The Ladies of the Secret Circus

Kerrigan Falls, Virginia

October 8, 2004

It was the wrong dress; Lara realized that now.

It was the color of old bones. The intricate platinum beading dripped down the dress’s fitted bodice in a scrolled pattern. Mid-thigh, the long chiffon skirt emerged, sweeping the floor with a dramatic five-foot train. Tugging at the garment, she looked in the mirror and frowned. Yes, she was definitely disappointed with this dress.

It was the first time she’d actually been alone with the gown. No mother standing behind her pulling at the fabric with a hopeful tone in her voice. No “bridal consultants” or seamstresses fussing at her with their encouraging platitudes of just how wonderful she would look.

She did not look wonderful in this dress.

Cocking her head from side to side, hoping for an angle she’d like, Lara recalled the small stack of photographs she’d clipped from bridal magazines as a little girl. She and her friends would grab last year’s dog-eared copies of Modern Bride from the waiting areas of the hair salons while their mothers got their perms and double processes. When no one was looking, they’d slide the old magazines into book bags, poring over them later in their bedrooms, each girl tearing out the pages of silk, taffeta, and tulle creations that they liked best. Lara had actually kept a few of the pages over the years and pruned them down to this one dress style, now reflecting back at her in the mirror. She sighed. No dress could possibly shoulder such expectation. But this one was too mature and vintage, more like a costume than a wedding gown.

Turning around, Lara strained to hear if her mother was on her way back upstairs. The hall was silent. She smiled. Studying her reflection, Lara began wishing the dress was fuller in the train, less formfitting through the thighs. Tugging on it, she concentrated hard, and the fabric gave way and blossomed, like a time-lapse video of flowers blooming, folds of fabric bursting then tumbling down and arranging themselves before her.

“There,” she said, and the fabric obeyed. “A little less.” The fabric swirled as though it were alive, rustling and shifting to please her. “Perfect.” She turned, watching it retract until she said, “Stop.”

Lara spun in front of the mirror, admiring the way the fabric moved. Next she focused on the color. “A little lighter, more ivory, less platinum.” Like a TV screen adjusting its brightness, the silver tones of the dress warmed to a pure-ivory hue. “Much better.” She considered the sleeveless bodice for October. “Maybe sleeves?” She could feel the dress hesitate, like it was bubbling, unsure of her direction. “Lace sleeves,” she clarified. Instantly the dress obeyed like a courteous bellman, creating ornate lace patterns along her arm as though the seams were being stitched together by the singing birds in Disney cartoons.

“Lara Barnes, what are you doing?” Her mother stood behind her with one hand on her hip and the other holding an elaborate twenty-strand pearl choker. In the center of the choker was a large Victorian diamond brooch.

“I didn’t like it.” Her voice was defensive. She smoothed the new skirt like it was an obedient pet, letting the dress know that she was done with alterations.

“Then you go to a store and buy another one. You can’t simply enchant a dress, Lara.”

“Apparently I can.” Lara spun to face her mother, her eyebrow cocked. “We really didn’t need to alter it. I do a better job.”

“The sleeves are all wrong.” Audrey Barnes frowned and ran her hand through her butter-colored bob. “Turn around,” she said, gesturing with her hand. “You’ll get nervous at the ceremony and the enchantment will wane. You mark my words. This is dangerous business.”

“If the spell wears off, you can keep the dress together for me.”

“As if I don’t have enough to worry about.”

Her mother was the superior spell caster, even if she hated using her magic. She handed the choker to Lara and turned her attention to the enchanted wedding gown. Audrey ran her hands over the lace sleeves, and they softened to a flowing chiffon under her touch. Unlike Lara, her mother didn’t have to tell the dress what to do; it read her mind. Audrey returned the platinum beading to its original color but then seemed to change her mind, and it shifted to a softer embroidery pattern. “There,” she said. “You need texture to contrast with the sleeves.” The finished effect was an ivory dress with platinum detailing at the bodice, ivory sleeves, and a matching full skirt. “It’s much more romantic.”

Lara studied the changes in the mirror, pleased. “You should enchant dresses more often, Mother.”

Audrey scowled. Taking the necklace from Lara, she fastened it around her daughter’s neck.

Lara touched the choker, admiring it. “Where have you been keeping this bauble?”

“It was Cecile’s,” said Audrey, referring to Lara’s great-grandmother.

Lara thought it looked familiar. “Have you worn this before?”

“No,” said her mother, admiring her alterations to the dress, tugging here and there and shifting the hue and fit under her hands. “You’ve seen it, though. She’s wearing it in the painting.”

She’d passed the painting of her great-grandmother Cecile Cabot that hung in the hallway hundreds of times but never really stopped to study it. Lara tried to recall the choker.

“It belonged to her mother.”

“I didn’t know that.” Lara touched the delicate strands, wondering how she’d never found this in her childhood raids on her mother’s jewelry box.

“They say she was quite famous.” Audrey smiled, spinning Lara around. “You look beautiful in it. And I do like the changes to the dress, but you can’t risk getting caught.”

“I’m in my room. Who is going to catch me but you?”

“You can’t take risks with magic, Lara. People don’t understand. What would happen if that dress began to unwind in the middle of your vows?”

“What you mean is that Todd won’t understand.” She folded her arms.

“Listen to me,” said Audrey. “There are some secrets that you must keep—even from Todd. This is one of them.”

Lara knew that her mother had always wanted them to be “normal.” Instead they were the Cabots—the famous and strange circus family—former owners of Le Cirque Margot. Circus families were rarely normal. As a kid, Audrey had worked the horses in the summers, becoming an expert trick rider, but she’d hated performing for crowds and made it clear that she wanted no part of her family legacy. Instead the young girl had taken the Lippitt Morgan horses from the act and had begun breeding them, turning Cabot Farms into one of the most successful horse breeders in the South. Unable to compete with television, Le Cirque Margot came upon hard times and low attendance, closing in the early 1970s.

Then there were the strange powers—the simple “corrections” that both mother and daughter could perform. So incensed was Audrey when her precocious daughter cast a spell in school in front of other kids that she enchanted the doors and windows as punishment, leaving Lara grounded in the house for a weekend.

Lara turned her back to Audrey. “Can you unzip me? I have to go see Todd.”

“Now?” Audrey put her hands on her hips. “It’s ten. Don’t stay too long. It’s bad luck.”

Lara rolled her eyes and gathered the dress, now changed back to its original version, and placed it on a hanger. She and Todd had given in to another one of Audrey’s old wives’ tales when they’d agreed to spend the night before the wedding apart. Lara would come back to Cabot Farms tonight with her mother while Todd spent the night at their apartment.

Audrey Barnes possessed all the coolness of a Hitchcock blonde, yet she subscribed to all the myths and romance of a Victorian heroine. She’d named Lara for the character in Doctor Zhivago—a film they watched together faithfully each year, a box of tissues between them. Tomorrow Lara’s first dance with her father was going to be the Al Martino version of “Somewhere My Love,” and she knew her mother would be weeping near the wedding cake.

As she drove her Jeep down the winding road from Cabot Farms to the highway, she recalled the disappointed look on her mother’s face when she and Todd announced they were engaged. Audrey didn’t care for him. She’d tried to talk them out of getting married, encouraging them to wait until spring. Lara knew her mother had hoped that given enough time, something would change, but Todd had been Lara’s first love, her first everything. They’d known each other since they were fifteen years old.

Audrey had encouraged them to attend separate colleges, paid for Lara’s semester in Europe, and even tolerated her year on the road with her father’s band, anything to allow the relationship to cool. Todd had also left for college, finishing his sophomore year, then returning home and building a vintage car restoration business.

When they were apart on a break, other boys were only ever interesting to Lara for their likenesses to Todd. From the bevy of Lara look-alikes that Todd dated during their splits, she knew he felt the same way. Whether chemistry or magic, there was some inexplicable pull always guiding them back together.

Had Audrey been younger, Lara was sure that Todd would have been exactly the bad-boy romantic figure that her mother would have swooned over. In fact, her mother had chosen her own version of Todd back in 1974 when she’d married Lara’s father, Jason Barnes.

Lara pulled into the driveway. The house was abuzz with activity and anticipation; lanterns lit the sidewalk to the front door that was now ajar. Relatives from places like Odessa and Toledo perched themselves on sofa arms and decorative side chairs. Plates clanged, and people caught up with one another over decafs and dirty dishes. She wondered why her house wasn’t stuffed full of relatives, like this one.

Through the foyer, she spotted Todd going out the back door, bags of ice in his arms. As he went past, he spied Lara and smiled. His wavy, chin-length dark hair had begun to curl as the evening went on.

“Lara, why didn’t you make him get a haircut?” asked his aunt Tilda, a hairdresser from somewhere in Ohio. Lara rolled her eyes conspiratorially. As if anyone could make Todd do something he didn’t want to do.

Back from delivering ice, Todd kissed his aunt on the cheek. “Ah, you don’t like my hair?” As Todd fixed his gaze on her, Lara could see the old woman straightening herself.

The aunt pulled at a lock, inspecting it. His hair was shiny and brown. Lara noticed a few gray hairs shimmering under the light like tinsel. Had Todd been a vain man, he’d have dyed it before the ceremony. There was an audible exhale from the woman as she smoothed an errant strand, seemingly agreeing that Todd’s hair suited him. “Well…”

Todd wasn’t just handsome, he was beautiful. There was a tragic sexiness to him, like a burgeoning James Dean, that was so intoxicating to women—all women. From the looks of it, even the ones who were related to him.

“I have to go soon.” Lara sank onto the sofa next to him. These days he wore long-sleeved T-shirts because, even though he was nearly twenty-nine, he still cared that his mother hated the sight of the rococo-scrolled tattoos that now decorated both of his forearms.

After an hour, Lara began to rise from the sofa. “I’ll walk you out,” said Todd.

“Let her go, Todd,” another pair of aunts teased. “It’s almost midnight. Bad luck to see the bride on the wedding day.” The overhead fans in the screen porch were rhythmically cycling above them, sending out waves of cool air that made Lara shiver.

“I’ll make sure to send her out by eleven fifty-nine then.” He pushed through the door. “How many times has your mother called you?”

“Twice in the last ten minutes.” Lara slow-walked across the yard toward her Jeep. She looked up at the sky and thought that she should remember to look up more often—the stars seemed low, like they were glowing brighter for her.

“Before you go, I have something to show you.”

Lara spun to see that Todd had begun to walk backward, leading her toward his stepfather’s garage. That he never looked down as he walked and never doubted the sureness of his steps fascinated her. She’d have stumbled over an uneven paver or tree root, spraining an ankle, but not Todd. He was one of the most confident men she’d ever known, comfortable in his own skin to a fault, and it made him generous to others. He had nothing to prove.

“I thought I’d have this finished before the wedding, but I didn’t get it done fast enough.” He opened the door and turned on the light that hummed from a faulty bulb. In front of her was a pickup truck up on a lift, angled like it was taking off in flight. The truck was painted with a smooth dull-gray primer, as though it had been sculpted out of clay. She gasped.

Lara had a thing for vintage pickup trucks—the kind they made into Christmas ornaments, embroidered onto winter pillows, or put in front of businesses to make them old-timey. When she was a kid, they’d had an old truck just like this among the battered old circus equipment. One day it had been hauled away for scrap in one of Audrey’s reorganizations, the dead-grass outline of it remaining for several years like a scar. “It’s a 1948 Chevy.”

“A 1948 Chevy 3100 five-window,” he said. “Straight-six manual. I know how you like that.” He walked around the truck and pointed past the body. About ten feet from the truck she spied a dusty pile of brown metal that looked like mechanical guts that he’d tossed out. “Wait till you see what’s in store for her. Come with me.” Todd led her around the truck to a wooden work space, rolling up his sleeves and pushing his hair back, completely focused on the plans and notes he’d drawn that were sprawled across the space. He placed his hands down on the bench and scanned the photos and sketches.

After he’d left college, failing out of the engineering program at Virginia Tech, Todd had returned to Kerrigan Falls and, on a whim, started a classic car restoration business with a man named Paul Sherman who’d owned an old garage. Over the past two years, Sherman & Sutton Classic Cars had become one of the most sought-after vintage car restoration specialists along the entire East Coast, mostly due to Todd’s reputation as a muscle car restoration expert—Corvettes, Camaros, GTOs, Chevelles, and Mustangs. Lara would never have thought that an obsession with ripping apart car engines in his teens would turn into a livelihood he loved, let alone one that was so lucrative.

“You see here”—Todd pointed to a photo of the very same Chevy with missing headlights and mismatched paint that resembled patches—“the fenders had rust all over.” Lara saw from the photo that the entire truck had been a dull weathered brown when he’d found it. So engrossed was he in shaping this metal puzzle into a work of art and seemingly unhappy about some detail, he appeared to be lost in his own world, his arms folded and the line of his square jaw pulsing.

While Lara should have been looking at the posted pictures of the truck in various stages of ruin, she studied his face instead. Todd’s long nose could have been a hair too feminine if not for the elegant bump at the top. When he walked into a room, people stopped their conversations and looked up, wondering if he was someone famous, perhaps a film star returning to his hometown for a holiday. That he didn’t care, that he stood here agonizing over a sketch of a 1948 Chevy truck as a gift for her, was what truly made Todd Sutton beautiful to Lara. He never noticed the effect he had on people—or if he did, it never mattered to him.

“Where did you find this?”

“Oh, that’s the special thing.” He smiled devilishly, his hazel eyes shining, and pulled from a file folder a photo of the truck with faded livery painted on the side. “Recognize it?”

Lara took the photo from his hand and inhaled sharply. It was an old black-and-white image, the familiar logo painted on it almost overexposed in the sunlight—she felt a jolt of melancholy. It was her old truck. LE CIRQUE MARGOT.

Decorated in its circus livery, the old truck had once hauled a two-person crew to eighteen towns with the purpose of sticking posters up on every telephone pole, barn, and local business that would post them—the markets and pharmacies being the most likely prospects. This Chevy had sat among the rusted and abandoned circus props and trailers at Lara’s house for years, grass and vines growing up through the floorboards as though the ground were reclaiming it.

“So, I was driving by an old amusement park supply in Culpeper, and I saw it from the road. It was hidden behind some old roller-coaster cars. I didn’t know it was the old truck that sat out in your field until I was scrubbing it and saw the faded sign. Something about the lettering looked familiar, so I went to the historical society to see if there were any old photos of it in Le Cirque Margot memorabilia. And sure enough, I found plenty.”

A blonde was posed leaning against the front bumper. She wore shorts and had legs that would have made Betty Grable envious. Turning back to look at the truck, Lara smoothed its rounded fender. This truck had belonged to the Margot.

“I had hoped to give it to you as a wedding present, but it’s frankly been a bitch to find parts for, so it won’t be ready in time, I’m afraid.” He laughed a little too loudly, and she tilted her head and glanced up at him. Was he jittery? Todd was never nervous. He was searching her face, trying to read her, hoping this offering had meant something to her.

She pulled him toward her and kissed him, hard, then whispered in his ear, “This is the most thoughtful thing that anyone has ever done for me. I love it.”

He looked down and his forehead touched hers. “Lara, we both know that I haven’t always been so thoughtful.”

It was true. Throughout their history, there had been many transgressions, many girls, then—as they got older—women. While she chalked it up to youth, Lara had slammed doors on him, thrown beautiful bunches of roses at him, ripped up apology notes and his poor attempts at poetry. She’d had revenge dates and surprisingly fallen in love with one of them for a short time but always returned to this man.

“You aren’t getting cold feet, are you?” Lara tilted her head, only slightly joking.

He didn’t touch her, and for some reason it felt sobering and honest that he didn’t. He wasn’t trying to charm her. “I’m sorry that I had to grow up—that you didn’t meet me now instead of then.”

Lara laughed this comment off, but he didn’t. She realized as she looked around the room—the photos, the thoughtful gift suspended above her—that the change that had come over him in the last few years had been so gradual, it had escaped her notice. He leaned his tall frame against the workbench and faced her, folding his arms. “I was someone who had to grow into love. Not that I had to grow to love you. I always loved you, but I didn’t know how to love you, so what you got was the equivalent of an attempt at a work of art from someone who didn’t know how to draw. I said the words, but we both know often they were hollow. At times it was the very absence of you that shaped me. But that’s what it is, isn’t it? Both the presence and the absence of a person. The sum of it all. As a result, I feel it more deeply now. Love. My love for you.”

The silence between them was thick. She could tell he didn’t expect a response from her. There was so much shared history—both good and bad. Yet it was the things that were unsaid that charged the room. Lara met his eyes. She saw this wedding gift for what it was—an offering—more a piece of himself than even marrying her could ever be. Every inch of that truck had been shaped and sanded by his hands—it was created by him for her.

He took her hand. Her lips met his. Todd was a great kisser—slow, deliberate. She knew exactly where to press against him to fill the spaces between them. He put his hands on her face and the kisses became deeper, harder. As they pulled apart, he caught a strand of her hair, twirling it around his finger and studying it.

“It’s nearly midnight.” She didn’t want to go.

“Ah, shit, not midnight,” he teased. He turned back to the perfectly sanded truck in front of them. “Here is the color she’ll be when she’s all done.” Taking her hand, he led her around and showed her a sample—the original Le Cirque Margot deep-red color that resembled a ripe Red Delicious apple.

She could easily imagine a lifetime of this. Smiling, she wished they could just go back to their apartment and their bed tonight. When they got back from their honeymoon in Greece, there was even a house, a stately Victorian with a turret and a wraparound porch, that they were looking at buying. “I really do have to go.”

Lara looked back at the truck before he turned out the light. “Will I see you tomorrow?” It was a joke, and she said it lightly as she opened the door and walked out onto the sidewalk.

“Nothing could keep me away.”