A Ticket to the Circus Read Online Free PDF Page A

and had a blue parakeet named Elvis who could wolf whistle and say his name. She always had the newest clothes andenormous piles of presents under her tree at Christmas. One year, we got autograph books, and Cherry’s page to me read: “On top of old Smoky, all covered with blood, I saw my (UGH) friend Bar—her head stuck in the mud. There’s an axe in her stomach and a knife in her head. I jumped to the conclusion that Barbara was dead!”
    That not being enough, she wrote one more: “Sitting by a stream, Barbara had a dream. She dreamed she was a fat old trout and some creep fished her out.”
    I laughed because I wanted her to like me, but it wasn’t funny. Cherry had great legs from taking ballet lessons. I so envied her those legs and the pink satin toe shoes and net tutu, but it never occurred to me to ask to take ballet myself. At twelve, Cherry had breasts, wore white lipstick and white short shorts, and gave the best dance parties under her carport, while I was still playing with dolls. She didn’t want to invite me to her parties unless I danced, so she decided to teach me, along with a chubby boy named Kenny from across the street. We were her charity project. I felt uncomfortable about it, but I really wanted to go to those parties. Cherry played the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” while Kenny and I tried to do the steps she showed us, and somehow we got good enough to be invited. Later that year, she told me she wouldn’t continue to be my friend if I kept on playing with Barbie, and since she made me choose and I wouldn’t lie about it, I chose Barbie. She called me on Christmas morning to ask if I had gotten a second Barbie, which I had, and she was as good as her word and threw me over for an older girl named Bobbye Ann, another cool girl with boobs who already went out with boys. It was my first touch of heartbreak.
    The dancing was my first little foray into sin, but it was so much fun I didn’t worry too much about it. It somehow didn’t feel like a sin. And I didn’t tell my parents. I loved them both so much, but I learned early on that I couldn’t tell them what I was feeling, what I wanted or needed or feared. Once, when I was having one of my nightmares, my mother wanted to call the preacher over to pray with me. She had no idea he was the reason for the nightmare. I always wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect Christian, and so I learned to pretend to them that I was. I wish I could have confided in them and asked their advice sometimes, but I knew they would just say “Don’t do that, it’s a sin”and be disappointed in me. My father was the most perfect man I knew. He was always helping someone else, driving old ladies to the doctor, taking fatherless little boys swimming or fishing, always doing things for everyone.
    But as much as my father believed in Jesus, as good as he had lived his life, religion was not a comfort to him as he was dying years later when he was seventy-eight. He lay there in the hospital for months, worrying, combing his memory, trying to remember something he had done wrong, something that he had done and hadn’t been forgiven for, something he should have done and didn’t do. Something that would send him to hell. He even said to me, “I’m so sorry I spanked you when you were a little girl.” I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Oh, Daddy,” I said, “I don’t even remember that. And I probably deserved it anyhow.” But he wouldn’t be comforted. I told him, “You’ve loved Jesus all your life, and He’s not going to let you go to hell.” I sincerely believed that. If anybody is in heaven, my father is, but I knew then that I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by those hell sermons, and I wish to God it had been different.

Four
    W hen I was twelve, my mother turned our carport into a beauty shop. A few years before that, when I could stay on my own in the afternoons after school, she had decided to go back to