A Ticket to the Circus Read Free Page A

and the nails a little weird.
    At any rate, I think the last straw for my mother was when I escaped from home, standing on the back of a little neighbor boy’s red tricycle, holding tight to his shoulders like a pint-size Ann-Margret on Elvis’s Harley, red curls bobbing in the wind. I can still remember the thrill of freedom as we rode, he pedaling as fast as he could, taking me down the block to play with another friend. When I came back, I was surprised to find my mother out in the yard, screaming my name and crying, and soon after that we moved back to Atkins, out in the country near Gum Log. She just couldn’t take city life anymore.
    This next part is vague for me in its details. It’s something that has been carefully hidden over the years, and I’m hesitant to talk about iteven now, but I think it is probably central to my life in ways I can only half comprehend. After this last episode, before we moved to Atkins, my mother went into the hospital and got shock treatments. I remember it only through my three-year-old sensibilities, and I, of course, wasn’t told where she was, but I believed it was my fault, that I had done something so bad that I’d made her go away. I stayed with my aunt Ella Belle and cousins Carla and Billy Darel while she was gone, I don’t know how long, as time doesn’t mean much to a three-year-old.
    I do remember it was summer and we were out in the yard in our underwear playing with the water hose when a strange new brown and tan car drove up. I couldn’t see who was in it. A woman I didn’t recognize got out and held out her arms to me, but I was frightened and didn’t run to her. It was my mother. She looked different; maybe she had a new haircut. After a moment I realized who she was, but how painful it must have been for her to come home from Lord knows what kind of brutal situation and find that her daughter didn’t remember her.
    I didn’t learn until I was a teenager what had happened; even to this day at age ninety she won’t talk about it, but all her life my mother would go into depressions and rages. I know she loved me more than anything in the world, and I loved her, but we never understood each other. It was hard for us to talk.
    One night when I was about seventeen, I was in the car with my future first husband and some friends on our way to a party on Petit Jean Mountain. It started to snow, and my mother had a premonition we were going to get killed in a car wreck. She sent my father to chase down the car and bring me home. Of course I was humiliated and so angry at her. It was then, in the car on the way home, that my father told me the story of her breakdown and asked me to be tolerant of her. Since then, I have always felt guilty about my mother, rational or not, and have believed that my being the feisty child that I was caused her to snap.
    Moving back to Atkins was much better for her. We were in the country, and since she couldn’t drive, it was just the two of us in the house all day long. (My father taught me to drive when I was eight; I would sit on his lap and steer. Then, later, I sat on a cushion until my legs could reach the pedals. By the time I was twelve, I was driving mymother everywhere, hoping I wouldn’t get stopped by a cop.) I would keep her company while she gardened or ironed or cooked, and she read to me until I memorized all my Little Golden Books and pretended to read them myself. Then one day when I was about five, I realized I
could
read them.
    We watched
The Mickey Mouse Club
together and made chocolate chip cookies and played with Pickles the cat, who had babies as fast as she could, feral cats who lived wild under the house. One day Pickles disappeared, along with the gang of offspring, and when I asked where she was, I was told she had run away. Along with all her children. I didn’t find out until much later that my uncle George had come and taken them all off, he would never say where. I chose to believe they were adopted