Puella

[I don’t think this story was a first draft, but I also don’t think that it was totally finished, because there are some grammatical inconsistencies throughout. Just a head’s up: the typos were in the original. Once again, this is a long story, so if you’d prefer to print it out to read, here’s a link to the Google Doc.]

Puella my brothers call me, showing off the Latin they claim to despise, pronouncing the dead words as if they were an unpleasant odor. What is so funny about that? I know, after all, that I am a girl, that I will grow up to be like our mother, a widow, fragile, soft of voice, and a conscientious teacher to the students who come to our house for piano lessons. But will I grow up to be beautiful and talented, protected against coarseness and triviality by her aesthetic sensibilities?

Or am I more like my bumptious and boisterous brothers Robert and Henry? It is common wisdom that a girl who kisses her elbow will turn into a boy, and I have tried that trick through many long afternoons, but I am careful not to let my mother know of my attempted defection. In my memory I see my mother seated by the radio listening to the opera. I am almost nine years old, and she is teaching me to hemstitch a square of lawn material when Grandfather appears wearing his second-best white linen suit and the stiff straw hat which I learn many years later to call “a boater.” He is vain of his trim appearance and never fails to take a daily “constitutional.” His walking stick is always with him. He wears hightop, laced-up shoes that give good support to his rheumatic ankles. When the long laces get into a tangle, he pays me a nickel for each knot I untie.

My mother’s slippers are made for tapping lightly while she counts for her pupils, “One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and…”

We have not owned a car in my memory although my brothers still speak as if it is one of the dearly-beloved departed. Grandfather asks my mother why she is not getting me ready to go to the circus. He is a practical man, newly-retired from a successful business, not at all a fun-loving person. His rule of thumb, like my mother’s, is that entertainment should be elevating; and his idea that I should all [sic] go to the circus seems strange and unlike him.

I can feel my mother’s reluctance to let me go, although my brothers have already set off with her permission, teasing me as they leave, “Puella, puella.” Eventually they will become lawyers and defenders of women, but for now they pretend to loathe girls and delight in teasing me. “Cooties, cooties,” they sing out, “You’ve got cooties,” until I run to my mother in tears.

We have had carnivals come to our town in the past, but they set up in the cotton lot in the main part of town, across from the watchful eye of the town police. I can remember vaguely being taken to one of those fly-by-night carnivals and being lifted onto a great black carousel horse and being given the reins to hold while Grandfather stood beside me with his hand resting on the horse’s rump. I have no clear recollection of that experience except for the sound of the calliope which spins into my consciousness sometimes when Robert or Henry grab me [sic] when we play Sling the Stature in our front yard on those summer evenings when even the sternest parent agrees that it is too hot for children to go to bed. Something in the way my mother looks at Grandfather makes me guess that she is accusing him of perverse curiosity, that it is not chiefly a sense of duty he feels towards a girl who has no father to escort her to the circus. She says that circus people are no better than gypsies, and he admits that he wants to see for himself these strangers who have raised their tents in a vacant field on the edge of our town, adjacent to his woods.

He is not half as eager as I am. All week I have passed the posters of Punch and Judy, lion tamers and clowns, and most astounding of all the acrobatic Valery family—Mother, Father, and three daughters. I have imagined myself as one of the agile daughters, dressed in sequins and plumes, at the very top of their pyramid. I have thought of nothing all week except the wonderful Valery family; but when my mother’s Saturday pupils send word that they cannot come for their lessons, I tell her that I will listen to the opera with her and learn the hemstitch. Since our father died, she has made me her companion. “My shadow,” she calls me. “What would I do without you?” But today she is indoors, I reason, and she doesn’t need her shadow.

Grandfather is asking me again to go with no expectation of being refused just as he might hand down a particularly fine pear from a branch that I am not tall enough to reach. How rude it would be to refuse. He bends towards me with a smile. I am his only granddaughter. He is the source of the nickels I carefully hoard in my trinket drawer. I am his ticket to the circus.

“What is the use of it?” my mother says crossly; but Grandfather says I will learn something more important than hemstitching. There is a mulish, impatient tone to his voice. He says that girls must make their own way as well as boys, that he will not always be around and that my brothers aren’t worth “a hill of beans.”

I know for a fact that he adores my brothers, and I see that he will say anything to get his way.

“Nonsense,” my mother says, setting aside her embroidery to get me ready. She combs my hair, which is straight as a stick and cut in a neat Dutch bob; for, as she says, what else can be done with it?

“Be careful,” she says, kissing me goodbye. “You’re not as strong as those worthless boys.”

“It will give you a chance to enjoy a little solitude,” Grandfather says now that he has bullied her. “I’ll take care of your baby.”

I hold his hand and try not to think about what has passed between them. For a moment I imagine myself running back, burying my face in my mother’s lap and insisting that I will stay with her, but I cannot bear the thought of my brothers at the supper table telling about the circus. They always begin their stories, “Before you were old enough to remember…” and I want to kick them under the table but my legs are not long enough.

Curls were not the possession of my brothers that I coveted. What I longed for was their fearlessness, agility, and audacity, their memories of life before our father had left us by dying. I could not even remember when we had a father in the house and a car in the garage. Instead we have a grandfather to worry over us and in the garage bales of cotton waiting until the price suits him to sell.

Though neither of them ever says that I am the cause of our having no car, there is something in their tone of voice that suggests I am the reason. When I think about it, I know that I could not have been traded in for one, but the hints are there. They speak as if all the excitement of life has taken place before I can remember. I yearn to be a part of their adventures, and I envy with all my heart their true memories of our father. When I look at snapshots of myself as a baby in his arms, I am convinced that there was such a time; but there is no memory of his love that I can bring into my present life. When my brothers speak of trips in Father’s car, I can remember nothing. Now the garage is stuffed with Grandfather’s bales of cotton and has lost all scent of father’s car, just as his dress suit and beaver hat, hanging in my mother’s chifferobe, have lost the scent of his person.

Grandfather walks straight into the woods, holding back a blackberry runner from the lower garden, pushing through what appears to be a solid mass of brambles. “This is the way I used to bring the cows when I wasn’t much older than you are. We hadn’t let it go back to the woods then.”

“Agricola,” my brothers whisper when Grandfather harks back to his life as a farm boy. But I like to hear him talk about how hard he worked on the farm, how he rode a pony to school.

Past the heavy undergrowth, the walking becomes easier and he lets go my hand. We are in a pine woods and the heavy layer of pinestraw has choked out all vegetation. It is slippery and soft. A thin stream runs through with spongy grey moss growing on its banks. Grandfather walks with purpose and an alertness to each turn. Suddenly he stops and rests his foot on an iron stake no more than a foot above ground. “See here, this is where my land stops. I wanted to be sure I could still find it.” He takes a strip of red cloth from his pocket and ties it to the stake. I am amazed that he led us straight to the marker, that he was thinking all along about something more than the circus. “Remember this,” he says. “I want you to remember where this stake is.”

In a while we come to a thickening of the stream. A fallen tree has made a natural bridge. I hope that he will carry me across, but he says, “I’ve seen you hopscotch on one leg so I know you can walk a log.” He holds his hand out and encourages me. I am glad that my mother has sent me off in sneakers.

Now we are on another path leading to an open field, spread with sawdust and thick with everyone in town milling about with the circus people, clowns mixing with the crowd blowing balloons and handing them out to children, announcing the show that is about to start in the big top. “Set the whole thing up in the night,” Mr. Edwards, the sheriff says, coming over to stand by Grandfather. “Worked like fury stringing up all those ropes.”

“Quite a turnout,” Grandfather says.

“What do you think about all this?” Mr. Coppedge, the postmaster, says to Grandfather, who nods to acknowledge the remark, but does not commit himself.

“Don’t miss the ferris wheel, little missy,” Mr. Bingham, the fire chief says. “Your brothers were the first to get on.”

Grandfather turns sharply, “Not up to mischief, I hope?”

“Just being boys,” Mr. Bingham says.

Grandfather smiles and leads me to sit with his cronies on the front row of seats. I can see my brothers on the top row, pushing and shoving, pretending to fall, stuffing handfuls of popcorn in their mouths.

I am sitting next to Mr. McQuague, the School Superintendent. He pats my knee and hands me a box of Cracker Jacks. “There’s a prize in there for you,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say and Grandfather throws up his hand in salute.

I can hardly believe that Mr. McQuague, who can make the teachers shake in their boots and for whom we decorate our walls, clean out our desks, and perform our best recitations, is here beside me and has waited for me to come along in order to give me Cracker Jacks.

I am too excited to be hungry, but I want to know what the prize is. I open the box and try stuffing my mouth full, but the delicious sweetness sticks to my molars. Grandfather hands me an orange drink and I gulp it down hoping to eat more of the Cracker Jacks. Finally I see a tiny corner of the prize and slip it into my pocket, not ready yet to savor the unknown.

I want to steep myself in the circus, observe the Valery family, and learn why the circus is more useful than hemstitching.

The circus is swirling all around us—clowns padding about in enormous shoes with flopping soles, squirting each other with trick sunflowers, riding bicycles backwards, blowing horns and grimacing. They tease the audience like a troop of brothers while men in green uniforms prod wild animals into position.

At the top of the center tent a beautiful lady is standing on a small platform in a glittering costume, methodically pulling at the ropes, holding down the swinging bar with her toes, stretching her calves in the same exercise my mother performs each morning, standing by the window, counting quickly with each inhalation. I feel a twinge of disloyalty and wonder if my mother is listening to the opera or if she has gone somewhere without me.

The parade begins and the clowns are joined by bareback riders, elephants, lions, tigers, and leopards pacing their cages, snarling at the crowd. The ring-master flicks his whip against high boots and bows to the applause.

There is no comparing this applause to the gentle clapping I hear at my mother’s spring music recitals, the polite tribute to girls in organdy dresses and the temporary transformation of boys into pianists. This applause is a sudden thunderstorm, a deluge, deafening and wild. People who come to our back door to deliver a load of wood or sell a basket of peaches are seated on the same row with Grandfather and me. He seems well acquainted with all of them although none of them sends their children to my mother for piano lessons.

At last the act that I am waiting for comes on—the Valery family. First the mother and father go through their act—swinging and twirling in the air, all rhythm and grace—the mother the beautiful angel I saw testing the ropes, the father the prince beside her. When they climb down and bow to the crowd they are joined by their daughters, one looking no older than myself, both dressed like their mother in sparkling garments with tiny tiaras set atop piles of curly blonde hair, their finely wrought necks and upper chests exposed. I feel my Peter Pan collar choking me, the elastic in my bloomers biting into my thighs. Did I ever dare imagine myself a member of their troupe?

The crowd bursts into applause as they build a pyramid, mother and father supporting the weight of the girls, catching them and sending them running back again after their smiling bows. The mother throws kisses to the audience and the father spins around, accepting the applause for his family. I turn to see if my brothers are watching these remarkable girls, but they have disappeared. How I would like to know the girl so close to my own age, a sister to talk to and confide in.

Grandfather turns to me and shakes his head, “It’s no life for a girl.”

I turn back to the ring and see two of the sisters with their arms and legs intertwined to form a single unit, flipping over and over as the music beats faster and faster. Suddenly my adored one stops, grimaces and frowns, while her sister, left upside-down, strains not to show alarm. Flexing her arms rapidly (the same exercise my mother does each morning to the keep the muscles of the upper arm firm) the girl tries to begin the flip again but cannot muster the strength to go on. Her sister disengages herself quickly and the Mother and Father move swiftly to hide the faltering girl. She leans against the tent pole, her hand held to her forehead.

I wonder if she is having such a headache as my mother complains of when she lies down on Sunday afternoons, lightly covered in her big double bed, listening to the Philharmonic Orchestra. The strange Northern music floats onto the front porch where Grandfather is reading the Sunday paper, the notes thinning and thickening like his cigar smoke, the melody interrupted as he forgets that I am behind him in the swing and stands to urinate in the bushes that grow up to the porch edge. This immodest male behavior sounds pleasantly like rain falling from the roof edge onto the bed of drain pebbles. I imagine how furious my mother would be, how embarrassed if some neighbor should come calling at that moment, how annoyed that he will not bestir himself to go inside to the bathroom. It is his house we live in; he will always do as he pleases.

“She’ll get a beating for that,” Mr. McQuague shouts to Grandfather.

“No life for a girl!” Grandfather shouts back.

“How do you know?” I cry out, but they are absorbed by the animal acts, discarding the whole subject as if it were an inferior grade of cotton. I want to run out into the ring and comfort the poor puella. I cannot see anything interesting about the animal acts. I am repulsed by the sight of a terrier dancing on his hind legs, his strained alertness, a ruffle attached to disguise his sex. Years later I read Chekhov’s stories about animal troupes and remember this terrier.

At last it is over and Grandfather pulls me along with him towards the exit before I can more than catch a quick glimpse of Robert and Henry, hanging by their fingertips for a long moment, then dropping lightly to the ground to duck under the tent flaps and escape to their next pleasure long before the rest of us can find our way to the exit, mashed against a crowd of friends and acquaintances.

We are moved along to the Punch and Judy show, the free entertainment advertised on the posters. Mr. Punch himself, a gnarled, dwarfed old fellow slips out from the curtained stand and looks straight at me. I hold my breath until he ducks under the stage and the puppets begin to scream at one another again. The crowd is pouring through the exit, no one listening except children like myself, dragging along, holding back, unwilling to believe that the circus is over.

Grandfather is telling Mr. Edwards that two street lights are burned out near our house. He lets go of my hand to take a cigar, and I fall against the rope that holds the crowd in line, the taut, cleverly-tied rope that keeps the tent from falling and enveloping us all. Mr. Punch steps out from his curtain again and bows in all directions. I shut my eyes so he cannot catch me staring at his ugliness and strain against the rope, burning my hands in my haste to reach Grandfather.

He is still talking to Mr. Edwards about affairs of the town as if they had left the circus and met outside the courthouse. I imagine that Mr. Punch will grab me and pull me under his curtain and Grandfather will have no idea what has happened to me.

A huge clown with a horrible painted mouth leans over me and presses a wooden puzzle into my hand. “Try this and see if you can do it,” he says. “No,” I cry out in panic. It is a small wooden square of interlocking pieces. I have never had anything given to me in my whole life except dolls, doll furniture, doll clothes, doll buggies, and doll ironing boards. I am sure he has not meant to give me the puzzle.

“Send the card in,” he calls out, moving through the crowd quickly, passing the puzzles to every child in sight as if he were ridding himself of hot potatoes.

I look at the puzzle and see that there is no card attached. I have never been given anything by a complete stranger in my whole life.

“Come on, Sister,” Grandfather says. “Ready for the Merry-Go-Round?” he says.

“No,” I say, looking up and seeing my brothers on the Ferris Wheel. I can’t bear the idea that Grandfather wants to stand beside me with his hand on the horse’s rump while I move up and down and round and round. Even five-year-olds are buckled on and left to ride by themselves.

The ferris wheel stops and my brothers come towards us, pulling out their empty pocket linings.

“Take your sister for a turn,” Grandfather says. “I’ll stand for the lot of you.”

“Does she want to go?” they say as if they had thought themselves of inviting me.

I nod yes, knowing that I am not sure, but determined that this opportunity must be taken advantage of. I want my brothers to take me with them, to make me the companion of their pleasure; I am tired of being Miss Goody-Two Shoes. Although I have seen the anguish in the twirling girl’s eyes when her performance failed, I want to whirl through space. No more hovering on the edges of life with the babes of the Merry-Go-Round. I ask Grandfather to hold my puzzle and he slips it into his pocket without asking where it came from.

The operator boosts me onto the seat and locks the crossbar. He smells horribly of sweat. One eye is strange. “Glass,” the boys say. “He can take it out.”

Already I feel slightly sick to my stomach. Grandfather has turned his back on the ferris wheel and has moved over to watch the young men at the shooting gallery. Even if I called out that I’d made a mistake, he would not hear me.

Robert says, “You can’t get off once it’s started.”

The first revolution takes my breath away and I forget everything except holding on for dear life. There is nothing in my life I can compare it to. Henry grabs my arm and says, “You can see the church steeple when we go over the top and if you look to the right you can see the cedar tree outside Mother’s bedroom.” I look as quickly as I can, but there is no time to get a fix on anything. The world whirls and blurs.

As we swoop down the boys call out to the operator, “Stop us at the top”; and he winks with his good eye. When we reach the exact middle of the turn, the wheel stops. Directly below someone is getting out. It seems to take forever for them to swing out the bar and step onto the platform. The gondola begins to rock and I see that my brothers are throwing themselves back and forth and shouting at the top of their lungs, “When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.” I think of the stumbling girl, humiliated but still alive. My hands are frozen to the bar. They rock until there is nothing but space below us. When my life no longer seems worth living, the wheel begins to move again. Sever more revolutions and I jump onto the platform and scramble away before the operator can touch me.

“How did Sissy like it?” Grandfather asked.

“She liked it,” Robert says. “We got twelve turns around and he stopped us on top.”

“You’re good customers,” Grandfather said, smiling at their shrewdness, seeing his own business sense coming out.

My watery legs gradually stiffen and my churning stomach slows down as I listen to Robert and Henry talking him into paying their way at the shooting gallery. They lean on the counter coolly and shoot down the moving lions and tigers as if they had no intention of pushing me off the precipice, of robbing me of my sanity.

“Be home before dark,” Grandfather says to my brothers. “Don’t worry your mother.”

“Had enough?” he says to me. “Let’s start home.”

I am ready to break and run across the field away from the whole blaring freakiness, but I take his hand and feel in my pocket for the Cracker Jack prize.

When we are on the path into the woods, he says, “Let’s stop and get the sawdust out of our shoes. You can wade in the branch if you want.” He puts down his walking stick and my wooden puzzle and leans back against a tree trunk and closes his eyes.

I slip off my sneakers and my bloomers and throw them up on the bank, twist my dress into a knot and ease myself into the water. I think how far away the circus seems although I can still hear the roaring of lions and the grinding music of the rides. I wish that I had begged for cotton candy. It is over forever, my first circus.

Minnows dart about in schools and water bugs skim on the quiet surface. A crayfish advances and I stand up quickly.

Looking around for Grandfather, I see on the far side of the tree where he has fallen asleep, the humpback dwarf and the Valery girl who collapsed during her act. I can hardly believe the talented girl (anyone could have an occasional failure) would walk in the woods with Mr. Punch.

“They’ll skin us alive if we don’t get back,” he is saying and the girl runs nimbly ahead of him across the log. They are so close I can see that he is not a dwarf at all, only a small and quite young person. His hump has been removed although he is still wearing his green brocade waistcoat and his hook of a nose is now small and beautiful. The girl is wearing faded slacks and her hair is no more curly than my own.

I slip my bloomers over my wet legs and decide that now I will open my Cracker Jack prize, but Grandfather stirs and yawns and says we must hurry before the sun goes down. “It gets dark early in the woods. We don’t want the little foxes to get you.”

He knows that I don’t believe there are little foxes in the woods because my brothers would not be allowed the run of the woods if there were any particle of danger, but he can’t resist this old “bogey man” story.

After supper when my brothers have told at long last a story in which I am included, and I can see that my mother has not suffered from spending an afternoon without me, I retreat to the front porch swing and take the Cracker Jack prize from my pocket.

Inside a small opaque envelope, there is a tiny, red cellophane clown. In addition there is a tiny piece of paper with directions. I read that I will be able to tell my personality type when I place the clown flat on my palm and wait for thirty seconds. I watch as the thin cellophane begins to warm and curl, toes first, then the tip of the clown’s hat. I read the directions again and it is revealed to me that my personality type is “Passionate.”

It is a word my mother uses to describe the relationship between Frederick Chopin and George Sand so I know that to be passionate will bring difficulty into the lives of those who are ruled by their feelings, but it is not long after this day of the circus that she gives me a new piece of music to learn and points to the words “With feeling.”

I want to tell her about the girl who faltered and recovered to walk in the woods with her sweetheart, but I fear that my voice will tremble and I will be asked questions I cannot answer.

For a long time I sit in the swing and hold the tiny clown in my warm palm. Grandfather comes out to join me, and we wait for the evening to cool. His cigar is the only light because the street lamps have burned out and the few cars that might pass our house have long ago been driven to the circus’ evening performance.

It is only after Grandfather dies and we move to Raleigh where my mother can teach serious piano students and my brothers and I can attend schools that will prepare us for college that the first visible signs will come to me that I am marked for life. Femina I learn to call myself.

[Undated story by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]