The Circus by L. Guyette Hamell

Two dwarfs in green wigs and white suspenders work the crowd on a mild March night here in the land of smoky dreams. Karen and I sit at the table sipping our too-sweet drinks.  Stuffed grape leaves languish on a shared plate between us. We watch as the young crowd passes by, moving in tangled groups, bodies traversing this busy tourist street. They are loud: voices raised to youth and drink. And I can see their very essence by the way they react to these two short men on the street. Both dwarfs have painted their faces red; one of them smokes. They are as garish as Christmas, as novel as trinkets in a souvenir shop. They slap five, laugh at the cruel jokes, mug with the drunken, flushed faces of undergraduates who bend down and smile into the camera next to the 3-foot clowns. And I feel the curl of anger at the back of my throat, pressing against my tongue. Years from now, some of these kids will swallow the bitter pill of memory. Some will remember this night, will remember their inhumanity, and shrink from it, will taste its acidity on a sleepless night. And so the curl of anger is not for them—but for the two painted clowns who toddle around this busy street hiding behind their shortness, their green wigs, their fear. Tell me who you really are, I want to say to them. I know you are not this…

Yet who am I to demand that? As I hide behind my Olay Regenerist eye cream, behind the gloss of Chianti lipstick, an underwire bra… On the street beyond our table are the girls who own this night, in their half-clothes, their haughty skin, their unawakened eyes. Their bodies are the polished engines of a car show, sleek aerodynamic limbs moving on a festive night. The boys watch, circling, aching to drive one of these revved-up machines. Karen and I pick at the dehydrated grape leaves, watch quietly from the corner where women like us belong. And I lift a napkin to my lips to wipe away the pretense, staining the heavy cloth. I do not want to be a Jean Rhys character, with her half empty Pernod, her blood-red lipstick bleeding into the crevices around her lips. Pretending, like the wigged midgets, that life is not cruel.

Later Karen and I lift our sandaled feet into the Treasure Trove, sand from the nearby beach crunching beneath our heels. There is a two-piece band—guitar and drums—and the singer has rings around his eyes the way a tree reveals its age. He wears a baseball cap backwards on his head, long shorts, Roman-style sandals. This tells me not to expect too much, and they do not disappoint. At the bar are men and women who have arrived at the same place as Karen and me. She and I look at each other and smile, no longer misfits on a tourist street. I put my purse on the bar, and the man beside me offers a stool which he shakes a bit and settles on my naked toe, his movements clumsy, his speech graceless, blundering. I hope you’re not driving, Karen says by way of a greeting, and the man laughs and tries to shake his head, and has to hold on to the smooth, curved edge of the bar. He works on ships, he manages to say through a thick tongue.

On closer inspection, everyone here tonight is butter-fingered and lumbering—in their baldness, their rounded bellies, their euphoria when the discordant band strikes up a familiar song. The grizzled man on the other side of Karen whoops at every song, pumps two knarled fists in the air, and looks at us with bleary eyes to dance. She cocks one eyebrow at me, and we both laugh.

At the end of the bar are two lithe blonds, their long hair shaken out over pinched shoulders and angled backs. Like Broadway footlights, the sequins on their too-tight jeans illuminate rounded globes as they shimmy to the raucous music. And when they turn around, breasts choked into a cramped theatre, their faces look like mine, like Karen’s. They dance together, two older women on display tonight, and the unsteady men thrum heavily around them. One of the blondes takes a quiet sip from her water bottle, and Karen says, She has had her time with alcohol. And we imagine her earlier life, wonder about our own—two tousled women on bar stools with sand between our toes.

Then it’s time to go, and just as I am shouldering my heavy purse, I notice, tucked into a corner of the bar, two carved wooden images. A Sambo head with ink black skin and a row of teeth like piano keys; beside him, the head of an ape, with two flared nostrils—upon which someone has tossed a fisherman’s hat… I motion to the bartender, nod to the two wooden images. A piercing sun and the bite of Jim Beam have rippled his skin; his long hair pulled back into a pony-tail. What’s this? I say, and he shrugs his shoulders, impatient—and looks behind me to another rickety man, who waves his money, who wants the memory of youth scooped into a glass and chilled over ice. And I am thrust into this circus, into this unknowable place, on a mild night in March, as the guitar player croaks into the mic, the chords from his Fender guitar feeding back through his pawn shop amp—and the sequined blondes quiver around the dance floor…

~Linda Guyette Hamell, MFA, Director of Academic Support