Circus

BY CLAIRE BATTERSHILL
ILLUSTRATION BY AARON MCCONOMY

The illustrator for this piece, Aaron McConomy, was born in the fragrant pine forests of Alberta. He has since moved on to the sweaty, festival-ridden city of Montreal, where he manufactures pictures on a desk littered with every drawing implement ever invented. theypf.com/acc.html

Susan’s grandfather was a bear in the travelling circus. Or, rather, he wore a bear. Actually, she is never quite sure how to put this. He wore a bear suit (made out of a real dead bear) and wrestled someone in a wrestler’s suit (made out of not very much cloth). He reared up on his hind legs (which were his only legs) and roared. One of the first organized animal rights protests in the city of Tunbridge Wells was held in 1892 on behalf of her grandfather, the bear, who happened to be human. This fact was never discovered because the circus was bound to lose business either way. If they exposed the truth, they would surely lose those who took pleasure in watching grappling animals, and, anyway, who wanted to see a man fighting another man in a bear suit? Plenty of people, apparently, as long as the man was a bear. If, on the other hand, the circus master kept the fact of Susan’s grandfather’s humanity concealed, the animal rights activists would continue as they were: pelting innocent tomatoes and cabbages at the tent and vandalizing the caravans. The solution was that Susan’s grandfather was set free.

To Susan, then, the circus is a Victorian photograph of cross-dressing midgets with shotguns having their limbs devoured by tigers that are actually people, for example. There are no clowns who make balloon animals in Susan’s circus. There is no cotton candy. There are handlebar moustaches, and perhaps there are bearded ladies with real beards. No Ferris wheels, but Siamese twins joined at the head wearing only one jumpsuit. No fishing for little plastic ducks with prizes on the bottom, but maybe, if you’re lucky, a fat and monocled man on an elephant, selling tickets at the entrance to the fairground.

You understand the distinction.

Susan hasn’t often fashioned imaginary tightropes out of laundry lines and walked perfectly across her carpet, as she is doing right now. She hasn’t always needed to walk in a straight line. But she’s changed jobs recently and to get to the new place, she has to walk across a concrete ledge on Queen Street West on the way to work. There’s a sidewalk next to it, sure, but the ledge is just high enough, just near enough to some slightly sad geraniums planted in gravel, to be irresistible. Only she’s missed her step a couple of times, and it’s bad form to arrive at work in a shiny Toronto office building with ladders in her stockings. She keeps clear nail polish in her purse in case the tightrope doesn’t actually help her balance. Susan has a bit of a problem with perseverance and already knows the tightrope won’t last long enough to make her an expert ledge walker. There are all sorts of momentary and vehement obsessions that she keeps in shoeboxes (from the shoebox phase) under her bed: a felting phase, a woodcarving phase, a guitar phase (too big for a shoebox, but she keeps the picks), a drawing phase, a Latin phase, a cooking phase (hundreds of recipe cards), a crack-cocaine phase and a button phase are all from the last six months. She did an obsessive spring clean last April and killed two birds that way, by storing the rags and cleaning products in the box from her boyfriend’s basketball shoes. Susan is already thinking of how to coil up the tightrope so it will fit where her sandals used to.

When her mother talks about the circus days, it is with a kind of dutiful resignation.

“Yes,” she says, “it was difficult being brought up a bear cub. Harder than you can really imagine, you of a regular human childhood.”

When Susan’s grandfather had ceased to be a bear, her mother was twelve years old and was well along in the process of becoming a contortionist. When they left the circus, however, her father was distraught and wanted no reminders. So Susan’s mother was forced to walk on her feet instead of her hands and to keep her back in a shape more like a back than like a snail shell. This was a painful and incomplete adjustment, and from time to time, at boring parties or while Susan’s father was knocking on other people’s doors, failing to sell insurance, Susan’s mother would yawn with her whole body. She would nonchalantly flip her back over until her head appeared between her legs. It wasn’t about showing off, it was just the way it happened sometimes, and Susan never really blamed her for not being like other mothers. One of Susan’s own phases had been contortion. She found that she had none of her mother’s natural gift and sprained her neck, though she refused to get one of those foam things to hold her chin up. Instead she got an empty shoebox, labelled it Contortion, stuck it under her bed and walked around for a few weeks with her head lolling a little to the left.

Susan’s boyfriend is called Leon. He comes home every day at exactly the right time, even though this is a different time almost every day. Sometimes Susan’s home already and sometimes she isn’t, but he has a way of opening the door or of sitting on the sofa in front of the TV that seems freakishly coincidental. If Susan needs a long bath and some time to herself, he comes home late. If she wants to play cards or make dinner, he’s there right at five. Susan’s favourite, though, is when they both arrive at the apartment at the same time, from different directions, and avoid eye contact as they walk towards the building. They get in the elevator, cough awkwardly as they ascend and walk down the hall. They do not speak. When they arrive, he presses her up against the door, her head right next to the brass 216, and they make out, as though they are strangers who have just met in an elevator and discovered that they live in the same apartment.

Leon mostly ignores Susan’s quirks, which is comforting and necessary. When Susan says things that don’t make sense or when she makes sock monkeys for days and days without doing anything else, Leon just rolls his eyes and carries on reading or shaving or doing whatever it is he’s doing at the time. He does intervene when necessary: he bought a bed skirt to conceal the shoeboxes for when company comes and had a gentle word about the crack-cocaine phase before it got too out of hand. Leon is a marketing executive for a company that makes organic chocolate products. Their apartment is full of tins and wrappers, all dark brown with gold lettering, with bars of colour at the edges to indicate flavour. The brown was Leon’s idea: “the colour of chocolate,” he said at the interview, and they hired him.