REMEMBERING PEANUT by Emily Collins
Elephant
/El*e*phant/
Noun
A large, grey, four-legged mammal
Elephant
A five-toed pachyderm
Elephant
As used in a sentence: My favorite animal is an elephant.
Source: Liza James, biggest waste of life in my English class.
As used in another sentence:
Remember this, elephants have the best memory. They never forget.
Source: Old saying. Presumably passed down from a wrinkly man shaking his cane.
Last sentence
That darn elephant over there killed my father.
Source: Yours truly.
I saw a circus in the room. I was sitting in art class peeping over my canvas eyeing the large peppermint smirking from the pedestal. We were meant to recreate what we saw. I looked around at my fellow classmates and was disgusted to find all of those savages completely absorbed in their work. Mrs. Doyle, our babysitter instructor, had excused herself from the room in order to let the true artist within ourselves rise to the surface. The cigarettes in her purse jingled like pocket change as she brushed past me. Doyle, with all of her dimples and hopeless optimism, left us alone to die and reinvent ourselves in front of that hard candy.
My hands trembled as I picked up the smooth rich crayon that contained the answers. Slowly, I sketched the outlines of that red-and-white tent I experienced last summer. This same tent I must tell you, protected us from the rain but not from the so-called harmless creatures lurking inside. Not too long ago I was fourteen years old and had a father with a complete set of unbroken bones. These were the happy times, the moments that made sense despite having a dad who was clearly too absurd for this natural world.
I guess I should’ve known my father was a doomed man. This sick story all begins with his disastrous name. My dad’s full name was Bennie Oliver “Peanut” Hopkins. Not only was I related to someone whose name competed with the length of The Magna Carta, my father was undeniably proud of this name he inherited and lived up to it daily. Dad wouldn’t have received the name Peanut if he hadn’t, as he so proudly put it, earned that title.
On my twelfth birthday, Dad gave me the truth about his name. I rose out of bed and stuck my clammy feet into a pair of wool slippers. I slid down the hall and my heart leapt towards the big wrapped box on the breakfast table. A beam of light trickled down to my present and my hands glowed in the sun as I tore away the wrapping paper. I opened the lid and found the biggest disappointment glaring back at me. My father had taken an old dictionary that’s been in our bookshelf ever since I was a baby and gave it to me for my birthday. There was a bright pink tab marking a word I presumed to mean something along the lines of insolent little cheapskate. I opened the dictionary praying to find a hundred dollar bill folded in the seam. Instead, dust jumped out at me from the book and I sneezed away its age. I removed the tab and read the word “Anaphylaxis.” The first three letters were circled in red. I read the definition and threw the dictionary to the floor. Fuming, I opened every drawer in the kitchen in hopes of finding at least one match to burn that dictionary – if not the entire house – to the ground. There was no cake but it didn’t matter for I was layered with so much hatred for my dad, there was nothing he could’ve done to appease the spoiled child inside of me. Out of all the things I felt that day, I could not experience power. My birthday was the one day out of the year where I felt like I could roll everyone between my palms as if they were dough. I was a motherless child living in a two-story house with three large, older brothers and a father who drank danger every morning. I didn’t exactly control the world or the house I grew up in. Birthdays were my father’s way of offering me a peace treaty as compensation for all of the battles I had to face. That year, however, there were no offerings; just dictionaries and a desire to burn things. I didn’t hear Dad step into the kitchen. “Oh, good you’re up. Happy birthday, kiddo. Did you open your present?” I glared at him and he snorted. “Care for an explanation?” he asked. I nodded my head sardonically. He cleared his throat.
“Well, when I turned fourteen.”
“Dad, I’m twelve.”
“When I turned fourteen, my lips swelled till they were the size of plums. My brother had given me a large bag of peanuts he stole from the town circus. He thought it was the perfect gift. ‘Stolen pleasures’ is what he called them. ‘Crack a nut, heal your soul’ he said. While the aesthetics my brother found in carnival food was respectable, I just couldn’t favor the effects it had on my body. It wasn’t the first time I’d turn red. When Mother entered the room, her swollen belly growled in distaste. She said that when I was three years old, I ate some nuts out of the palm of her hand then turned ‘as red as a beat and as large as a pumpkin.’ When I turned seven, I ate some again at school and the teacher nearly fainted. I remember laughing uncontrollably until I hit the ground. On my fourteenth birthday I felt my heart stop and my lips kissed the ground. You see, I could never remember what was so deadly for me because that’s the very thing that compelled me to sample the dangers lurking behind those shells. I am allergic to peanuts but never have I been allergic to life. During the attacks, I couldn’t breathe. My ears would steam, blocking out the panics around me. My insides felt like they were shuffling cards and I gambled with time by not calling for help immediately. As soon as the mask was put over my face and the needles were shoved into my arms, I’d feel around for more diseases to swallow. I didn’t like being confined but I figured that if I had to suffer, I’d rather die a little on my own terms. So, I had my middle name legally hyphenated with Peanut at the end so I’d never forget but always be tempted.”
Dad finished his story with both palms up facing me like eyes in a dark cave. My father only gestured this way when honesty couldn’t pull at his tongue any further. His hands were rough and smudged with dirt stains from the 60s. He was double-jointed in one hand and his pinky involuntarily turned upward like a cane. I looked at the dictionary and at the man in front of me. “So what’s the point of all this?” Dad grinned. “Well, meanings are kind of important aren’t they? Figured what better way for you to know the definition of everything there is? Also, the word I circled for you contains the first three letters of your name. What better way to remember a little bit of you too?”
He kissed me on the head and turned on his heel. He whistled into the hallway then stopped and poked his head back into the room. “Also, today is a promise.”
“A promise for what?” I asked cautiously.
“To one day legally take you to the circus.” His eyes glowed in the distance. “And watch it steal your little heart.” When Dad left, I quietly placed the dictionary in the trash.
That wasn’t the only thing of my father’s I threw away. If I had known I’d one day lose him to the most ridiculous way imaginable, I would’ve savored everything he ever gave me. I had my father’s death but I was too young to remember my mother’s. Family secrets can blanket a lot of pain but children are the ones sewn into them. I’ve always been more involved in matters I never wanted to deal with and I learned a lot through touchy subjects and stories my brothers would whisper to me late at night. These are the same stories that reshaped the image I had of my dad. The tales I heard from little birds told me of how Mom was sick all the time and how Dad was rarely there. My oldest brother Job once told me that he saw the back of Dad more than he did the front. While I saw both sides of my father plenty of times as a child, I couldn’t help but feel that that is exactly what he was: two-sided. My dad was a daredevil and while he’d jump off a building in a heartbeat, he sometimes appeared too mortified to raise a family. Most of the time I tried to push these thoughts into the back of my mind but they always came bubbling to the surface. The worst are the ones that can’t go away. I once heard my other brother Luke say that Dad was jumping out of an airplane the day mom swallowed her life away. She went cold with me in her arms. I can only imagine the way her head limped in that rocking chair and the way that beam of light shone through the window highlighting the little child that couldn’t keep her mother alive. Hearing such words from other people is like walking around with a stack of books on your head. The pressure can almost kill you but at least you have all the knowledge about the life you never wanted to learn. Then again, I could be wrong. Dad always said there is nothing admirable about being melodramatic. We should all paddle through rapids instead.
If my father were still alive and saw me now sitting in an art class, he would have been severely disappointed. While Dad always had an appreciation for the arts, there was nothing he loathed more than any of us sitting still. When my brothers and I would graze on the couch on those banal Saturday afternoons that stuck like candy, Dad would leap from behind the couch and whip us with a fly swatter until we buzzed around the room for our lives. Job, my oldest and most sophisticated older brother would curse and say, “Good God, Father. Don’t you think we are much too old for this?” Dad stopped waving the swatter and spat, “Yes and I am much too young. You should’ve seen yourselves. It’s as if Death itself took over the couch. I own children not urns. Now turn off the T.V. and go make something of yourselves.”
My older twin brothers Luke and Donnie, both beefy in size and in character, shrugged their shoulders. “What do you expect us to do?” Luke asked skeptically. Donnie eyed the T.V remote wishfully and Job shuffled the phone in his pocket. Dad’s face hardened. He looked at us as if we were the biggest failures known to man. As I watched Luke scratch his crotch mindlessly, I gained an understanding for my father. His opal eyes hardened and froze like images in a kaleidoscope after too many twists. He glared at us and even through the hard lines, I could tell he hadn’t aged one bit. The wrinkles around his eyes dispersed like the fireworks set off in his youth. His wispy hair wasn’t just as white as snow but as white as the wolves he faced when he journeyed to Alaska to meet my mother’s family. “They had teeth THIS big,” Dad gestured to me one six-year-old evening back when bed time stories were cool. “The Mama wolf had red beady eyes and pointy spectacles. She and everyone else howled at my existence and nearly ripped me to shreds as I rescued your mother and took her away from them forever.” That afternoon, Dad’s chin was strong from all of the punches life had dealt him over the years. For decades Dad tended to these sores by jumping off of cliffs and airplanes in search for answers in the clouds and sea. I remember the way he stared at us and how he couldn’t believe he co-created such brainwashed children, how he co-raised such boring teenagers. I remember this notion so clearly because it is the last image I have of my father on the day before he died.
“Yeah, Dad. What are we supposed to do?”
Dad narrowed his eyes and lurched towards the T.V.
“He wouldn’t,” Job whispered.
But that was the thing about my Dad. He always would. I sighed then ducked abruptly as our cheap television set flew out the window and into the neighborhood. The window shattered and glass pierced the ground like sharp icicles too old for a cavern. Mrs. Owens, who was out jogging her perfect little body, screamed as the television nearly punctured her left foot. Mrs. Owens saw me through the broken window and sneered. I smiled at her delicately and watched her call the authorities once again. Job sighed and put his face in his hand. He left the room and sulked up the stairs. Donnie snorted and put his broad arms behind his swelling head. He turned to his brother for an answer.
Luke never lost a single wrestling match at his school but always managed to get pinned by the silent rage inside him. Some are just born with it and my brother learned to control himself with protein shakes and inferior beings struggling beneath his ham-shaped body. But there are some people who can’t be touched. My father never failed to push Luke into a new kind of ring altogether and watch him lose every time. Luke’s eyes lit as he stomped towards the fireplace. He took the framed photograph of Dad sky diving with the Oldest Lady in the World and stepped on it. Dad nodded his head calmly while Donnie flipped over the couch. Dad and I watched as Luke and Donnie teamed up and destroyed the living room. I grew up with boys all my life so it feels almost pointless to even document that smell. Any reasonable young girl would understand. That smell that tastes like sneakers rotting on a telephone wire and baby powder trying to cover up the lies. Similarly to how your leg smells after it’s been assaulted by a dog in the park, this stench seeps through the walls like cheap blood in a horror film and remains there forever. While my three older brothers were the smelliest beings I ever encountered, my father never had an odor. It wasn’t because of his love for justice and revenge that made my dad the archetype of how I later defined masculinity. It was his energy and the eternal faith he bestowed in me that proved I wasn’t just some typical girl doodling in an art class.
By the time the cops showed up, our living room was a surreal mess. The T.V was gone, the couch was torn in two, glass snuck up on our feet and all our little clocks melted. I can just imagine Mrs. Owens shouting the entire spectacle into her pink phone. The woman hated us. She tried to save me one time by taking me under her bare wing. It was her Christian duty to try and take me from my gosh-awful family. I spent the night at her house once. She had two daughters and they didn’t grow up with the same values I understood as a child. It seems that ever since the night I dared Crissy and Jeannette Owens to eat fecal matter, the Friends in Blue appeared at our house more than so often. I answered the door. That time it was Officer Kendal.
“Hey Jack,” I said.
“How’s it going Ana?”
I shrugged. “It’s going I guess.”
“Is your old man around?”
“He went to his room about an hour ago. Why?”
“Oh, nothing I’m sure. Anything going on that I should know about?”
“Nothing short of the usual.”
Jack Kendall was a heavy-set man with teeth the size of belt buckles. He was the county sheriff and became one of my dad’s many admirers the day Dad got out of a ticket. He told Kendal that he was speeding in order to see the Corpse Flower bloom before anyone else. This was no lie. It was also, according to Kendall, a “new one.”
“Well, try to take it easy. There’ve been some noise complaints.”
“Sure thing.”
“And tell Peanut I gave him these.” It was a list of little-known mountain ranges throughout the country. “I hear they’re incredible. Have a good night AnaCorynn.”
I put the list on the fridge, next to pictures of Dad doing things that gave me a mini heart attack each time. I wanted to make tea and when I reached for my favorite mug with cockroaches painted on the sides, I noticed two tickets sticking out of the rim. Any plans I’d originally had for the next day were cancelled. I was to go to the circus with the man who never broke a promise.
I went into our desolate living room at two in the morning. The most inconvenient thing about that house was that there was no upstairs bathroom. My stomach cramps produced dehydrated nightmares that sent me running down the stairs praying for toilets and glasses of water. After I relieved myself, I almost didn’t notice Dad kneeling on the carpet. In retrospect, I wonder how many of life’s amazingly twisted moments I would’ve missed if I didn’t always need to take a dump.
I approached Dad and knelt down next to him. He was holding the broken picture of him skydiving with the Oldest Lady in the World. I put my head on his shoulder and he covered one of my ears with his hand causing half of my world to sound blurry. When he spoke, I could smell the whisky tangoing with his breath. When I listened, his words were sobering and raw.
“I did it for her” I heard him say.
“You were so young but I loved her all the same. She wanted to see everything. I wanted to give it to her. She was just so sick. Couldn’t leave the house.” I tried to ignore his tears and imagine him doing something crazy like kayaking down a river full of piranhas or bungee jumping off a bridge. Nothing fit. He mumbled quickly and I caught words such as “so young” and “look just like her.” He started to hum and I cried a little beside him. It was the most dangerous thing we ever did.
While sitting on the bleachers at the circus, I spotted things I never wanted to see. From the animals that were abused in the arena to the humans that only hurt themselves by watching, I sat next to my Dad in wonder at how the government still allowed such a thing to happen. The smell of cotton candy tickled my throat and I sneezed every time the popcorn man with bad breath shouted over my head. Much to my eternal embarrassment, I saw Charlie Webster, a boy in my class walk across the stands. Dad watched my eyes follow him longingly. “Is that a boyfriend of yours over there?” he nudged me. “I’ve got a bat in the trunk.”
“Dad, you couldn’t even hit a dead body. And no, he’s not my boyfriend. He doesn’t go for well, you know. Girls like me basically.” It was true. Charlie Webster enjoyed spending time with girls like Mrs. Owens’ brats or simpletons like Liza James who think elephants are cute. They fit together like magnets and prance around in upper-class oblivion with shiny shoes on their feet. They do this with impeccably good looks and outstanding GPAs. I’ve always been allergic to that sort of trend. Dad swore and lit a cigar. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” He blew a cloud of smoke into my face. “AnaCorynn, you are the weirdest little girl I’ve ever met and I guess I have only myself to blame. But, you are also the most beautiful and if that little shit over there can’t see it, then he isn’t worth your God-given time. You’ve got power, kid. Try using it to your advantage for once.” I blushed and tried focusing on the man sticking his head inside a lion so I could hide my gratitude. I noticed late audience members entering through the sides. They had to go through the metal detectors as we had once done earlier. It was as if the geniuses who put the detectors there thought one of us was going to bomb a show that was doing a good job of that on its own. A little boy set off the machine and the parents watched in horror as their son was frisked and stripped to the ground. He flailed on his back like a bug and the security guard barked an order into his walkie-talkie. My eye twitched. Dad eyed the child. “Nero fiddles while Rome burns,” he chuckled darkly after taking a long drag. We watched silently as the bearded lady pole danced and the human “giant” let a miniature poodle prance on his shoulders. Even after all the tortures we witnessed that afternoon, nothing could have prepared us for the elephant named Tipper and the way she lived up to her silly little name.
The ring master was an orange midget named Pepper. He had a large nose and gorilla-like hands that gestured openly to the mess he created. From the stands he looked like a dancing polka dot and his movements gave me motion sickness. Pepper used a megaphone to get our attention but that just caused everyone to talk over him to their neighbors. In many ways, I felt pity for people like Pepper and my dad. Once upon the mid-twentieth century, the circus defined magic. Now, due to the factories I breathe on every corner and the special effects I absorb from the movie screen, the circus has become nothing but an ending dream with false promises and cheap graphics. There is no longer such a thing as imagination inside a tent. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Pepper gritted through his teeth, “I give you the amazing and spectacular Tipper.” The audience clapped mindlessly as the large animal entered the arena. Its eyes drooped like curtains and its trunk dangled like tired arms against a car door. After a couple of clowns led Tipper into the center of the arena, the orange midget had the audacity to ask for our help.
Audience participation is undoubtedly one of the deadliest sins no one likes to talk about. Being an audience member is a constant battle within itself and when some midget decides to break that fourth wall, misery takes its toll. Pepper raised the megaphone to his lips and uttered the six words every introvert dreads to hear: “I’m going to need a volunteer.” Like Hell you did Pepper. Immediately, Dad grabbed my arm. I hissed and tried to bring it down but he wouldn’t budge. “You’ll thank me one day” he said. Mortified, I noticed that my arm, out of all the 1200 arms there were, was the only one raised. Pepper turned toward us and squinted. As a man who obviously had his hands raised for him too many times in his life, called on my father instead. “You, the man with the cigar. Come on down and meet Tipper.” The elephant yawned. Dad turned to me and grinned. “Well, what do ya know? This’ll be interesting.” At the time, none of us had any idea.
We will never know what Pepper wanted Dad to do on stage. He stood by Tipper’s behind and waved to me from the ground. I smiled and wriggled my fingers. I was at the circus and my father was the main attraction. I was embarrassed yet accepting. After all, he had been the greatest performance of my life. As for Pepper, he had taught his elephant many tricks but “sit” was clearly not one of them. By the time my Dad stopped waving his hand frantically, Tipper’s behind flopped to the ground with my father underneath it. For once, the audience was silent. The last thing I saw were my Dad’s palms sticking out from underneath Tipper’s large and hairy ass.
My world burned. The tent fell and my throat froze from the avalanche inside of me. My skin turned the color of lava as I grew short of breath. I fell to the ground and strangers breathed into me. I pushed them aside and gasped for something ordinary. Anything to awake me from that outdated nightmare. Screams and apologies flooded my veins but the laughter I heard shook me cold. Not because I thought that laughing at such a sight was cruel but because a part of me thought it was pretty ingenious as well. The only difference was, I expected Dad to stand up with Tipper far above his head and that unshakeable grin spread around his face announcing the end of the joke. My daddy was my superhero but elephant tushy was his Kryptonite. I didn’t realize where I was until my brothers arrived and forced me to explain everything.
Dad once told me that meanings are important but after my experiences at the circus that summer, I finally understand how wrong he was. Explanations are irrelevant because more than anyone would like to realize, they don’t exist. His death epitomizes my point. Even the pastor at the funeral couldn’t refrain from saying, “I guess it’s true when they say elephants can’t resist a Peanut.” My father knew I was strong but he didn’t realize how powerless I am to the caustic sensations I affront when greeting the unexpected. Every year I get older but like the father taken from me, I am incurably naive. I still look for the beauty in things. I act on impulse and no dare has ever intimidated me. But I am driven by my past. It beats me over the head and I never know what it’s trying to say until I am alone.
By the time my art instructor came back inside, the peppermint on the stool was gone. I looked behind my canvas and saw my father smiling and believing from the center of the room. He offered those hands to the world. I glanced at him and nodded. Slowly, I took my charcoal and began to write. I documented what was true. The bell rang and I packed up my things. I glanced at him one more time, took him in and left with not a single detail forgotten.
//ww
/El*e*phant/
Noun
A large, grey, four-legged mammal
Elephant
A five-toed pachyderm
Elephant
As used in a sentence: My favorite animal is an elephant.
Source: Liza James, biggest waste of life in my English class.
As used in another sentence:
Remember this, elephants have the best memory. They never forget.
Source: Old saying. Presumably passed down from a wrinkly man shaking his cane.
Last sentence
That darn elephant over there killed my father.
Source: Yours truly.
I saw a circus in the room. I was sitting in art class peeping over my canvas eyeing the large peppermint smirking from the pedestal. We were meant to recreate what we saw. I looked around at my fellow classmates and was disgusted to find all of those savages completely absorbed in their work. Mrs. Doyle, our babysitter instructor, had excused herself from the room in order to let the true artist within ourselves rise to the surface. The cigarettes in her purse jingled like pocket change as she brushed past me. Doyle, with all of her dimples and hopeless optimism, left us alone to die and reinvent ourselves in front of that hard candy.
My hands trembled as I picked up the smooth rich crayon that contained the answers. Slowly, I sketched the outlines of that red-and-white tent I experienced last summer. This same tent I must tell you, protected us from the rain but not from the so-called harmless creatures lurking inside. Not too long ago I was fourteen years old and had a father with a complete set of unbroken bones. These were the happy times, the moments that made sense despite having a dad who was clearly too absurd for this natural world.
I guess I should’ve known my father was a doomed man. This sick story all begins with his disastrous name. My dad’s full name was Bennie Oliver “Peanut” Hopkins. Not only was I related to someone whose name competed with the length of The Magna Carta, my father was undeniably proud of this name he inherited and lived up to it daily. Dad wouldn’t have received the name Peanut if he hadn’t, as he so proudly put it, earned that title.
On my twelfth birthday, Dad gave me the truth about his name. I rose out of bed and stuck my clammy feet into a pair of wool slippers. I slid down the hall and my heart leapt towards the big wrapped box on the breakfast table. A beam of light trickled down to my present and my hands glowed in the sun as I tore away the wrapping paper. I opened the lid and found the biggest disappointment glaring back at me. My father had taken an old dictionary that’s been in our bookshelf ever since I was a baby and gave it to me for my birthday. There was a bright pink tab marking a word I presumed to mean something along the lines of insolent little cheapskate. I opened the dictionary praying to find a hundred dollar bill folded in the seam. Instead, dust jumped out at me from the book and I sneezed away its age. I removed the tab and read the word “Anaphylaxis.” The first three letters were circled in red. I read the definition and threw the dictionary to the floor. Fuming, I opened every drawer in the kitchen in hopes of finding at least one match to burn that dictionary – if not the entire house – to the ground. There was no cake but it didn’t matter for I was layered with so much hatred for my dad, there was nothing he could’ve done to appease the spoiled child inside of me. Out of all the things I felt that day, I could not experience power. My birthday was the one day out of the year where I felt like I could roll everyone between my palms as if they were dough. I was a motherless child living in a two-story house with three large, older brothers and a father who drank danger every morning. I didn’t exactly control the world or the house I grew up in. Birthdays were my father’s way of offering me a peace treaty as compensation for all of the battles I had to face. That year, however, there were no offerings; just dictionaries and a desire to burn things. I didn’t hear Dad step into the kitchen. “Oh, good you’re up. Happy birthday, kiddo. Did you open your present?” I glared at him and he snorted. “Care for an explanation?” he asked. I nodded my head sardonically. He cleared his throat.
“Well, when I turned fourteen.”
“Dad, I’m twelve.”
“When I turned fourteen, my lips swelled till they were the size of plums. My brother had given me a large bag of peanuts he stole from the town circus. He thought it was the perfect gift. ‘Stolen pleasures’ is what he called them. ‘Crack a nut, heal your soul’ he said. While the aesthetics my brother found in carnival food was respectable, I just couldn’t favor the effects it had on my body. It wasn’t the first time I’d turn red. When Mother entered the room, her swollen belly growled in distaste. She said that when I was three years old, I ate some nuts out of the palm of her hand then turned ‘as red as a beat and as large as a pumpkin.’ When I turned seven, I ate some again at school and the teacher nearly fainted. I remember laughing uncontrollably until I hit the ground. On my fourteenth birthday I felt my heart stop and my lips kissed the ground. You see, I could never remember what was so deadly for me because that’s the very thing that compelled me to sample the dangers lurking behind those shells. I am allergic to peanuts but never have I been allergic to life. During the attacks, I couldn’t breathe. My ears would steam, blocking out the panics around me. My insides felt like they were shuffling cards and I gambled with time by not calling for help immediately. As soon as the mask was put over my face and the needles were shoved into my arms, I’d feel around for more diseases to swallow. I didn’t like being confined but I figured that if I had to suffer, I’d rather die a little on my own terms. So, I had my middle name legally hyphenated with Peanut at the end so I’d never forget but always be tempted.”
Dad finished his story with both palms up facing me like eyes in a dark cave. My father only gestured this way when honesty couldn’t pull at his tongue any further. His hands were rough and smudged with dirt stains from the 60s. He was double-jointed in one hand and his pinky involuntarily turned upward like a cane. I looked at the dictionary and at the man in front of me. “So what’s the point of all this?” Dad grinned. “Well, meanings are kind of important aren’t they? Figured what better way for you to know the definition of everything there is? Also, the word I circled for you contains the first three letters of your name. What better way to remember a little bit of you too?”
He kissed me on the head and turned on his heel. He whistled into the hallway then stopped and poked his head back into the room. “Also, today is a promise.”
“A promise for what?” I asked cautiously.
“To one day legally take you to the circus.” His eyes glowed in the distance. “And watch it steal your little heart.” When Dad left, I quietly placed the dictionary in the trash.
That wasn’t the only thing of my father’s I threw away. If I had known I’d one day lose him to the most ridiculous way imaginable, I would’ve savored everything he ever gave me. I had my father’s death but I was too young to remember my mother’s. Family secrets can blanket a lot of pain but children are the ones sewn into them. I’ve always been more involved in matters I never wanted to deal with and I learned a lot through touchy subjects and stories my brothers would whisper to me late at night. These are the same stories that reshaped the image I had of my dad. The tales I heard from little birds told me of how Mom was sick all the time and how Dad was rarely there. My oldest brother Job once told me that he saw the back of Dad more than he did the front. While I saw both sides of my father plenty of times as a child, I couldn’t help but feel that that is exactly what he was: two-sided. My dad was a daredevil and while he’d jump off a building in a heartbeat, he sometimes appeared too mortified to raise a family. Most of the time I tried to push these thoughts into the back of my mind but they always came bubbling to the surface. The worst are the ones that can’t go away. I once heard my other brother Luke say that Dad was jumping out of an airplane the day mom swallowed her life away. She went cold with me in her arms. I can only imagine the way her head limped in that rocking chair and the way that beam of light shone through the window highlighting the little child that couldn’t keep her mother alive. Hearing such words from other people is like walking around with a stack of books on your head. The pressure can almost kill you but at least you have all the knowledge about the life you never wanted to learn. Then again, I could be wrong. Dad always said there is nothing admirable about being melodramatic. We should all paddle through rapids instead.
If my father were still alive and saw me now sitting in an art class, he would have been severely disappointed. While Dad always had an appreciation for the arts, there was nothing he loathed more than any of us sitting still. When my brothers and I would graze on the couch on those banal Saturday afternoons that stuck like candy, Dad would leap from behind the couch and whip us with a fly swatter until we buzzed around the room for our lives. Job, my oldest and most sophisticated older brother would curse and say, “Good God, Father. Don’t you think we are much too old for this?” Dad stopped waving the swatter and spat, “Yes and I am much too young. You should’ve seen yourselves. It’s as if Death itself took over the couch. I own children not urns. Now turn off the T.V. and go make something of yourselves.”
My older twin brothers Luke and Donnie, both beefy in size and in character, shrugged their shoulders. “What do you expect us to do?” Luke asked skeptically. Donnie eyed the T.V remote wishfully and Job shuffled the phone in his pocket. Dad’s face hardened. He looked at us as if we were the biggest failures known to man. As I watched Luke scratch his crotch mindlessly, I gained an understanding for my father. His opal eyes hardened and froze like images in a kaleidoscope after too many twists. He glared at us and even through the hard lines, I could tell he hadn’t aged one bit. The wrinkles around his eyes dispersed like the fireworks set off in his youth. His wispy hair wasn’t just as white as snow but as white as the wolves he faced when he journeyed to Alaska to meet my mother’s family. “They had teeth THIS big,” Dad gestured to me one six-year-old evening back when bed time stories were cool. “The Mama wolf had red beady eyes and pointy spectacles. She and everyone else howled at my existence and nearly ripped me to shreds as I rescued your mother and took her away from them forever.” That afternoon, Dad’s chin was strong from all of the punches life had dealt him over the years. For decades Dad tended to these sores by jumping off of cliffs and airplanes in search for answers in the clouds and sea. I remember the way he stared at us and how he couldn’t believe he co-created such brainwashed children, how he co-raised such boring teenagers. I remember this notion so clearly because it is the last image I have of my father on the day before he died.
“Yeah, Dad. What are we supposed to do?”
Dad narrowed his eyes and lurched towards the T.V.
“He wouldn’t,” Job whispered.
But that was the thing about my Dad. He always would. I sighed then ducked abruptly as our cheap television set flew out the window and into the neighborhood. The window shattered and glass pierced the ground like sharp icicles too old for a cavern. Mrs. Owens, who was out jogging her perfect little body, screamed as the television nearly punctured her left foot. Mrs. Owens saw me through the broken window and sneered. I smiled at her delicately and watched her call the authorities once again. Job sighed and put his face in his hand. He left the room and sulked up the stairs. Donnie snorted and put his broad arms behind his swelling head. He turned to his brother for an answer.
Luke never lost a single wrestling match at his school but always managed to get pinned by the silent rage inside him. Some are just born with it and my brother learned to control himself with protein shakes and inferior beings struggling beneath his ham-shaped body. But there are some people who can’t be touched. My father never failed to push Luke into a new kind of ring altogether and watch him lose every time. Luke’s eyes lit as he stomped towards the fireplace. He took the framed photograph of Dad sky diving with the Oldest Lady in the World and stepped on it. Dad nodded his head calmly while Donnie flipped over the couch. Dad and I watched as Luke and Donnie teamed up and destroyed the living room. I grew up with boys all my life so it feels almost pointless to even document that smell. Any reasonable young girl would understand. That smell that tastes like sneakers rotting on a telephone wire and baby powder trying to cover up the lies. Similarly to how your leg smells after it’s been assaulted by a dog in the park, this stench seeps through the walls like cheap blood in a horror film and remains there forever. While my three older brothers were the smelliest beings I ever encountered, my father never had an odor. It wasn’t because of his love for justice and revenge that made my dad the archetype of how I later defined masculinity. It was his energy and the eternal faith he bestowed in me that proved I wasn’t just some typical girl doodling in an art class.
By the time the cops showed up, our living room was a surreal mess. The T.V was gone, the couch was torn in two, glass snuck up on our feet and all our little clocks melted. I can just imagine Mrs. Owens shouting the entire spectacle into her pink phone. The woman hated us. She tried to save me one time by taking me under her bare wing. It was her Christian duty to try and take me from my gosh-awful family. I spent the night at her house once. She had two daughters and they didn’t grow up with the same values I understood as a child. It seems that ever since the night I dared Crissy and Jeannette Owens to eat fecal matter, the Friends in Blue appeared at our house more than so often. I answered the door. That time it was Officer Kendal.
“Hey Jack,” I said.
“How’s it going Ana?”
I shrugged. “It’s going I guess.”
“Is your old man around?”
“He went to his room about an hour ago. Why?”
“Oh, nothing I’m sure. Anything going on that I should know about?”
“Nothing short of the usual.”
Jack Kendall was a heavy-set man with teeth the size of belt buckles. He was the county sheriff and became one of my dad’s many admirers the day Dad got out of a ticket. He told Kendal that he was speeding in order to see the Corpse Flower bloom before anyone else. This was no lie. It was also, according to Kendall, a “new one.”
“Well, try to take it easy. There’ve been some noise complaints.”
“Sure thing.”
“And tell Peanut I gave him these.” It was a list of little-known mountain ranges throughout the country. “I hear they’re incredible. Have a good night AnaCorynn.”
I put the list on the fridge, next to pictures of Dad doing things that gave me a mini heart attack each time. I wanted to make tea and when I reached for my favorite mug with cockroaches painted on the sides, I noticed two tickets sticking out of the rim. Any plans I’d originally had for the next day were cancelled. I was to go to the circus with the man who never broke a promise.
I went into our desolate living room at two in the morning. The most inconvenient thing about that house was that there was no upstairs bathroom. My stomach cramps produced dehydrated nightmares that sent me running down the stairs praying for toilets and glasses of water. After I relieved myself, I almost didn’t notice Dad kneeling on the carpet. In retrospect, I wonder how many of life’s amazingly twisted moments I would’ve missed if I didn’t always need to take a dump.
I approached Dad and knelt down next to him. He was holding the broken picture of him skydiving with the Oldest Lady in the World. I put my head on his shoulder and he covered one of my ears with his hand causing half of my world to sound blurry. When he spoke, I could smell the whisky tangoing with his breath. When I listened, his words were sobering and raw.
“I did it for her” I heard him say.
“You were so young but I loved her all the same. She wanted to see everything. I wanted to give it to her. She was just so sick. Couldn’t leave the house.” I tried to ignore his tears and imagine him doing something crazy like kayaking down a river full of piranhas or bungee jumping off a bridge. Nothing fit. He mumbled quickly and I caught words such as “so young” and “look just like her.” He started to hum and I cried a little beside him. It was the most dangerous thing we ever did.
While sitting on the bleachers at the circus, I spotted things I never wanted to see. From the animals that were abused in the arena to the humans that only hurt themselves by watching, I sat next to my Dad in wonder at how the government still allowed such a thing to happen. The smell of cotton candy tickled my throat and I sneezed every time the popcorn man with bad breath shouted over my head. Much to my eternal embarrassment, I saw Charlie Webster, a boy in my class walk across the stands. Dad watched my eyes follow him longingly. “Is that a boyfriend of yours over there?” he nudged me. “I’ve got a bat in the trunk.”
“Dad, you couldn’t even hit a dead body. And no, he’s not my boyfriend. He doesn’t go for well, you know. Girls like me basically.” It was true. Charlie Webster enjoyed spending time with girls like Mrs. Owens’ brats or simpletons like Liza James who think elephants are cute. They fit together like magnets and prance around in upper-class oblivion with shiny shoes on their feet. They do this with impeccably good looks and outstanding GPAs. I’ve always been allergic to that sort of trend. Dad swore and lit a cigar. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” He blew a cloud of smoke into my face. “AnaCorynn, you are the weirdest little girl I’ve ever met and I guess I have only myself to blame. But, you are also the most beautiful and if that little shit over there can’t see it, then he isn’t worth your God-given time. You’ve got power, kid. Try using it to your advantage for once.” I blushed and tried focusing on the man sticking his head inside a lion so I could hide my gratitude. I noticed late audience members entering through the sides. They had to go through the metal detectors as we had once done earlier. It was as if the geniuses who put the detectors there thought one of us was going to bomb a show that was doing a good job of that on its own. A little boy set off the machine and the parents watched in horror as their son was frisked and stripped to the ground. He flailed on his back like a bug and the security guard barked an order into his walkie-talkie. My eye twitched. Dad eyed the child. “Nero fiddles while Rome burns,” he chuckled darkly after taking a long drag. We watched silently as the bearded lady pole danced and the human “giant” let a miniature poodle prance on his shoulders. Even after all the tortures we witnessed that afternoon, nothing could have prepared us for the elephant named Tipper and the way she lived up to her silly little name.
The ring master was an orange midget named Pepper. He had a large nose and gorilla-like hands that gestured openly to the mess he created. From the stands he looked like a dancing polka dot and his movements gave me motion sickness. Pepper used a megaphone to get our attention but that just caused everyone to talk over him to their neighbors. In many ways, I felt pity for people like Pepper and my dad. Once upon the mid-twentieth century, the circus defined magic. Now, due to the factories I breathe on every corner and the special effects I absorb from the movie screen, the circus has become nothing but an ending dream with false promises and cheap graphics. There is no longer such a thing as imagination inside a tent. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Pepper gritted through his teeth, “I give you the amazing and spectacular Tipper.” The audience clapped mindlessly as the large animal entered the arena. Its eyes drooped like curtains and its trunk dangled like tired arms against a car door. After a couple of clowns led Tipper into the center of the arena, the orange midget had the audacity to ask for our help.
Audience participation is undoubtedly one of the deadliest sins no one likes to talk about. Being an audience member is a constant battle within itself and when some midget decides to break that fourth wall, misery takes its toll. Pepper raised the megaphone to his lips and uttered the six words every introvert dreads to hear: “I’m going to need a volunteer.” Like Hell you did Pepper. Immediately, Dad grabbed my arm. I hissed and tried to bring it down but he wouldn’t budge. “You’ll thank me one day” he said. Mortified, I noticed that my arm, out of all the 1200 arms there were, was the only one raised. Pepper turned toward us and squinted. As a man who obviously had his hands raised for him too many times in his life, called on my father instead. “You, the man with the cigar. Come on down and meet Tipper.” The elephant yawned. Dad turned to me and grinned. “Well, what do ya know? This’ll be interesting.” At the time, none of us had any idea.
We will never know what Pepper wanted Dad to do on stage. He stood by Tipper’s behind and waved to me from the ground. I smiled and wriggled my fingers. I was at the circus and my father was the main attraction. I was embarrassed yet accepting. After all, he had been the greatest performance of my life. As for Pepper, he had taught his elephant many tricks but “sit” was clearly not one of them. By the time my Dad stopped waving his hand frantically, Tipper’s behind flopped to the ground with my father underneath it. For once, the audience was silent. The last thing I saw were my Dad’s palms sticking out from underneath Tipper’s large and hairy ass.
My world burned. The tent fell and my throat froze from the avalanche inside of me. My skin turned the color of lava as I grew short of breath. I fell to the ground and strangers breathed into me. I pushed them aside and gasped for something ordinary. Anything to awake me from that outdated nightmare. Screams and apologies flooded my veins but the laughter I heard shook me cold. Not because I thought that laughing at such a sight was cruel but because a part of me thought it was pretty ingenious as well. The only difference was, I expected Dad to stand up with Tipper far above his head and that unshakeable grin spread around his face announcing the end of the joke. My daddy was my superhero but elephant tushy was his Kryptonite. I didn’t realize where I was until my brothers arrived and forced me to explain everything.
Dad once told me that meanings are important but after my experiences at the circus that summer, I finally understand how wrong he was. Explanations are irrelevant because more than anyone would like to realize, they don’t exist. His death epitomizes my point. Even the pastor at the funeral couldn’t refrain from saying, “I guess it’s true when they say elephants can’t resist a Peanut.” My father knew I was strong but he didn’t realize how powerless I am to the caustic sensations I affront when greeting the unexpected. Every year I get older but like the father taken from me, I am incurably naive. I still look for the beauty in things. I act on impulse and no dare has ever intimidated me. But I am driven by my past. It beats me over the head and I never know what it’s trying to say until I am alone.
By the time my art instructor came back inside, the peppermint on the stool was gone. I looked behind my canvas and saw my father smiling and believing from the center of the room. He offered those hands to the world. I glanced at him and nodded. Slowly, I took my charcoal and began to write. I documented what was true. The bell rang and I packed up my things. I glanced at him one more time, took him in and left with not a single detail forgotten.
//ww