Aerial

The Encore

New York, New York, USA
Late Spring 1968
Two-and-a-half years later

"Focus."

It's nothing.

Twenty minutes from now, all you'll have to do is follow the technical director from this backstage green room, down the crowded CBS Studios hallways to the well-lit sound stage where there will be a small studio audience. It certainly won't feel like the half dozen video cameras are even there and that those cameras are transmitting a signal to hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of Americans from coast to coast. Maybe you won't even notice them. Just like always, you'll float across the stage on your roller skates and grip the rope, flip yourself upside down and move your muscles to the soundtrack that matches the volume and timbre of your level of perfection. And afterwards, Ed Sullivan will just be a normal person asking you a few questions in front of a few spectators, a group that shrinks significantly in size in comparison to what you're used to performing for. 

An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show; it's nothing. A cherry cake walk, a bitter lick at first with an aftertaste that rivals the sweetness of your lollipops.

Christ's sake, Melvin. Focus.

But first, you have to get these last few swipes of mascara to cooperate without painting any more tiny black brush strokes across your cheek. And then you can do all of those other slightly bigger things, followed by a much-deserved celebration in your high-rise suite in the Elysee Hotel in the heart of Midtown. Complete with pancakes or maybe waffles, piled high with a snow-capped mountain of whipped cream and your bare toes sinking into the plush, argyle carpet. But this giant mirror in front of you, surrounded by bulbous and hazy yellow lightbulbs is reflecting back a painted woman who appears much more confident on the outside than she feels on the inside.

In the stretch of the eighteen months after fleeing Russell Buchanan's circus, you have become the first and most infamous female roller-skating aerialist in the world.

Emotional suffering works in mysterious ways. It's understood that memories are often blocked in order to process present pain and it isn't until you begin to feel safe again that they start flooding back. For you, this took a couple months of dragging yourself in and out of bed after Harry's brain jolted, subsisting on easily-prepared meals such as sleeves of cheese and peanut butter cracker sandwiches and dry toast in order to keep yourself from whittling away.

The gamut of distress is strong; from denial to anger to acceptance, over and over again in that order until you're driven to the brink of insanity. Slowly it wanes, the cycles lengthening and shrinking until finally they dissolve almost completely, making space for mementos that were at one time blissful but became agonizing to traipse through in their absence. A meadow full of tall grasses and extraordinary flowers, hiding secret thorns that shred you to bits on your mental journey.

You'd immersed yourself in reminders of Harry after he'd left; stockpiling cotton-candy-flavored Crush loosies on your vanity and unpacking his box of starched belongings to sleep in his wifebeaters that were left behind, dancing to rock records in your living room before bed and snuggling with Beau on your lunch breaks, long swigs of orange juice straight from the carton in the refrigerator light, green apples and peanut butter for lunch and sea salt on your face at dawn.

Then you flipped. And when you began to accept that he would not be coming back to you, you began to slowly avoid these quirks until each element was completely eradicated from your life, replaced by new favorite colors and tastes. Things have a habit of feeling good only if you want them to, after all. And dreams only affect you if you remember them.

The thing about the Sun is that after it burns you, you tend to stay in the shade for a little while.

The summer solstice. The height of summer also happens to be the very same day that the Earth starts to turn away from the Sun, heading straight through its shedding leaves into winter. You and Harry were no different.