happening.
“The trapeze,” I breathed. A shimmer of happiness rippled through me.
Mary smiled, climbed up the ladder, and fastened the rigging to a ceiling beam. “Watch what I’m doing,” she said. “You may have to do it yourself.” At her command, I passed the chains up to her and watched her throw them over the beam, fastening the trapeze ropes to the shackles. Two pieces of rope hung down and the bar stretched between them, about eight feet from the floor. The final effect was so cl
ean, perfect: a perfect shape, a perfect confluence of lines cutting through the air.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked, turning to her. “Are you sure you want to show me?” Guilt came over me; I felt so bad for pressuring her, for calling her names. I felt bad about everything.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ll teach you to swing on the trapeze in a few days, when you’re done healing. Okay? But for now I wanted you to see it, feel the bar. Get comfortable with it.”
I nodded eagerly, stretched up to touch it.
“Here,” Mary said, pulling up the stool. “Stand on this.”
I climbed up on the stool and then stood, reaching out my arms. Mary’s hand pressed on my back to balance me.
I closed my palms around the bar, felt the cold metal of it against my skin. It was thinner than the bar in the window at home, and smoother, easier to grasp. I looked at Mary and smiled.
“Can I do it now?” I asked.
“You’re not ready,” she said. “You need to heal.”
“I’m okay, though. I don’t feel anything. Just once?”
She sighed, pretending to be exasperated. “Well, then, you’ll need to chalk up your hands, and you might as well change into a leotard so I can fix it up for you.” She made a face as I grabbed her hands and then jumped from the stool to the floor.
“Here,” she said, reaching into a small box on the floor, next to the rigging. “Put on this leotard. I’ll put one on, too.” I took the leotard she handed me and, with my back turned, slipped out of my clothes and into it. It hung from my body like a sheet. Once Mary was changed, she pinned mine up on the sides.
“Now chalk up your hands,” she said, gesturing to the canister she’d set out. “Dip your hands in and rub the chalk onto your palms. Like this.”
I pressed my hands in and was surprised by the cool powderiness, the clean smell.
“Now climb back up and grab the bar,” she said.
I nodded, swallowing, and climbed onto the stool. Then I looked up at the bar and sprang. I wrapped my hands around it, tried to get a firm grip.
“How do you feel?” Mary asked.
“Good.”
“Maybe you can swing a little, and then that’s enough for today.”
“Can I sit on it?” I asked, tilting my face to her. I loved the feel of air on all sides of me; I had never experienced anything quite like it. When I’d hung from the window, I was so close I could kiss the glass. Dangling from a tree, I’d had to curl my wrists around the branches, making it difficult to move as freely as I could now.
But on the trapeze, my body was like water. I could move in any direction, it seemed.
“Swing back and forth,” Mary said, “lifting yourself higher each time.” Her hands were on my back, guiding me. “Like this. Roll your body toward the bar.”
I strained my muscles and pulled myself—awkwardly at first, but on my third try I found myself clinging to the ropes on either side of me, looking out at the same shelves and books I had just viewed from the ground. Incredible. Even sitting there, unmoving, I felt almost transformed.
“I’m impressed,” she said. “How did you get to be so strong?”
I blushed. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that will make everything a whole lot easier, little girl. Now what do you say we get ourselves some lunch and pick this up again a few days from now?”
Giddy and happy, we changed out of our leotards, ran into the garden, and selected the plumpest tomatoes and nicest-looking greens. Mary tossed them together inside while I stood on the stool and cut thick slices of pumpernickel bread and cheese she’d bought at market.
When the food was ready we grabbed our plates and went down to the river. We spread our meal out on the grass. Lying there, my body still warm from the exertion, I felt almost beautiful for the first time in my life. I looked down at my arm and couldn’t even see the bruises anymore.
“Tessa,” Mary said, putting down her plate, suddenly serious, “promise you will never take a book home again.”
“I promise,” I said, biting into the sumptuous bread, the tangy cheese.
“I mean it,” she said. “I can’t stand to see you this way, with these bruises, these wounds. It reminds me of what I went through a long time ago, and you, you deserve a thousand times better than that. I wish I could protect you from him, but I can’t.”
Her voice was shaking, and her face flushed red. I looked at her. I wanted to ask questions, but wanted more to forget about every bad thing in the world, and for everything to come down to just this: this bread, this cheese, this river, and this one, perfect day. I felt tears in my eyes and nodded, bringing up my wrist to wipe my face.
“I was thinking, too,” she continued, more calmly. “Why don’t you tell your parents that I want you to stay past dinner to help organize the old papers and records? And that I’ll up your pay a dollar every week? We can read and practice the trapeze.”
“Yes,” I said, unable to look at her now. “I would like that.”
We spent the rest of the day relaxing by the river, weeding the herb garden, and drinking tea over thick books with gold edges. Going home was almost unbearable, but I forced one foot in front of the other, through the square and the fields.
After that everything pretty much went back to normal: the library was open, I worked a little later each day with my parents’ approval, and Mary and I stood side by side stamping the cards and handing the books over to Oakley’s farmers and lovelorn men and women. My body was clean and unbruised. The books Mary had picked out for me all lay safely in a stack under the library’s front desk.
At the same time, everything had changed. Mary treated me differently, less like a child. I became someone she could talk to about adult things—about William, about sex, about the bearded, mustached man who visited her at night, when she couldn’t see him, and didn’t want to. I learned some of the secrets of her heart then, but I know now that I should have gone deeper, and seen all that had happened before.
CHAPTER SIX
I took to the trapeze as if it were a part of my body I hadn’t known existed. Swinging in space, the bookshelves on either side of me, my family didn’t matter anymore. The kids in the square, the endless fields in Oakley that stretched and stretched past the horizon—none of it mattered. It was like reading Sister Carrie but better, because this time it was all me.
“Now swing,” Mary said. “Kick out your legs. Get comfortable up there.”
With each moment passing, I felt more present in the world, more sure. I reached up my hands on either side, bent my head back and looked at the ceiling beams.
“I am comfortable,” I said, as the air ruffled against my hair and cheeks.
“The first trick,” she said, “is the knee hang. You’re going to separate your knees, grab on to the bar, and then drop. You’ll end up hanging from your knees, your hands pressed together between them.”
I could already see it. In one instant I did the move; before she could even reach me I let my body fall and my legs grasp the bar. I swung back and forth, hanging there, the world turned upside down. I let go with my hands, closed my eyes.
Mary gasped and rushed over. When she heard me laughing, her body relaxed.
“That’s too dangerous!” she said. “You could hurt yourself.”
Her disapproval couldn’t dull the bliss I felt as I swung my arms back to the bar. Mary reached out for me and grabbed my hands, flipping me up so that I was standing on the floor again.
I jumped around, already longing to be back in the air.
“Now hold the bar and fall under it,” Mary said. “Like that. Press your legs up to it, straight across, like doing a split.”
I did, and looked down at her surprised, open expression. “That’s exactly right,” she said.
My body moved of its own accord; my ankles slipped into the sides, where the bar met the rope. I started swinging that way, my hands still on the bar.
“The ankle hang,”
she said quietly. She walked over, reached up, and placed her hands over mine. “Now hold with your ankles,” she said. “Hold tight.”
I did, and gently, she told me to unclasp my hands. “I’ve got you,” she whispered. I let go then and let my body fall back. She stood next to me and under me, making sure I wouldn’t fall. I stretched my body backward and waved my arms out.
“Like this?”
She hunched under me, her hands stretching toward me, hovering just under my skin. “How does that feel?”
“Nice,” I said. I couldn’t articulate the way my limbs felt loose and soft, my body completely without barriers, fluid as water. I don’t know that I’d ever been happier than I was right then.
“You are so lucky you have that body, Tessa,” she said, as I rocked back and forth. “It took me weeks to do that. You’re a natural.”
It was so easy: I learned the gazelle, where the left leg is straight, the right leg bent up to the front of the right rope, the rest of the body hanging underneath. I learned the toe hang and single toe hang, where you drop from the bar from just one foot.
“What about you?” I asked one afternoon. “Don’t you want to take up the trapeze again?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Tessa,” she said.
“Just once?” I asked. “I want to see!”
“After watching you, I think I never should have bothered at all!” she said. “I was all wrong for it, you know. All wrong for lots of things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, and for a moment it seemed like her hair had gotten curlier and her eyes more blue. Like something was pressing down on her. Then she looked up at me and smiled. To my surprise, she bent down and dipped her hands in the chalk.
“Okay,” she said, her face open and suddenly radiant. “What the hell?” And with one quick movement she hurled herself to the bar and flipped up on it until she was sitting, swinging back and forth, her legs crossed beneath her and hands gripping the ropes. Her face glowed as she began swinging faster, back and forth, and then pulled herself up to her feet in one graceful movement. In the next second she lifted her feet from the bar and threw them over her head, curving her body into a scythe. She held the position for several seconds, grasping the ropes, swinging back and forth, then slipped back down until her feet rested on the bar. She was ecstatic, whooping and laughing.