horizontal wiggle, the train’s shuddering approach, the happy union drenched in surging music, kisses for everyone.
Everyone knows the ending of this scenario. The funny thing is that almost no one knows the beginning of the story.
The beginning—you can imagine it if you retrace your steps through the story, rewind the film so that horses gallop backward, the sun rises in the west, and people’s mouths open and close as they swallow their words. Backward to the time before she came to be lying on the tracks.
Our woman with the flowered dress and golden hair lives in a small town. She wears an apron. She cooks; she sews. She makes butter. You’ve seen pictures of this in your history books: the butter churn, and the heavy dasher, which the woman holds in both hands and jerks up and down until the cream breaks. She knits socks; she quilts. She smells clean. She is wonderfully domestic. Her mother has trained her well.
One day her father calls her outside and introduces her to the man who has asked for her hand. This man has a round, low-slung belly and a shiny wetness all around the mouth. He has brought three cows as a gift. These stand in the yard, ignoring the conversation. They are dull-eyed, coarse-haired animals. The udders sag; the teats are raw and chapped.
Her father looks pleased. Good milkers. He runs his hands over the heavy heads.
That night after her suitor leaves, she tries to speak to her father. He raises his voice and slams his fists on the table. She goes to bed sullen but not cowed.
In the dark hour before dawn she leaves her home and runs away across the fields.
She runs to another town, but it is not so different from the first. She finds work baking and churning and pickling. But the town’s women all tell her to pinch her cheeks rosier, fasten her corset tighter. The men all talk of trade and domestic animals. One day while sewing she is startled by a man’s groping hands. She pricks her finger, and the drops sprinkle on the cream waiting in the churn, so that the butter is pink that day.
During the night she runs to another town, but it is more of the same. She moves from place to place, like a pencil following a connect-the-dots picture. With each town there are more horses and cows and dogs, and chickens wandering the streets. You might picture the swing-door saloons, the piano player, sneering men and shiny guns. Clouds of dust. Men who proposition her, who press and prick.
You can call her Caroline—that is a nice name and appropriate for the time period—but you could just as well call her Virginia or Evangeline, or Mary Lou; she doesn’t care. You can stare at her, but her face will not come into focus. She would rather be left alone.
Eventually she tires of the faded towns, the men who bellow for their dinners and a back rub. She leaves the latest town and walks the grasslands. Here she comes: hopes dashed, battered, bitter. She stumps along until the train tracks cut snakelike across her path and give her an idea.
High above, the vulture with the sunburned head circles and watches her arrange herself on the tracks. She fastens herself to the rails with shoelaces and stay strings, tightening the knots with her teeth. Then she lies back to wait, sun warm on her face.
Of course the train appears, then the shining horse with its rider. The hero with the chiseled chin leaps from his steed with the train fast approaching; the spectators hold their breath. The woman on the tracks groans and thrashes in frustration. No one seems to notice her face; no one hears her scream at him to leave her alone, to just let her be. He tears her loose in the nick of time. The train crashes past, cheers and confetti pour from the windows, and as he holds her triumphantly aloft, she watches her own hands rise and reach for him, not in a grateful embrace, but to rip his eyes out.
II. CIRCUS EVENING WEAR
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