The Invisible Circus Page 3

  In the driveway Barry killed the engine. “I want to talk to you,” he said, leading the way to the house. All Phoebe’s life they had lived in this same sprawling Victorian on Clay Street. In recent years it had gone a bit to seed, the paint dull and chipped, overgrown trees leaning drunkenly at the windows. The third floor had been sealed off years ago, rented out as a separate apartment.

  Barry followed Phoebe into the kitchen. “Sit,” he said, pointing at a chair. She obeyed, heart racing. “This has to end, Phoebe. You know it.”

  “What?” Phoebe said. But he was right. She did know.

  “You and Mom,” he said. “How you’ve been living.”

  “But you’re hardly ever around.”

  “That’s right,” Barry rejoined with energy. “It’s physically painful for me to come inside this house! I mean, Jesus, Phoebe, it’s been years and nothing’s changed; it’s like Great Expectations.”

  Phoebe listened in dread. He was right, she thought, he must be right. She’d read Great Expectations, but couldn’t think which part he meant.

  “You, I’m not worried about,” Barry went on. “You’re about to start college. But Mom, Jesus. Alone in this house, that asshole boss eating up all her time and she’s forty-seven years old, Phoebe. Think about it. Forty-seven.”

  “But I’m not going to leave her,” Phoebe cried. “She won’t be alone ever.”

  It was the wrong answer. Barry veered toward her, nearly wild-eyed. “Phoebe, don’t you get it?” he shouted. “You have to leave, that’s my whole goddamn point! You’re not what she needs anymore.”

  “So that’s why you gave her that stuff,” Phoebe said, angry now. “So she can catch a new husband before it’s too late.”

  “To put it crassly.” There was a pause, then Barry went on in a quieter voice. “After Faith, I don’t know, Mom just froze. It’s tragic.”

  “You mean because of that one guy?”

  “The only guy since Dad! And Mom was in love with Claude—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “But after Faith died she just—”

  “Stop it, Bear.” Phoebe covered her ears. But she could still hear him.

  “—cut him off. Like she thought she couldn’t have that anymore. Like some kind of punishment.”

  He had never said anything like this before. Phoebe was amazed. “She dates,” she finally said, addressing a straw placemat. “Mom goes out.”

  “Yeah, she goes,” Barry said with scorn. “Then she comes back to you, this house—”

  “We live here! What else can she do?”

  “Let go,” Barry said, his voice hushed. “Just, let go.”

  “Of what?” Phoebe asked fearfully. “Each other?”

  “All of it. Dad, Faith, the whole number. Just”—he flicked open his hands, a flash of white skin—“let it go.”

  Phoebe rested her head on the table. Barry moved close and touched her hair, and something in Phoebe relaxed, trusting him. “You’ll be amazed how easy it is,” he said.

  “What if we don’t want to?”

  The question seemed to stall him. Phoebe raised her head, then sat up. “I mean why?” she said, confused. “For you? Because you say?”

  “Of course not for me—for you,” Barry said, moving away from her, “you and Mom.”

  “But we’re perfectly happy. You’re the one who’s upset with things, Bear. I mean, wait a second,” Phoebe said, pushing away from the table to stand as the realization broke across her. “I know why you’re saying this stuff, it’s because of Faith.”

  “Bullshit,” Barry said, uneasy.

  “You want her gone,” Phoebe said, the very words inducing a reeling sensation. “You want to stamp her out!”

  Barry opened his mouth, speechless, and Phoebe knew she’d touched something. “You want her gone so you can be everyone’s favorite.”

  The shadow of her brother’s beard was blue against his skin. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “You’re scared,” Phoebe said. “I see it.”

  They watched each other across the kitchen. Phoebe felt a surge of power over Barry that spent itself abruptly. “Forget it, Bear,” she said, moving near him. They relaxed against each other, a rare moment. Even their hugs were normally tense.

  Then Barry moved her away. “Fuck it, Phoebe. You didn’t hear one thing I said.”

  “I did,” she said. “I tried.”

  He laughed at her. “You refuse to try,” he said, “which mystifies me, because what’ve you got to lose?” He waited. “Nothing! Don’t you get it? This is nothing. You’re sitting on nothing here.” He left the room.

  “It is not nothing!” Phoebe yelled after him, but Barry was out the front door, slamming it behind him so the floor shook. Phoebe heard the lash of his engine for several blocks. She imagined the freedom Barry must feel, ripping along the freeway toward Los Gatos, blasting his tape deck. She wished she knew how to drive.

  Two or three months after their father died, Barry had decided one Saturday to clear out a basement storeroom for an inventing workshop. Their father’s paintings crowded the little room: hundreds of canvases, many painted in the last months before he died. Nearly all the paintings were of Faith. Barry decided to throw them away.

  He stacked a first load into an enormous cardboard box and dragged it out to the street. Faith was outside, trimming beds of ivy with a large pair of clipping shears. Phoebe slumped beside her on the warm brick path, twirling ivy stems like propellers and letting go, watching them fly for a second.

  “What’s in the box?” Faith asked when Barry came toiling along the driveway.

  “Some old stuff of Dad’s.”

  Faith went to the box, still holding her shears, and looked inside. She pulled out one of the paintings, a portrait of herself in the backyard. In the picture she was smiling. “Bear, what are you doing with these?”

  “Throwing them out.”

  Faith seemed confused. She’d hardly been able to eat, and the shears looked heavy and dark in her hand. “Put them back,” she told him.

  “There isn’t room.”

  “Put them where they were, Bear. Back in the basement.”

  “I’m throwing them out!”

  “They were Dad’s!” Faith cried.

  Barry pushed past her, dragging the box behind him over the pavement. It made a loud scraping sound.

  “Stop it,” Faith cried. “Just—give them to me.”

  But something had happened to Barry. “I want them out,” he hollered. “I’m sick of these things!” There were tears on his face. He seized a painting from the box and threw it into the street. There was Faith, face-up on the concrete. She shrieked as if she’d felt the impact. Barry took a second painting and tried to break it with his hands. Phoebe ran at her brother and held his arms, but he shook her off easily, pulled three paintings from the box and hurled them as far as he could. Two rolled in cheerful somersaults before toppling over. Barry was a fierce, wiry boy, and he moved quickly. Portraits of Faith soon littered the street: pastels, water-colors, wet-looking oils.

  Faith was sobbing. She waved the shears in Barry’s face. “Stop it,” she screamed, “or I’ll kill you!”

  Barry paused. He looked at the shears, then smiled. He broke the painting over his knee. Faith plunged the shears into her own thigh.

  Then everything stopped. Barry’s face went so white Phoebe thought at first that her sister had killed them both. There was a long, almost leisurely pause when none of them moved, when the day tingled around them.

  Then everything happened at once: Faith sank to the ground. Barry tore off his T-shirt and tied her leg in a tourniquet. Phoebe pounded wildly on the door of their neighbor, Mrs. Rose, who ferried them to Children’s Hospital in her clattering station wagon. There were shots, stitches and lots of questions. It was a game, they’d all insisted—instinctively, without plan or discussion among them—a game that had gone too far.
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  It had always seemed to Phoebe, looking back, that on that day something shifted irreversibly among the three of them. As Faith lay in the emergency room, bleached from loss of blood, Phoebe saw in her sister’s face a kind of wonderment at the power of what she had done. It was spring 1966. That fall Faith would start high school, and within a year would be immersed in what had become, in retrospect, the sixties. But when Faith and Barry fought, none of this had happened yet. Faith was thirteen, wearing green cotton pants. She knew nothing of drugs. Even the first of so many boyfriends had not yet crossed their threshold.

  After the fight Barry kept out of Faith’s way. He would watch her from a distance, following her movements with his dark eyes. He was afraid of her. And Faith, after that day, no longer seemed frightened of anything.

  Phoebe went upstairs to her sister’s old room and shut the door. After Faith died, their mother had tried to clear this room out, but Phoebe raised such a clamor she agreed to wait, and a few months became a year, then two; it was somehow too late.

  For the past three years Phoebe had slept here. Just slept. Her clothes and possessions she kept in her old room, down the hall. Phoebe knew her mother disapproved of this arrangement, for she never came in Faith’s room to perch on the bed and talk, as she had before.

  Faith had draped her ceiling in reams of blue batik. Glass pyramids lined her shelves, scarabs and rare beads and miniature gold incense burners. Outside the window hung a cheap set of wind chimes, cloudy, peach-colored discs reminiscent of Communion wafers. They’d come from the sea, Phoebe thought. Their sound had the giddy unevenness of children’s laughter, or some fine thing splintering into pieces.

  Phoebe flopped on the bed, still in her Wallabees, listening to Faith’s chimes and feeling the house pull in around her as it always did when strangers left it. Faith’s room was full of pictures, snapshots of toothless grins and Christmas trees, birthday cakes suspended above the upturned faces of children in party hats. Faith had loved pictures—photographs, their father’s drawings, it made no difference—she’d craved any glimpse she could catch of her own life reflected back at her.

  Objects crowded the shelves of her sister’s closet, a Mexican straw hat embroidered with flowers, a cowhide wallet, flesh-colored arrowheads from the rain-soaked fields around St. Louis, on and on it went, down, down, until at the very bottom lay—what? Phoebe didn’t know. But something. The key to a mystery was buried among the forgotten moments of her sister’s life, times when Faith had leaned in a doorway or slumped on her bed fiddling with an alarm clock. Alone in this house Phoebe often heard a faint humming noise, some presence beneath her, around her. Faith’s room was the entrance to it.

  Maintaining the room was not easy. Pictures dropped from the walls, dust gathered in the batik. Phoebe knocked it into clouds with a broom, then vacuumed it up from the rug. Twice she’d taken down the batik and washed it by hand, hung it in the yard to dry, then reattached it exactly as it had been, or close. But despite her best efforts, there was a kind of erosion in the room, a sagging and curling and fading she was powerless to halt.

  Phoebe rarely had friends to the house, aware that in most people’s eyes she would look like a nut. Yet this mystified her—for how was living in your sister’s room any crazier than surrounding yourself with life-sized posters of Roger Daltrey hollering into a microphone, as her friend Celeste did, or following the personal lives of Starsky and Hutch, or sleeping on a street curb overnight to get decent seats to a Paul McCartney concert? Being obsessed with total strangers was considered perfectly normal, yet on the few occasions when outsiders came into Faith’s room, Phoebe glimpsed herself through their eyes and was terrified. So she kept them out.

  Barry had this same effect. Much of what he’d said was true—detritus from their mother’s brief courtships filled their house, weird breakfast cereals from a man in market research, record albums by someone’s punk rocker son, their grim mechanical sound suggestive of auto assembly lines. But these dates were little more than anecdotes for Phoebe and her mother to laugh about, how one man had confessed to a previous life as the lapdog of the British Queen Mother—“Can you imagine?” Phoebe’s mother cried, flinging off her pumps as Phoebe writhed on the bed, shrieking in horrified delight. “A dog? And he tells me this?” By ten-thirty she was usually back at home listening to Phoebe talk about the quaaludes and LSD she’d seen people take, how her friends had raced cars on the Great Highway and had sex among the cattails beside the school playing fields. For with each revelation Phoebe also was saying, I didn’t do this—they did, but not me—assuring her mother that she was careful, separate, likely to live forever. Phoebe often sensed that she and her mother had struck a kind of bargain, each gaining something crucial from the other by keeping her outside life at bay. They often spent Saturday mornings together at her mother’s office, Phoebe doing homework at the boss’s big desk. Afterward they would eat a late lunch somewhere fancy, each drink a glass of Chardonnay, and as they walked to the parking garage through the oceany wind, Phoebe would feel the magic of their lives—what spectacular things awaited them.

  It was a mystery: what throbbed up from the basement, what rang in Phoebe’s ears, alone in this room. Something had happened to Faith.

  The sixties had been named and written about. In the public library Phoebe had spent hours poring over old Oracles, leafing through scholarly and journalistic accounts of the “Love Generation.” But she read with a restless, uneasy suspicion that these analyses were leading her further from the mystery’s core, not toward it. Often she found herself drifting instead to the fashion magazines, leafing through Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar where models lazed in their inadvertent beauty, Lisa Taylor and Patti Hansen, Janice Dickinson glancing furtively over one shoulder while being yanked down a narrow street by a small black schnauzer on a leash. Where was she going? Where were all of them going, so gorgeous and distracted, the trees grainy—Yes! Phoebe would think, her breath quickening as she flipped the pages. Yes. Another world gleamed through these images. Phoebe searched the pages half expecting to find a picture of Faith.

  She curled on the bed and closed her eyes, longing for sleep, but the chimes distracted her. Barry was wrong, she thought, he was wrong and she was right, she and her mother were right. It all made sense. Phoebe thrashed on the bed, searching her mind for the righteous indignation she’d felt in the kitchen with Barry. But it was gone. And instead she felt the other thing, a queasy vertigo, as when her mother had failed to comprehend the silver necklace. Phoebe opened her eyes and looked at Faith’s room, the pictures and trinkets she’d struggled for so many years to keep intact. I’m right, she thought, it all makes sense. And then: How long can I go on like this?

  Her mother’s boss dropped her off at seven o’clock. She was cheerful, sunburned. “God, I’ve been freezing to death in just that damn sweater,” she said, tossing her clothes on the bed and heading for the bathroom.

  Phoebe perched on the toilet seat, yelling back and forth to her mother while she showered. The delicate scent of her soap rose with the steam, and Phoebe was so relieved she was back. Fog had surrounded their house, browsing coldly at the windows. She lowered the shades.

  Her mother pulled on a sweatsuit and they went downstairs to make a cheese soufflé. Phoebe tore the lettuce leaves. She’d never really learned to cook, but was a good assistant.

  Taking turns, they beat the egg whites in a hammered copper bowl while a Brahms piano concerto roiled through the house. Phoebe noticed a gold serpentine chain on her mother’s wrist. “Were you wearing that before?” she asked.

  Her mother paused, holding the whisk. “Isn’t this something?” she said. “It was sitting on my desk, all wrapped.”

  “Jack?” Phoebe said, incredulous. The only birthdays her mother’s boss remembered were the ones she reminded him of.

  “I know. I almost fell over.”

  “Did he—I mean, did he watch you open it?”

  “No, he disappeare
d. I think he was embarrassed.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t from him.”

  “No, it was. I mean, I thanked him. It’s nice, don’t you think?”

  After dinner they carried bowls of Häagen-Dazs upstairs to her mother’s giant bed. A rerun of The Rockford Files was on. True to form, Jim Rockford fell in love with the woman he was trying to protect and his old dad was threatened by thugs outside the silver trailer. Phoebe fought sleep but finally gave in.

  Her mother woke her. “You’re pooped,” she said. “Go to bed.”

  “Wait, I want to see the end,” Phoebe muttered, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. She searched the screen for Rockford.

  “The show’s all over, sweetheart,” her mother said. “This is just news. It ended while you were sleeping.”

  three

  While Phoebe’s father was painting her sister, Faith, Phoebe would bang objects sometimes to try to catch his attention, or rustle leaves if they were outside. Her father looked, but only for a second.

  She tried disappearing, wobbling into the bushes in her bare feet or hiding up in her room, waiting for someone to call, but no one did.

  Finally, in frustration, she went back to them. Faith reached for Phoebe without even moving her head—she was good at sitting for paintings. Phoebe slumped against her sister and, out of nowhere, she was happy. Their father grinned. “You’ve been ignoring us, squirrel,” he said.

  Afterward Phoebe would run to look at the canvas, thinking she might be in the picture, too, but there was only Faith. And sometimes not even Faith was fully visible, just a hint of her face, a shadow or else nothing at all. But even then Phoebe saw her sister hidden among the trees or windows or abstract designs, like a secret. She was always there.

  “It’s a gesture,” their father said, “an expression you make with your body.”