Elizabeth McCracken - Niagara Falls All Over Again

But my father knew, better than I did. He wanted to save me from a life of restlessness. Traveling on foot in the Iowa snow was the earliest story he told about himself, back when he was fresh off the boat from Lithuania. “It was so cold,” he would say when we were small, “I dreamed of sleeping in a cow. Must be warm inside a cow. But the snow, it turned out, was a good thing, because in one bad blizzard, I was stranded for a week at a farm with a schoolteacher, and she taught me English. I might not have learned otherwise.”

In a week? We didn’t believe it.

“Isn’t this English I’m speaking?” he asked.

I don’t know who that schoolteacher was, young or old, beautiful, plain, kind, or merely bored. Was she unmarried, looking to make over a young man who came up the walk, feet frozen but still clanging his pots as if to prove their worth— Look, lady, fine pots, good pots ? Was she married but lonely, like a wife in a dirty joke? Was she simply a woman who always needed a student? What did my father think, the next morning, when they opened the door and were met by a wall of snow?

Men who travel dream, it’s unavoidable. I don’t know what my father dreamed of then besides bedding down in a cow. He was so far away from home that even in fields where the snow had blown away into drifts, he could not drop to his knees to the frozen ground, lumpy like the underside of a familiar calloused foot, and know that he touched something that eventually touched people he loved.

My mother believed in curses, my father once told me. She believed in a vindictive God, a vicious practical joker, an eavesdropper who killed children. I don’t know what she would have made of Hattie’s death.

But my father believed that God was good. He saw before I did that God makes bargains, and he believed that my presence in the store was part of a tragic, already sealed bargain. He had his son. He had five fine daughters. And he knew why Hattie had gone up on the roof: God had put her there, to deliver me. God knew that it was necessary, and so He whispered in Hattie’s ear.

My father loved and missed Hattie. He said so. He wept for her in his office off the stockroom; he prayed for her at B’nai Jeshurun. He would not have bargained her life away, he would not have considered it for a moment. God makes his own bargains. God is a businessman, and God loves those in His store, and God does not give things away. You may go from one end of this world to the other, from the plains by the Nemen River in Lithuania to the plains by the Raccoon River in America: there are prices for everything. You do not live without paying terrible, terrible prices for the flimsiest of pleasures, the smallest rewards. So your bargain with God is arranged by God, and afterward you can only walk away, and look at what you have closed in your fist, and use that as best you can.

I was fired from the melodrama when the middle-aged lady who played my disappointed mother fell in love with an out-of-work actor who wanted my role. “He’s too fat,” she said, “he’s too old, but love is blind, eh?” It surely is, I told her. Then I worked for three weeks as a straight man for a trained seal named Boris — its owner had wrenched his back and needed a sub — and I tossed chopped fish into its humid mouth and tolerated the baleful looks and occasional nips it gave me when I missed a line, not to mention its body odor: you could hardly believe a live thing could stink that badly. Then the seal fired me with a chomp to my fingers and a slap of its tail. “He doesn’t like you, I guess,” said Boris’s owner, lying on the floor next to his boarding room bed. “But at least your hand won’t smell of fish. After a while”—he sniffed his own fingers, wincing at the effort—“it’s permanent.” Boris and I were appearing in a small theater in Duluth, and I convinced the house manager to give me a spot by myself. “What do you do?” he asked, and I told him I could sing and dance. Well, I could, even though for years all I’d sung was duets. He was dubious, but let me finish the week because he hated my old partner, the seal.

What kept me going was Hattie. In the few moments before I stepped on the stage, I imagined she was in the audience. Somehow, my journey had brought me here, to this midwestern backwater where she’d moved instead of dying. She’d seen my name on the bill or had spotted me going through a stage door or had simply been bored and had come to the theater. I could see her, amid the alien elbows of the audience. The woman behind her is upset to be sitting behind such a tall girl, with such distracting red hair, but Hattie doesn’t notice. She is waiting for her only brother to step onstage. She is ready to applaud.

And then, every night, I would lose heart, because she was supposed to be beside me onstage. Even Boris was better than no one. Though inhuman and hateful, at least he looked in my direction once in a while, for herring and straight lines. I needed a partner. I had always needed a partner.

So I found one, or she found me.

Hattie had been my first partner, of course, and later Rocky and I would claim he was my second, that I wandered lonely as a cloud until he appeared by my side. We said this the way long-married parents never mention first loves to the children, or if they do, as a joke— Your mother was set to marry Chuck O’Neill, bucktoothed kid, ears out to here, nice enough, did I mention his nose? I always felt bad about that, because before I had Rocky, I had Miriam.

We met in Duluth, at the end of my disastrous week as a single act. For all I know, Boris pointed me out to Miriam: See that guy? He’s lonely. He smells of fish. Chances are he’ll do anything for you if you’re nice to him. She was a child comic, a woman dressed as a girl, à la Baby Snooks except sexy: miles of crinolines, corkscrew blond curls, glossy Mary Janes that she stared at, toes in, when she started to say something tinged with innuendo. By the punch line she looked up, all smiles. A guy named Ben Savant was her straight man, a dark-hearted rogue trying to talk her into a kiss. Basically it was a Dumb Dora act. Mimi, what do your parents do at night? They put out the cat. Well, what does your father do in the morning? He lets in the cat. No, no: forget about the cat, the cat’s run away from home. Wa-ahah!

She carried an enormous lollipop that, though she only mimed licking it, got somehow sticky anyhow and picked up pieces of fluff, so it had to be replaced every few days. (If she’d kept the cellophane on, the stage lights would have flashed off.) The act was mostly Savant leering and her acting innocent. Like so many things, funny then, unacceptable now. His suit was as black as his mustache, which was as black as his hat; her blond hair matched her dress. Only the lollipop was lively.

I had a habit of watching other acts from the wings; green as I was, someone else’s talent could cheer me up. It was the only thing that did. That Saturday night, I saw Mimi and Savant lay ’em in the aisles, which was almost as interesting as their transformation as they stepped off the stage. Savant was a kid, probably not much older than me, and his villainous mustache was blackened cotton wool spirit gummed to his upper lip. “Hot,” he said to me, peeling it off. He stuck it in my hand, like he was tipping a bellboy. Miriam followed. Up close you could see she was no kid. I figured she was at least ten years older than me. You could see how wide her real mouth was, blotted out with pancake, a tiny cupid’s bow pout painted over it like a ribbon on a wreath. Same with her nose: it was a fair-sized hook, but she had it shaded into buttonhood. I’m sure it was convincing from the house. As Mimi, lost child, she kept her eyes wide open, her upper lashes hitting the bottom of her eyebrows; she applied the mascara with a heated pin, to make it thick. Each lash ended in a round ball, like a drawing of a crown in a children’s picture book. It must have been an effort to keep so wide-eyed, because in real life she had the heavy-lidded look of a vamp, sleepy and cynical. The lids came down the minute the curtain did.