Passionate fiction about a travelling circus family, the Binewski's, where Mum and Dad through applying concoctions to her pregnant body, have created a family of "geeks", the old fashioned meaning of freaks. There's Oly, the humpback dwarf, with wig and tinted glasses, there's her brother Arty, who starts to control the whole circus more and more as his father descends into drink and sadness and his mother reaches for pills, there's the conjoined twin Iphy and Elly, the latter gets lobotomized by Chick, their kid brother who can manipulate matter through mind, only because master control freak Arty did not like her.
It tells the story from Oly's point of view, supposedly from her manuscript although the end, in which she kills the woman who tries to make her daughter Miranda (conceived by letting Chick secretly move Arty's sperm into her own ovary) a "norm" again. Norms are boring, norms are assembly line bodies, nothing unique.
The weird, the spectacle is celebrated here, and it makes for a page-turning read.
We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins' glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
I wear the same wig when I go out. I don't trust Lil's blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.
As for Miranda, I can't be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.
My mother, on the street alone, can be written off with the gentle oddities of rambling mumblers, drunks and beggars, but when I come twenty feet behind, there is an ice moment. Even the smug feel it. They go home and tell their wives that the streets of Portland are filled with weirdos. Their dreams weave a bent linkage between the wild old woman and the hunchbacked dwarf.
Miranda seems preoccupied with deformity. She has lured the fat man from the corner newsstand up to her rooms several times to model for her. There is no obvious reason for such a fascination in her own life, even if her living does depend on that tiny irregularity of hers. She is strong and straight. Her spine and legs are as long as history. It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her towards all that the world calls freakish.
I loll in molten idiocy.
We stopped on an edgeless plateau that stretched to nothing on all sides, making the eye desperate, shriveling the brain to dry hopelessness between the dreary sheets of sky and ground.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.
We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.
Dr Phyllis has a voice like the breeze of Antartica but it is a young voice - younger than her body, perhaps from being used so little and so carefully.
That's when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn't mean what Iphy's blood meant. If I loved it wasn't the same as Iphy's love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.
Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the posy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he'd never thought of me the way I'd thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.
