She seemed placidly content with our silence, and I knew I would have to initiate any new topic. We were passing a suburban bank. “You were terrific on that Trampoline, Wanda. And you look so very trim. I was wondering if you… if you’re on some sort of gymnastic team.”
The bank lawn looked green and soft. Without breaking her stride she stepped off onto the grass and went into a series of three limber flip-flaps which ended with a complete front flip with a half turn so that she ended the series facing me. Again she gave that bark of laughter. “Gym team!” she said with complete derision. “Circus,” she said haughtily as she fell in step with me again.
I felt like thumping myself in the head. This was Sarasota. It explained some of the strangenesses of her. These were the most clannish people in the world. “Which circus?” I asked.
She seemed truly astonished. “With my name, which one would it be? Rossoni and Markava. It isn’t big, but we are known. I am a flier. You should know that too. I can do many things, but flying is best. I was on the rings when I was five years old.” She held her arm out. “Look at this arm! Tell me what you think of this arm, Paul Fox.”
We stopped and I looked at it carefully, wondering what I was supposed to be looking for. It was round, firm and brown, and gracefully proportioned. The skin texture was silken. I had the dizzy wish to kiss the hollow of the elbow. “It’s a lovely arm, Wanda.”
“Yes it is,” she said with a wonderfully innocent pride. “My mother, my grandmother, they are both the same. It is good luck for a woman to be this way. With either arm I can lift more than you can with two. But we Markava women get no ugly bulging muscles. With my uncle sitting on my shoulders, I can do very slow deep-knee bends. He weighs over two hundred. I weigh one hundred and eighteen. The muscles show a little bit more in the legs, but it is still not ugly, is it?” She moved away from me to pose for inspection and looked back over her shoulder at me with a rather anxious expression.
“They’re lovely legs, Wanda.”
“No. The arms are better, as arms. The legs are too short. I am just five feet two and a half, and I am too long in the waist to have a really good figure. If I were five feet six, the legs would be just right, with the same length from the hips up. I’d look better when I fly. But I might not be so strong. Here. Press with your knuckle here, against the calf.” I saw her tense her leg. It became like sleek brown marble. A passing tourist boggled at us and nearly ran up over the curbing.
We walked on. I searched my memory for a properly circusy question and finally dredged one up. “Can you do the triple?” I asked politely.
“Out of the last hundred practice tries, I got forty-one. When I can get to sixty out of a hundred, we’ll put it in, Uncle Charley says. He’s my catcher on the triple. After we practice, our hands are so swollen we have to soak them.”
I had run out of questions. It seemed to me we had walked a very long distance. I could feel a blister beginning to form on my right heel.
“You smoke too much,” she said abruptly.
“I know I do.”
“So why don’t you smoke less?”
“There’s a lot of strain connected with my job, Wanda.”
“Strain? Selling pills?” she asked with such surprise that it irritated me.
“They set a quota for me, and I have to meet it.”
“So what happens when you meet it? The strain is over?”
“Well, no. They set a new quota.”
She snorted and said, “Even in the seal act, a seal always gets a fish after every trick. They don’t make her work harder each time for the fish. That quota thing is ridiculous.”
I thought about it, and I saw that it was. I was being treated with less dignity than a seal. But I had to salvage something. “I make darn good money.”
“How much?” she demanded.
“Uh — twenty thousand dollars.”
“What do you spend it all on?”
“Taxes take a big bite because I’m single. After I pay living expenses, I invest what’s left in stock in the company I work for.”
“Ha.”
“What’s this ha?”
“Nothing. It just sounds like a crummy way to live, Paul Fox.”
“I’m considered very successful for my age.”
“Ha,” she said again, and I didn’t feel like contesting that one. I didn’t know what she was calling me in her mind. A townie, perhaps. Or a mark. It was an odd experience to be scorned and pitied by this delicious little flier.
“We turn here,” she said. “Five more blocks. Are you sick?”
The question startled me. “Why do you ask me that?”
“You are pale, and I saw your hand shaking when you picked up your coffee cup. You look thin and stringy, and when somebody squealed their brakes a little while ago you went right up in the air.”
“I don’t get a chance to get much sun, Wanda. I’ve been working hard without a break for a long time. No, I’m not sick.”
“You don’t look healthy.”
“Compared to you I’ve never been healthy, I guess.”
“You look older than twenty-five.”
“I like what you do for my morale, friend.”
“I’m not doing it. You’ve been doing it to yourself — for that twenty thousand dollars.”
“You don’t mind saying exactly what you think, do you?”
“I wouldn’t say it if you really were sick.”
So I used up a couple of blocks of silence thinking that over. I was scowling at the sidewalk when she said, “Here it is.”
The paving and sidewalks and small, careful houses ended. The Markava domain was beyond the end of the street, and it seemed to have been spilled across several scrubby acres. I stood and looked at the cars parked at complete random, at several house trailers and at haphazard sheds and outbuildings. The original house had been a cottage. It looked as if it had been enlarged through a dreamy process of buying abandoned garages and affixing them to the house and to each other in the quickest possible manner. There was a big new front porch of raw wood across the front of it. I looked at all the kids racing around.
“Is there a party going on?”
“Oh, no. It’s mostly all family. But there are people always coming and going. Come on.”
The children ignored us. As we went up onto the porch, a huge man pushed the screen door open and came out. “Charley, this is Paulfox,” she said, turning me into one word.
“Hahya,” he said to me. “Go change and we’ll work some, Wan.”
“You could watch,” she said to me and went into the house. Charley was eating some sort of stew out of a yellow bowl with his fingers. He looked like a television version of a Siberian bandit. He was bare to the waist, and his magnificently-muscled torso was hairless. After each chunk of stew meat he would lick his thumb and finger and then wipe them on a dish towel tucked into the waistband of his baggy trousers. He looked at me with distant amusement.
“That Wanda,” he said finally. “I wanted to build up an army, know what I’d do? Send her out six or ten times a day. Make a big circle. Come back here. One guy following every time. Clunk his head and swear him in. Sure. She talks to you, though. You’re ahead. One guy in twenty she even says hello. The others just follow. A big one last week got out of line. Fritz was here. He’s only so big, and maybe he’s sixty, who can tell? Does a wire act. The big guy got on Fritz’s nerves. He bent down, picked up the guy’s right foot and put it behind the big guy’s right ear. After he found out he could walk, he didn’t stay long.”
Wanda came out in a faded gray-blue leotard. Charley put his bowl down on the porch floor and stepped out of his pants. He was wearing patched maroon tights. I followed them around the house. The big practice rigging was there with the safety net slung in position. All the chrome was shiny, and the whites were very white. Such flying rigs look smaller outdoors. I learned one thing the Markavas weren’t casual about. Charley and Wanda went to work, and they checked every line, every guy wire and every fastening — patiently, thoroughly and without haste. Then they went up hand over hand to opposite platforms and used the lead strings to pull their traps up to their platforms. Several persons had appeared from nowhere to watch. I didn’t know then that a couple of the men had positioned themselves in the only places where there was any chance she might miss the net on a partial catch and a slip.