A Cabinet of Wonders by Renee Dodd

Author:Renee Dodd [Dodd, Renee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter sixteen

A Bag of Bones

June 16th, Marshall, Texas

Bumble-Bea’s old friend Mr. White turned up in Texas on June 16th, 1927, the tenth anniversary of the day that Bea’s sister Ethel had perished from scarlet fever. Eleven-year-old Bea had cried unceasingly for a week after. Unable to eat, she panicked her parents by losing twenty pounds so quickly that death’s bony hand seemed to grip her dwindling (though still substantial) frame, pulling her steadily closer to her lost sister. But the fast didn’t continue for long, and soon she had regained all that weight and more.

Losing Ethel had gouged a hole in Bea’s spirit, an empty space that begged to be filled by food, by Jimmy sweeping her off her feet, by seven years of carnival performance. Every June 16th over the past ten years, Bea had found it difficult to eat for twenty-four hours, an annual fast that allowed the hole left by Ethel’s death to gape unfilled, hungry, howling. This anniversary was no different, and so she performed with twice her usual enthusiasm, regarding the Texan marks with her ornamental smile daubed firmly above her chin, feeling the hollow in her chest begin to fill with their attention. Like a bucket with a hole in it, she remained sated as long as the intoxicating gaze of the masses continued to pour in, and soon felt depleted once the flow had stopped.

“Can you move around?” a girl from the front row asked.

Bea laughed and stood, fluffing the ruffles of her skirt as she twirled.

She hated these frilly dresses with gathers that pinched her fat into corrugated patterns that remained engraved into her flesh for hours after she’d shed the Baby Beatrice costume; she hated simpering and dancing and pretending that her girth made her jolly, wide-eyed and powerless, but seeing an enormous woman costumed as a little girl amplified the dramatic effect, and the conceit was Freak Show tradition, so Bea resigned herself to the daily sting of a hundred fluffs of her ruffles and battings of her eyelashes, flourishes supporting her image as a doll full of giggles, empty of sense, and completely blank, smooth, and sexless between the legs. Still, though, however much she hated it, all those eyes upon her, and all the words, both kind and rude, managed to flow past her humiliation and into her pierced tin bucket of a heart until there was no emptiness left to spawn grief.

Yes, she hated Baby Beatrice, but she loved her more.

“That all you in there?” a man asked.

“Sure is.”

“You sure? There isn’t any padding filling you out?”

Although Bea refused to show much skin on stage, she had a way of satisfying this sort of rube. Sliding the puffy short sleeve of her dress up to her shoulder, she swatted her left upper arm with her right hand so that the sucks could witness the smack, then swing and shudder, of fat-packed flesh.

Someone shouted, “That’s repulsive!”

Bea couldn’t tell where the voice came from, but it was when she scanned the crowd for the speaker that she first noticed Mr.

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