The summer of 1923 in Monroe was hot and damp and sang with a near-constant hum of insects all and sundry. The small children who lived in the poorer part of town ran around buck naked in the summer heat, covered in dirt and grass stains but cool and comfortable as a garden cucumber. Their mamas would look after them from inside the house, arms too far plunged in the washing to do more than holler half-hearted admonishments out the window.
My own mama, Jacqueline Tyler née Delahoussaye, stood on the front porch of our small home, sweeping off leaf debris from the willows that surrounded the house. It needed a fresh coat of paint, had for about fifteen years, and the wood, worn and gray, showed through an ancient veil of white lead. The house used to belong to my daddy, a man called Peter Tyler who hailed from Tennessee before he settled down in Monroe with my mother, but he died before I was old enough to know him. My sister had only been four at the time. She said he was a kind man with a tanned face from picking cotton all day, and I didn't have much choice but to believe her because we didn't have a single photograph of him.
Mama said Reinette looked more like him than I did, but neither of us took after him in particular. To me he was some kind of solid dream just beyond my grasp. We were proof that he lived, but his memory wasted away for lack of a material germ to flourish in my mind. He was a man I loved on principle, the way a girl loves the idea of having a father who loves her in return, but it was a love that lacked substance, was faceless and impersonal as much as it was, still, constant.
I walked along the dirt road outside of town that eventually gave way to the smaller dirt path that came up to our house. I wore a loose-fitting dress and a pair of flat boots I had for work, but despite their soft, old leather, my feet ached from the strain of standing all day, walking two miles into town and then two miles back. The further one walked out of Monroe, the more one was liable to find themselves in dense Louisiana wilderness—nothing like the bayous further south, but a kind of wilderness that all the same begged exploring. As a small girl I had wandered only a safe distance from home so that Mama or sometimes Reinette could better keep an eye on me, but as I grew older I went further and discovered a willow tree so large that its wide, wilting branches left space enough between them and the trunk that I could run and jump freely within it. I didn't take Reinette to my tree when she joined me on adventures, which was just as well because I'm certain she too had her own sanctuary that I knew nothing of, perhaps in the branches of a thick old gum tree or by the spray of cattails next to the little pond just a way off from the house. We were close enough to love each other, Reinette and I, but not enough that there weren't some secrets, always some amount of closely guarded privacy.
When I was fourteen I stopped school and began working, stopping too my adventures into our thick wilderness. Reinette had left for the first time, and Mama's washing work wasn't bringing in enough money. No one wanted a laundress they had to travel two miles for when they could find one just as good in town. So I worked first as a cotton picker like my daddy had, but it was seasonal work and the wages were poor. I came home late in the evenings—we worked as long as the summer sun would allow—covered in sweat and dirt, my skin burned in the way that daddy's, Mama said, had tanned: thoroughly. She would let me eat my supper with one hand as she scraped the dirt and grime from the other, switching when she judged each clean enough. We did this all of late summer and into autumn until the harvest was over. I didn't return the next year. Mama didn't let me go back, but she never said why, and I didn't ask because I hated it.
When spring came I found work at a small dry goods store in town run by a man called Henrik and his wife. They needed another set of hands, and because I could count and read better than most folks, he hired me to work six days a week with good pay. At first his wife always looked at me suspiciously, had not allowed me to be in the same room alone with her husband for more than five minutes. I didn't blame her. I was young, and by the accounts of others, though nothing close to Reinette's effortless beauty, pretty enough that later on I realized Mrs. Ameline Henrik saw me as a real threat to whatever variety of marital bliss she'd built with her husband. She ought to have given him more credit. They were middle-aged and childless but not for lack of trying, and if Ameline remained a little stiff over the years, Mr. Henrik became something as close to a father as I would ever get.
We moved everyday goods like soap, seed, paper, and cloth. Mr. Henrik stocked grain and rice at more expensive prices than the grocer, but they weren't a big moneymaker, and the people who did buy them where willing to pay extra for the convenience of buying their husband's tobacco and their pantry necessities at the same time.
Besides textiles and tobacco, Mr. Henrik's biggest profits came from his 'exotic' tinned foods. No one else in Monroe had the strange delicacies that lined the shelves of Henrik's Dry Goods and Imported Foodstuffs, which were mainly pickled sundries imported from his European trade connections he established during the war. We had everything from herring to capers, gherkins to sauerkraut, even chocolate from Belgium and macarons from Paris in all colors of the rainbow. I had tried them all in turn, each so different from my mother's hearty but plain cooking, each a wonder and a glimpse beyond the parish limits.
It was a day in early spring when I walked back from minding the store, my leather boots scraping along the dusty path up to the house, the sun still lolling lazily in the late afternoon sky. Mama swept the leaves and blossoms from the willows off the porch with an ancient broom, her hands cracked and dry from a day's worth of washing. She spotted me from her perch and smiled in an expectant kind of way.
"Gotta letter from your sister today," she hollered, pulling a white square from the front pocket of her apron. I bounced up the steps to the house and kissed her on the cheek. The letter was unopened.
"Should I read it now, mama?" I asked, bending down to unlace my boots and slide them off. My feet were sore and I was sure there was a blister forming on my toe. It meant I probably needed to get a new pair, which would for a while cause blisters of their own until they were broken in. No, what I needed was a bicycle, that way I could save my feet from the daily four-mile round-trip journey. But we didn't have the money. Not yet, anyway.
Usually Mama would insist on letting me take my time, fix me a glass of tea, and go back to her chores while she waited for me to come and help with supper. But today was letter day, which meant that all patience was gone with the wind.
I smiled and took the letter from her. She sat herself in the rocker by the door and smoothed out her apron in an attempt to maintain her calm. I, too, was anxious to hear from Reinette, for it had been almost three months since we'd last had word.
"'Dear Mama and Rose,
I'm sorry it's been so long since my last letter. I hope this finds you well. I'm still in New Orleans and I'm of half a mind to stay forever. I don't think I've ever been to a place more beautiful and full of people. But I'll be seeing you soon. Louis bought a stake in a traveling circus styled in the old French way, and he says he wants to see his investment. A traveling circus! I thought he was putting me on! What a funny thing to do, but he's convinced it will make him a tidy profit, and when he gets it in his mind to do something it's as good as done.
Anyway, the circus will be in Monroe within the week before it moves on north. Maybe you've seen it in the paper. We'll be arriving behind the circus whenever Louis says we'll go—it's entirely his notion, and all of his friends are at his disposal. Men are strange creatures. I'll write to you when we leave New Orleans. I'm so keen to see you both.
Love as always,
Reinette'"
I folded up the letter and held it in my hands. I hadn't seen my sister in a year and a half, ever since she ran of with her latest beau, a man in his late thirties named Louis Navarre, a dubious but wealthy businessman in New Orleans.
Mama sat quietly in her chair, rocking back and forth, the treads thrumming over the seams of the floorboards. "Will you read it again?" she asked. "I like to hear your voice."
I nodded and began again, my sister's words filtered through my voice. The first time Reinette ran off, she was barely eighteen. She went all the way to St. Louis with a man called Charles Williams who showered her with gifts and what she thought was love. She seemed old to me then, wiser and more superior. She'd taken a job in a small hotel in the middle of Monroe where travelers of all sorts stayed, usually on their way to or from New Orleans or Baton Rouge. That's how she met him. He charmed her and made promises while she poured him drinks.
People, even the smartest of them, even the ones who are practically worshipped by little sisters, can be fooled. But Reinette wasn't one to be fooled twice, and eight months later, after my mother had cried more times than I had seen her cry before, even more than when daddy died, she showed up at the end of our dusty little path, a suitcase we'd never seen before packed to bursting, wearing a knowing look that bore no shame, that was, I believe, a look victorious.
Reinette wanted to see the world, she told us, wanted to see new places and meet people who liked talking. Sick of cleaning and serving in the hotel, tired of being poor and wanting, she wanted to do things, real things. She wanted, she said, to live at the pleasure of the world.
Mama hadn't asked Reinette what she'd done when she'd been gone. Maybe it didn't need asking. By then I was going on sixteen, and I knew what it meant when an unmarried woman ran off with a man. I knew that it was a good thing we lived a spell out of town. If we didn't, we'd have been the objects of some disdain: the family of a woman ruined. But I didn't think of her in that way. She'd made a real choice to go on an adventure. She left Monroe, if only temporarily, and lived. To me she was braver and more beautiful than ever.
After Charles she still ran off from time to time, but never for longer than a month, usually coming back with a great beaming smile and a wonderful story of each new place she saw. If Mama ever thought about telling her off, she never acted on it. I think she knew there was no telling Reinette what to do and that if she tried, there was a chance Reinette wouldn't come back. It wasn't until a year and a half ago when she met Louis, a man she described as smart and handsome and rich, that she left, it seemed, for good. We received the occasional letter, but the more letters we received, the more it became clear she had no immediate plans to return, until now.
After I finished it the second time, I searched Mama's eyes for some kind of reaction, but there didn't seem to be any there. She usually lived for the days we received letters from Reinette. They were so few and far between that the effect of one flushed Mama's cheeks and dominated conversation for weeks.
"It'll be a good thing, won't it, Mama, seein' Reinette? Maybe she'll bring us some of that coffee you like so much."
She sighed and gave me a weak sort of smile, patted my knee and brought her hand up to cup my cheek.
"You're a good girl, honey. Thank you for readin' the letter to me." Mama stood up and brushed off her apron, though there was nothing to brush off. She grabbed the broom and walked back inside, the screen door slapping shut behind her.
I took the letter and read it again to myself, studying Reinette's tight, neat cursive that she spent so long perfecting. I knew that I should have gone inside to help Mama with supper, but all I could think of was the letter. As excited as I was to see my sister again, I was mesmerized by the idea of a circus. The furthest I'd been from home was the eastern-most edge of Ouachita Parish when Reinette and I took a ride in Mr. Henrik's new Little Six. The wind blew in our faces and the dust from the road flew up in furious clouds; we had never gone so fast in our lives. It was the next night that I found a letter on the kitchen table saying she'd gone away with Louis.
I tried to shake the memory of the last time I'd seen my sister and thought instead of wonders that would come to town with the circus. I'd never seen one before, only knew that a circus was supposed to be the greatest show on Earth. Having never seen any show at all, I was inclined to believe what I'd heard. But I knew one thing well enough: the circus meant new people. The circus meant a wondrous new world right inside of Monroe.
The circus, I thought, sweeping my hair back out of my face before going inside—was an opportunity.