When she was five, they told her it was like a circus and she believed them. Since then, a hospital bed felt more like a royal balcony from which to view the show.
You had your freaks: the nurses with too many breasts, women of plastic nails and plastic hair, plastic lips molded into a grin. Hardly any more inviting than a bearded lady. You had your doctors who managed to achieve the impossible: fortune tellers who told you your future in less than the fraction of a second. And everybody else seemed to dance and spin around you. The IV drip-drops did their little flip dance in a plastic bottle, a whole world in a grain of fluid. A veritable orchestra of beeps and honks synched itself up with the steady beat of her little excited heart, and she could see the conductor somewhere in a corner, flapping his hands like a crazy crow.
And when they told her she’d be coming back, each time to a new act, they made sure to hang different pictures on the wall and change up the colors. They would switch the positions of her bed and tubes and angle the chairs and table so the room was a jungle of edges they softened with toys and balloons. The thing about balloons was they always popped. She loved holding them between her fingers like a ring-master, and sticking a pin or a pencil through their smelly thin skull.
“Angela,” her mother’s voice broke her reverie, “we have something we should tell you.”
Angela realized she was surrounded by a little choir of mother, father, and doctor, a sort of trinity in these hospital shrines. The wardrobe of her mother’s dress certainly got duller throughout the years, and her father grew a gruff beard the way a popcorn seller might look. He had grown dim with a jolly belly; she had grown drab like a dusty amusement park.
“I’m a big girl now, guys. Almost eight. You could talk to me like a grown-up,” Angela interjected. But she pretty much stopped listening after her emphatic display of maturity; after that, there was no point. Instead, she noticed the way her mother’s small old hoop earrings swung like gymnast’s rings every time she shook and buried her head in her father’s shoulder. She thought that his heaving belly was like the big dome where the circus set up, a stuffed balloon in which you played and roamed. She figured there was probably a whole monkey performance going on in her dad’s stomach, so she tugged at her thin gown to see if her own belly was the same. A smaller circus, she thought. And the thick ropes tying it all in place were the wires and snakes coiling over her tummy to a spot in her chest.
“Do you understand, Angel?” someone asked her. She looked up from her bare bones, wide-eyed.
“Uh-huh,” she said. And by the time their little performance was over, she was heavily into the scene on TV where the clowns grab somebody from the audience and take them down to the pit. If only she could be so lucky.
She felt like maybe this time was it, they let her stay with the toys and dolls, fancy grey machines like elephants that blew potions into your mouth and nose, painted faces with red eyes and noses that came to visit. Was she part of it now? Was she a performer?
She knew her family was sad to see her go, but the circus folk are wanderers; they roam from town to village and show people tricks and sing them songs and give them strange, foreign things they’ve never seen before. The orchestra grew louder and louder every day. And how electrifying the lights were above her head! They made patterns down halls and up ceilings, they crawled along the walls announcing candy and soda for sale. They showed her where to bat her lashes when her head rolled to a side and her eyes swung back like the answer in a magic eightball.
This must be the trick where the drumroll shakes the ground and you wait, mouth gaping for the final act. The performers all rush onto the stage and erupt in a spasm of their specialties. Man with the hands that shoot electricity! Snake-charmer with his plastic pipe! Women in exotic masks playing darts with their eyes, shaking their hips, shaking her chest, shaking!
Great fireworks in shapes like stars and circles! Everyone was clapping and the drums were thunder and somewhere it started to rain in little taps on the tarp. The symphony got as loud as it’s ever been and the instruments throbbed together. The last big bang of the fireworks! The instruments boomed! The conductor stood frozen on his step in the corner of the room.
We are waiting for something. The final performance. Everybody’s hushed in anticipation. You could hear the seconds tick. And her heart did one last little leap that echoed in the giant dome. A round woman held the last note of her opera trill till the gloves came off.
They all packed up their trunks and trinkets in piles. The sleeping elephants followed behind their down-trodden masters, tugged along. Scraps of paper and plastic littered the ground like candy-apple confetti. At the end, you realize the space where the circus settles is just a wasteland. You leave behind your trash and move on.
There follows a procession of gods and monsters, pink-streaked faces in black, friends and family with ticket stubs in their hands, as if to say we have been there. We have seen the acts of the circus and the star of the show was Angela. And at night, you think you hear the caravan coming through, with the loud drunk laughter of girls and parrots and popped balloons. You hope at least they kept the room the same.
