A Ticket to the Circus Read Online Free PDF

work. After my father’s accident, we needed the income, so she tried a string of different jobs. One was picking cotton, which she at least was familiar with. Every morning before I went to school, a rattletrap pickup truck would stop outside our house. My mother—wearing faded jeans, some kind of old shirt, and one of those sunbonnets made from printed cotton that puffed out on top like a muffin—would climb up into the open back with a load of people dressed just like she was and head for some cotton patch. She worked all day in the hot sun and came back long after I got home fromschool. That didn’t last too long. I was happy when she quit. I was embarrassed for anybody to see her dressed like that, riding in the back of a truck.
    Then she got an even worse job on the pinning line at the chicken plant, but it paid more. She and several other women stood for eight hours a shift on a wet concrete floor and pulled feathers out of chickens after they had been tied, flopping and screeching, by the feet, had been hung on a moving wire, and had had their heads dipped into a pool of electrified water, which shocked them to death. Her arms ached so much from holding them up in the same position and pulling out feathers that she could hardly move at night, and she was always slightly green and sick with a runny nose from the cold plant, even though she wore sweaters under her coverall and two pairs of socks inside her rubber boots. I went with her to pick up her last check, and I nearly threw up from the smell, just in the office. I had the courage only once to peek inside the actual plant to look at the chickens drifting around the room on their conveyer wire, getting plucked here, split open there, and their innards pulled out at the next station, and then I had to get out into the fresh air.
    When no other job could be found, we were driving down the street in Russellville and saw that someone was putting in a new beauty school. It was a six-month course, and my father said he would turn the carport into a beauty shop for her if she wanted. She was so happy at the school with all the other women, a lot of them her age, learning how to cut hair and do perms and color and perform the newest rage, back-combing, also known as teasing or ratting, to make all the hair fluff out into a bubble. They used real people for the students to practice on, and since beauty school treatments were, of course, cheaper than regular beauty shops, it gave women who normally couldn’t afford it the luxury of having their hair and nails done. The local nursing home would bring all the old ladies in by the busload once a week, and when they left, they waved cheerfully from the bus, their bouffant hair in assorted pastel hues filling the windows like cotton candy. I used to go and hang out with Mother on Saturday, and at lunchtime we’d go across the street to the drugstore and get a pimento cheese sandwich and a Coke at the soda fountain. All day, I would watch and absorb the lessons. I practiced on my friends, and am still a pretty good haircutter, if I do say so myself. (Norman never again went to a barber after we got together, and he delighted in telling people I cut his hair. “Just think of all the money we’ve saved over the years!” he’d say.)

    Me in the sixth grade with my cat’s-eye glasses.
    Of course, I was my mother’s at-home practice dummy, and for a year or two after she started school, I had short perm-fried hair that embarrassed me. So when I was thirteen, I put my foot down and told her I was never letting her cut or perm my hair again. I felt bad about hurting her feelings, but that hair, along with my thick rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses, made me the ugliest girl in the sixth grade. At least one of them.
    Mother loved everything about her little
Steel Magnolias
shop. She had people to talk to all day, the work wasn’t odious or odiferous or backbreaking, and she made decent money. The going rate in 1963 was a dollar