Creative nonfiction by Karen Baumgart

And Now, for the Final Act, Watch Him Choose the Circus

Sometimes, Trista likes to say last year, when I was seven, my father ran away with the circus. She enjoys the bald harshness of this statement, the discomfort it causes, the clumsy grasping for a suitable response. Of course, she knows it sounds like he’s a performer, not just the person who travels ahead of the circus, putting up posters in shop windows; his days of daring bicycle stunts under the big top are long past. The sting of his leaving has almost scabbed over now, crusted layers of hurt sloughing from shiny pink skin underneath.

* * * * *

Two weeks after her fifth birthday, Trista brings home her kindergarten class photo, rows of gappy smiles beaming at an unseen photographer. She remembers how they’d been told to yell out stinky feet, giggling and pulling faces until their teacher said that’s enough now, this isn’t a zoo! In the picture, her own feet are clad in cheap brown sneakers, nestled amongst the other girls’ candy-pink ones, unmistakeably wrong, as though someone has placed a puzzle piece upside down between the right-side-up ones. Even at five, Trista forgives her father, understanding he simply chose shoes that wouldn’t show the dirt.

* * * * *

Hospital tags swinging around bird-bone wrists, Trista curls inward as her father boasts about her exam results. She wishes he wouldn’t; Year 9 doesn’t even matter, does it? Nothing does, not when she’s wearing this new body she doesn’t recognise: torso puffy, limbs dangling like toothpicks, an ugly doll whose stuffing has been forced back into all the wrong places. Trista will return to the hospital tomorrow; this is just weekend leave to visit her father. A test, the psychiatrist had said, to see if you can eat in a stressful environment. As she watches her father spin the tags on her wrists so only the band is visible, shame wraps iron fingers around her ribs. 

* * * * *

It’s Christmas season, and that means pfeffernüsse and chocolate-covered marzipan and plump cherries from roadside fruit-sellers. Trista’s tiny, dimpled fists swing at her sides as she toddles after her father and his treats; she imagines herself following breadcrumb trails in a gingerbread forest, like in the stories he reads to her. (In fairy tales, Christmas is always in the wintertime, so different to their Australian Christmases). A plate of festive snacks between them, Trista’s father speaks about his boyhood in a faraway land with topsy-turvy seasons, how he’d begun to learn circus tricks, balancing chairs and tables, and—eventually—riding a bicycle around the inner surface of a giant wooden sphere.    

* * * * *

Trista is twenty-five when her father falls ill, his body finally failing him at a time when she is reluctantly beginning to take care of her own. Every few weeks, she brings her little girl on the four-hour bus ride to his home, where she speaks gently with his new wife, feeds him small bites of soft-boiled egg. The storm-grey of his eyes has leached away, irises filling with liquid from the sea’s edges, barely a colour at all. Later, they bathe his limbs, terry‑towelling strokes as careful as a whispered conversation. Oddly, his fading is a damp stone in her lungs; surely, she should feel relieved to know he is leaving her for the last time? He dozes fitfully while his granddaughter skips around a living-room she won’t remember.

* * * * *

Next to Trista’s bed, there is always a lopsided tower of books. She wanders through many stories at once, narratives weaving and twirling, yet magically distinct in her six-year-old mind. Sometimes, upon waking, she finds her father unexpectedly home, after months of travelling with the circus. Trista shows him her bedside stack, and he laughs, so proud because he, too, is a voracious reader. Despite their firm corners, her beloved books wrap her in the tender embrace of well-worn pages (even later, when he chooses the circus after all).