Looking Back Read Online Free PDF

mine. But if Hanna uses my ice cream and my hat, my knowledge of the subways and my hand, well, I use Hanna too: she’s my excuse to ride the Ferris wheel, to shop for dolls. And when the circus comes to town—Ringling Brothers, no less—and I take her, everything evens up. Walking to Madison Square Garden, stepping over sidewalk lines and dodging muggers, she is my escort more than I am hers.
    I think of one time in particular.
    There we sat, in our too-well-cushioned seats, Hanna in her navy blue knee socks and flower barrettes, I beside her, holding the overpriced miniature flashlight she had shamed me into buying (because everyone else in our row had one), earnestly obeying the ringmaster’s instructions to wave it when the lights went out—frantically, a beacon in the night—because Hanna’s hands were too full of other circus-going apparatus: a celluloid doll whose arm already hung loose, the Cracker Jack she wanted for the prize inside, the Jujubes that she swallowed dutifully like pills. We all seemed a little sad, Hanna and me and all the other flashlight wavers who surrounded us, like people I’d see in a movie and feel sorry for—the grown-ups, the ticket buyers, because the admission fee hadn’t really bought us into youngness again, even the little kids, because most of them had barely had it to begin with. We grew up old, Hanna even more than I. We are cynics who see the trap door in the magic show, the pillow stuffing in Salvation Army Santa Clauses, the camera tricks in TV commercials (“That isn’t really a genie’s hand coming out of the washing machine,” Hanna tells me, “it’s just an actor with gloves on.”) So at the circus, there was a certain lack of wonder in the crowd, a calm, shrugging atmosphere of “So what else is new?” She leaned back on her padded seat, my four-year-old, watching me twirl her flashlight for her (“Keep up with those flashlights, kids,” the ringmaster had said), chewing her hot dog, anticipating pratfalls, toughly, smartly, sadly, wisely, agedly unenthralled, more wrapped up in the cotton candy than in the Greatest Show on Earth. Above us, a man danced on a tightrope while, below, poodles stood on their heads and elephants balanced, two-legged, over the spangled bodies of trusting circus girls, and horses leapt through flaming hoops and jugglers handled more balls than I could count and never dropped one.
    Perhaps it was that we had too much to look at and so weren’t awed by any one thing. But even more, it was that we had seen greater spectacles, unmoved, that our whole world was a visual glut, a ten-ring circus even Ringling Brothers couldn’t compete with. A man stuck his head into a tiger’s mouth and I pointed it out, with more amazement than I really felt, to my cool, unfazed friend, and when she failed to look (I, irritated now—“these seats cost money …”) turned her head for her, forced her to take the sight in. The tiger could have bitten the tamer’s head off, I think, swallowed him whole and turned into a monkey and she wouldn’t have blinked. We watched what must have been two dozen clowns pile out of a Volkswagen without Hanna’s knowing what the point of all that was. It isn’t just the knowledge that they emerge from a trap door in the sawdust that keeps Hanna from looking up, either. Even if she didn’t know the trick involved, she wouldn’t care.
    I don’t think I’m reading too much into it when I say that, at five, she has already developed a sense of the absurd—the kind of unblinking world-weariness that usually comes only to disillusioned middle-aged men and eighty-year-old rocking-chair sitters. I sometimes forget that Hanna is just five, not eighty; that she believes she will grow up to be a ballerina and tells me that someday she’ll marry a prince; that she is afraid of the dark, she isn’t big enough for a two-wheeler; her face clouds over in the sad parts of a Shirley Temple movie and lights up at the