The Merry Go Round and Round and Round

Tara Van De Mark

In an abandoned lot, just a block from the grand theater where the puppet show has started, sits the carousel.  It’s exposed with no pavilion covering it.  The horses are stripped bare from a century of use, only flecks of gold, red and blue paint remain around their decorative bits.  They stare at us with blank wooden eyes, necks bent at unnatural angles trying to break free from the brass pole that holds them in place, circling.

But Gia, my eldest, has to ride it.

She’s nine and her disappointment plunges through my adult skin and pierces my scared girl inside.  This was supposed to be a fun family outing.  The show is Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, reimagined with marionettes and bubbles.  It cost me next week's groceries, but a Mom influencer posted pictures of her tartan clad children watching entranced and titled it Magic!.  She said, making core memories, and this idea intrigues me, that I could pipe classical music into their minds loud enough to drown out my primal screams.

As a family passes us, the son in a newsy cap and the daughters running so fast they create a wind that makes their ribbons flap like American flags, I try bargaining with her.  We can ride it after the show.  But I’m down to my last diaper, having left before I could change the baby, her yellow poop oozed through her white tights on the drive.  I don’t think it’s even open.  Gia takes this as a challenge and, with my middle one Cecilia in tow, they trot over concrete chunks in their hand-me-down black patent leathers.

I remain standing on the sidewalk, holding the baby with negligent looking naked legs, the diaper bag, and the hope that soon I can collapse into a deep springy theater seat.  But Cecilia and Gia reappear waving for me and that dream flits away like the violin solo of a bird in spring.

The attendee is petite, her top half is a beehive of hair.  What a beautiful family, she says through dentures just placed into her mouth.  Should I spit at that, ward off the evil eye, or are we already sufficiently doomed?  Before I can pay, her long acrylic nails wave us in with a monastic hum of, go, go, enjoy, enjoy.

Gia carries Cecilia, who can’t be trusted to move in moments of real need, and hoists her onto a horse with monstrous teeth.  Gia mounts her steed with the precision of someone riding a kitchen stool.  I sit in the chariot with the baby and give her the only comfort I can, my breast.  The bulbs flicker on and tinny notes begin, familiar and strange, like how my Mom, Zsa Zsa, insists on giving the girls unwanted wet kisses on her annual visit.  The song is off key until speed gathers and cymbals join-in, then it’s almost pleasant.  The baby falls asleep, her cheek to my chest.  Cecilia hugs the pole with her entire body.  Gia sits upright and regal, her feet in the metal stirrups, her hands on the leather reins just like in the pictures at the library.

We spin through the languishing summer sun and the fall festival waltzing.  How many times around will it take to erase the missteps I’ve made?  We could ride all the way to Zsa Zsa’s condo in Florida where she would feed us Kraft dinner and let us watch cartoons all weekend long.  But, Monday she hosts mahjong, so she would load us up to go back home, where she thinks I belong.

Voices stream from the theater doors.  We remain in place, my three girls and I, as the carousel slows to a stop.  We will exit.  We will wave our thanks to the pile of hair.  We will drive back home.  Maybe, if I soak the baby's white tights in bleach, they can be salvaged.

Image © Europeana

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Tara Van De Mark is a recovering attorney now writer based in Washington, DC.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, The Best Small Fiction, The Best of the Net and has recently appeared in BULL, Lincoln Review, Gone Lawn, Citron Review, and Tiny Molecules.  She can be found at www.taravandemark.com and lurks around X/twitter and bluesky @TaraVanDeMark.