Judy Budnitz - Flying Leap

We took our inspiration from the circus, to bring you everything from sequined thongs to tent dresses .

One day my neighbor approaches me and says she has a date the following evening; would I mind baby-sitting her seven-year-old daughter?

Phil appears at my door on the arranged night, dressed in red overalls, scratching scabs. Her name is Phyllis, but she likes to be called Phil. She smells of childhood, of sweet milk and graham crackers. The hand she offers me is sticky. I don’t know how to entertain children, so I’ve arranged for us to go to the circus.

The circus appears not in a tent but in a large indoor theater, which holds in the smells of elephant dung and gunpowder and the sugar-tainted spit of a thousand children.

I buy Phil a T-shirt and cotton candy. It is light and feathery on our lips, and then it turns to sweet nothing on our tongues. We eat it in handfuls until the opening parade, with the elephants and clowns and stilt walkers. The Siamese Twins. The Thin Man. And the Fat Lady.

The Fat Lady reclines on a float drawn by twenty straining horses. She rolls her eyes at us, too languid to wave. Her body is all one large rippling mass, rubbery and inflated. The features are lost in the puffiness of her face. She looks so familiar; she is someone I have seen or been in a nightmare. I take the cotton candy away from Phil and flatten it beneath my shoes. Sticky mess. Phil whines.

Next are the dancing bears, the dogs jumping through hoops, the monkeys riding motorcycles. The lion tamer does his thing in the center ring. He has platinum hair, meaty pectorals, a big whip. When the tigers and lions get too close, he cracks the whip at their noses. The animals have sullen faces and beautiful hair; they are sulky and aloof, like runway models. They drag their paws the whole time. Phil yawns.

Next is the Knife Thrower. He spits on his hands while his gold-spangled assistant straps herself to the round target, which begins to rotate. Her body spins like the hands of a mad clock. She wears a smug, expectant look. The Knife Thrower sweats; he hesitates, staring straight ahead at her bare spinning stomach and the rhinestone pasted to her navel. There is an odd tension between them. He begins flinging the knives, with rapid precision. The knives sink into the target, neatly outlining her arms and legs. The knives land between each finger and toe. Knife handles form a halo around her head.

The bristling target. Her dangerous smile. Scattered applause, oohs and aahs. For the final knife, he blindfolds himself, stretches his arms at the sound of a drumroll, then kisses the blade and lets it fly—straight at her face.

The audience gasps; hands hide eyes. Her body within its metallic outline is electric. The world stands still as the knife screams through the air; her head snaps in a sudden sickening way—and then a fanfare bursts out of the sound system, trumpets and cymbals. The assistant smiles more brightly than before. She has caught the knife in her teeth.

The Knife Thrower turns and bows to the audience. We clap uncertainly. Then the target halts and the assistant steps down. The applause swells; we all rise to our feet. The Knife Thrower we applaud merely for his manual dexterity. The woman we applaud for her courage. She is brave to the point of foolishness.

The Knife Thrower has a dark look. I’m sure that in the deep coilings of his mind is the thought that he would like, just once, to see a knife veer off course. He would like this, but he will never let it happen. Without her, he is nothing, a pizza slicer in tights. The assistant knows his conflict; this is why she smiles and thrusts out her belly-button bull’s-eye.

The assistant now smiles brilliantly at the crowd. I’ve heard she once had teeth of her own, but after a few months of the act they were so broken and jagged that they tore her tongue and frightened small children. So the teeth were pulled out and now she wears false teeth like an old woman. The new teeth are flawless and indestructible; they leave little semicircles of dents on the knife blades.

The drama of the knife-throwing act has left me queasy. I stand up to leave, but Phil begs to stay a bit longer. She wants to see The Lady Who Hangs by Her Hair. I sit down again.

Soon she appears—the Lady. All the little girls in the audience clasp their hands and gaze upward. The Lady wears only heavy makeup and sequins in strategic places. Her hair is knotted on the top of her head and she clips herself to a cable. She leaps from the platform and hangs by her hair; she swings with a tight, strained smile and her eyebrows inching up to her hairline. She twirls high above the floor, then swings to and fro, to and fro, toes pointed, with a dreamy, pendulous motion. Phil is kneeling on her seat, entranced.

There is a terrible accident. The Lady Who Hangs by Her Hair is swinging and then abruptly she drops out of the spotlight. In a sudden flash and crinkle and crumple of sequins she is lying on the ground. Shreds of sawdust and elephant dung cling to her skin. I hear her harsh unrehearsed cry, and then she is whisked away on a stretcher.

A murmur rises from the crowd. Children wailing. Hostile mingled voices. “Ruined the whole show,” mutters a woman behind me. “Great—now the kids will have nightmares,” says another.

Someone says, “It was bound to happen. She had split ends, don’t you know. They say she’d been putting on weight, wasn’t taking care of herself.”

A child’s voice says, “Is she Rapunzel?” And her mother answers, “No, honey. In the Rapunzel story the lady sits in a tower, and her lover climbs up her hair. This lady here, she hangs from her hair her own self.” The child says, “Why did she fall?” And the mother: “That’s what she gets for trying to change the rules like that.”

The lights switch on and I see that Phil has thrown up all over herself. The stuff is pink and smells sickly sweet. She holds her wet shirt away from her chest. Her face is teary-slick, but she twists away from me. “I want my mother,” she says with dignity.

So I take her home.

A few days later I knock on the door and ask about Phil. “Still a little sick,” her mother says, and eyes me suspiciously. She’s wondering what I’ve done to her daughter that’s made her afraid to get out of bed.

“Can I come in and see her?” I ask.

Her mother says, “No, I don’t think so, not right now; she’s very busy watching cartoons.”

She shuts the door in my face.

Aprons for every occasion .

Do you remember: being knee-high, living in a world of pant cuffs, skirt hems, and the undersides of things?

Your mother stands in the kitchen. She cooks for your father: fondue, meringues, shish kebab, chutney. Gefilte fish, lotus, lo mein, ravioli. Tabouli, tortilla, moussaka, succotash and goulash . Your aunt wears high heels and goes out at night. She dances for men: salsa, samba, chacha, meringuee. Lambada, salome, tango, fandango, disco. Jitterbug and hokey-pokey . Your mother holds the bowl tightly against her stomach; she beats and beats with a wooden spoon. Your aunt practices the tricky steps, heels pounding the floor; sweat darkens her dress under her arms and in a long stripe down her back. Your mother’s tools are called savory, relish , and sage ; your aunt’s are rhythm and a roll of her eyes. Your aunt gives you the high-heeled shoes to try on; your mother holds out the spoon. They are hunters: Your aunt’s war paint is the red on her mouth; your mother’s is a dusting of flour. They have the same smell, the smell of desire, the smell of cooking meat. The trap is set: the sprightly meal, the spicy dance. Afterward, your father pats his stomach. A man on the dance floor pats your aunt’s hip. Your mother, your aunt, neither goes to bed alone.