“Have you really joined the circus, Saturday?” she asked between wolfish, huge bites.
The Marid flushed with pride. Had she ever noticed how pretty he got when he did that? Like foam cresting on the deep sea.
“When I first came to the Moon I had no idea what to do with myself,” he said ruefully. “Ell had his Library and it kept him so busy. Some days I would sit very quietly in the empty half of the Lopside and read the lonely books on those shelves so they wouldn’t feel neglected. But, oh, September! I am a child of the sea! I cannot stay in one place for long without stretching and swelling and dancing and surging and crashing and rolling. I walked over all of Almanack, never taking the same path twice. It was very lonely.” Saturday lowered his eyes; he could not quite say it while September looked so intently at him. “How often I wished you were there so that I could point things out to you and hear what you thought of them. Who would you have bet on at the capricorn races? Would you have liked the rice cakes the giant rabbits whack out with their silver mallets? Would you laugh at the moonmummers in the amphitheater near my little house?”
“You have a little house?” Suddenly Saturday seemed so much older than she, though she knew he was not, not really. To have one’s own little house and walk alone every night through such a great city! But Saturday went on in a rush, hardly hearing her.
“And I would come and watch the Stationary Circus. Not the performances-I came to watch them practice. They do such beautiful shows, but what I liked was to see them working out their routines, making mistakes sometimes, trying different costumes, different combinations of players and animals, different steps and leaps and flips and grips. Practice seemed like a very alive thing to me. I thought often of how much I would like to practice something like that, to shape it bit by bit, every day, to be so good at moving and seeming that I could change just a tiny turn of my toe and have it become something new, from a comedic tumble to a tragic fall, from a leap of faith to a twist ending, from a nosedive to lifted spirits. Because you would take that with you, you know?” Saturday looked up to see if she understood him. “You couldn’t help it, if you’d practiced enough. Your body would remember, like how a piano player drums her fingers on her leg in the pattern of her favorite song without even noticing. You’d take it with you into everyday doing and walking and singing and reading in the Library and dreaming and sleeping. Every time you moved or seemed it would mean something, the way it means something in the circus, when you’re performing and everyone below you is gasping and clapping and covering their eyes but still peeking through their fingers. Even the littlest turn of your toe.” He took a deep breath. September had never seen him so excited.
Pentameter tweaked Saturday’s topknot gently. “He thought we wouldn’t want him because he’s flesh and bone.”
“But we’re open minded,” chirped Valentine, giving his knee a sisterly punch. September could not help reading her soft brown cheek, though she could not tell if this might be rude or not. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart… “After all, he comes from the sea and the best ink comes from cuttlefish, so there’s a family connection.”
September marveled at how easy they were together. Saturday didn’t blush at all when they jostled him.
“I did have to practice awfully hard.”
“Rubbish!” said Valentine, chewing on a fat fountain pen that snapped off when she bit down, like a ripe carrot. “He did a Quad Folio Fold with a Double Dogear on his first day!”
Pentameter slid a second envelope toward A-Through-L, whose rumbling stomach, being so much bigger than any of theirs, announced a need for a second course. On his strong brown hand September read: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken…the rest vanished around the curve of his thumb. “You are wickedly heavy, though, brother. We had to bench press the Gunpowder Ghouls-in full gear!-every night just to work up to catching your big blue dumbbells in mid-air!”
“I learned to make myself lighter,” Saturday laughed. “Seawater can be as light as spray and heavy as whales. And September, I did, I did find I was good at it. I practiced just the way I’d wanted to. Until then, the only thing…” he cleared his throat. It sounded like a wave breaking on sand. “…the only thing I’d practiced so much was what I’d say to you, when I saw you again.” The Marid hurried on. “Though in the end I am better at Dogearing than remembering speeches, no matter how many times I’ve said them to myself! And, well, the way you can look at a surging ocean and feel everything from deep sorrow to bubbling delight to a giggling urge to jump right in and splash about-when people look at me, they feel those things, and I practiced and practiced until I could change my smile by half a quirk and change one feeling to the other. When I am on the trapeze, in the air, people look at me and they see me, they really see me, and they cheer like I’ve done something specially for them.” The Marid looked up at the sparkling apparatus above them. “Up there, I am as far from a cage as it is possible to be.”
September’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered the first time she saw him, cramped and bent and broken in the Marquess’s cruel lobster cage, penned in and forgotten. She shook her head; her tears flew aside.
“I am happy for you,” she said as brightly as she could. And she was, it was not a lie. But even he, even poor beautiful Saturday knew what he could be and do in the world. Ell had his Library, the Sibyl had had her door, Ballast had her ships-and September, still, was only herself, in the audience watching Saturday moving and seeming. “Back home everyone is always asking ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if everyone is a Pooka and you can just change, from a girl or a boy into something else, a griffin or an armchair or a shark! But you have, you’ve changed into…into a flight of fancy, like the sign says. A circus man.” And it was the first time she had thought of the word man in connection to Saturday.
Saturday looked at her strangely. His dark eyes shone. “No, no, I haven’t. I’m still Saturday. A slightly more airborne Saturday is all! And I am going with you, of course I am going with you! That’s what understudies are for! September, I have waited and waited for you! If you say we must go and see about a Yeti, well, that is what I want most in the world.”
Valentine and Pentameter looked at each other. They grinned identical grins. Together, they leaned into Saturday and kissed him on each cheek, squeezed his arms, and dashed away as quickly as they’d come running over the ring to meet them. They scurried up the little footholds on the trapeze poles, nimble as cats. On one of Valentine’s bare feet the dedication My Dearest Pickle-flashed. One the other: My Own Boy-Pentameter’s heels announced joyfully: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.