big enough now, my pretty,
to swallow me whole.
After that long
still
day
just as long as a rope that you can’t quite
reach—
I found myself standing
outside the caravan,
that single lung,
listening to the open-door
silence turning to one
set of breaths
when I went
inside.
Mama gone
for the night with Vera,
meeting old lovers.
I couldn’t bear it,
to sleep
alone that night.
Ivory had a million schoolgirls,
new transplants like her
in a new garden
and I was one Rosie.
I still looked like me, and
in the next show, I’d still be
The Rose of the Circus Rose,
perfect as my posters, but—
it was my roots—
my invisible roots, half gone—
I couldn’t bear—
But there was Bear.
Bear in her cage
still play-acting at being
what everyone thought she was.
They thought the cage was locked,
thought Bear couldn’t release
the latch with her clever nose.
Bear knows.
I crossed the quiet ground
to the cage
and slipped inside,
not bothering with doors:
a fifteen-year-old wouldn’t have fit
but I could, just.
The bars caressed my bones
and I was through.
Bear rose
through the shadows,
slow moving from sleep,
hot as a hearth,
throat-rumbling deep.
Big enough for a girl of fourteen
to hide in. Only just. And besides—
two sets of breath, as soon as I entered.
Tandem breaths.
Tandem hearts, and if one
was ten times my size,
that was familiar, too.
I’d always thought it wouldn’t take much
to build a heart bigger than mine.
And the open night air all around us:
the same air Ivory had breathed all day.
Some wind might carry it between us,
the same breath,
a sisterly kiss.
The same breath
she took as she read a book
might pass my lips now, might lift
us through the coming show.
Bear here, and Ivory’s air.
I felt myself
blossom and breathe.
Bear lifted one
paw, still half
sleeping, and I fit
myself to earth again,
so tired, I welcomed the idea
of hibernation.
Bear’s breath, so long
it matched to every three of mine,
deep as an ocean shell,
deep as a cavern echo
far underground
where the roots hang down.
3
Ivory
My time at the Lampton Girls’ School of Engineering was the happiest I’d ever spent, and the hardest. I’d felt such guilt, leaving for that year. I ended every letter I sent Rosie with an apology. When we were small, I used to tell her, lying quietly in the dark, that I’d never leave her as long as I lived. And while she’d released me from that promise long ago, while she’d encouraged me to go, I still knew I had broken my vow.
It hurt me almost past bearing.
Guilt over leaving Mama and Rosie clung to me every day, and it came back twice as strong if I forgot them in an hour of rapt studying or an evening of raucous dormitory laughter. I knew tuition was expensive, and I wasn’t a scholarship girl; Mama had told me only that she’d handle it, but I couldn’t imagine the sacrifices she must have been making to send me to school.
I wrote long letters to Mama and Rosie every week—and though it made me feel a little silly, I always wrote a line to Bear as well, making sure to tell him what I was up to. And I sent my greetings to the rest of the troupe, of course. I was sure Mama read my letters to the group, and even though that made me feel strange, I couldn’t quite tell her not to.
Rosie, though, I trusted to keep our letters to herself. So it was in these that I wrote to Bear and that I shared anything that wasn’t wonderfully positive; I didn’t want Mama to think I was having any trouble at all.
I wasn’t having trouble, after all, not really. In some ways, the school wasn’t so different from the circus; everyone bonded quickly, though we were all different ages and from far-flung places. I had found friends easily, girls named Dimity, Rachida, Constance, Felicity, Faith—names I stored carefully on the tidy shelves of my heart. The school was just small enough that we could feel like a group, like a tribe; smaller than the circus, and quieter and more orderly, more studious. There were girls as young as twelve, but many were older than I, and plenty of grown-up women came to Lampton’s as day students to take classes in building or repairing the machines that made their lives run more smoothly. In many ways school suited me better. But the little troubles, the experiments or the quizzes I failed, the arguments that all teenagers get into now and then and that sometimes hurt more than I wanted to admit . . . those I told to Rosie, not to Mama.
I even had my own bed all to myself. I’d never, ever had that before.
Mama used to keep Rosie and me in the same bassinet, and after we got too big, the three of us slept on the rug on the floor of our caravan together. Mama kept buying props for the circus and upping the troupe’s wages, but she refused to buy a bed for herself. She asked us if we wanted them plenty of times, but we had never known anything else, and the rugs and blankets on the floor were more than soft enough for our pudgy children’s limbs.
I’d see Mama stretch and wince waking up after a night on the floor with us, though, a problem that got worse as time went by. She tried a hammock made from an old curtain, but gave it up after one night, saying it made her back worse, not better.
So I constructed a plan. I knew what I wanted to do for Mama, and I spent several nights plotting it out, half of another wheedling the stagehands for leftover timber, and a week or two building in secret, in the few spare moments any of us had.
I presented Mama with her foldaway bed on the night of her fortieth birthday, when Rosie and I were going on nine. Rosie, who of course had been in on the plan with me, had collected all the softest, smallest feathers from discarded costuming, and saved up to buy cotton batting to stuff the rest of a mattress that I sewed from faded, but still strong, tent canvas.
When we gave her the bed, she gathered us both in her arms and wept into our hair.
Within a month, her back had improved enough that she could do all her routines again.
But here I go, looping back and back into the past, one memory reminding me of another and another. Schools, beds, Bear, Rosie, Mama . . .