Home of the American Circus

Ellsworth, Maine. February 2007. Buck, Freya’s boss, comments that Freya looks terrible when she arrives for her lunch shift at a bar called the Thirsty Clam. Buck says that Hans, a lawyer, called. Buck is often confused or intoxicated, and Freya feels the need to look out for him. Freya chats with customers, visitors and regulars, but feels increasingly ill. She collapses while taking a lunch order and is taken to the hospital.

Her nurse advises Freya to walk after her surgery so she will heal. Freya isn’t quite ready to leave the hospital, but she can’t afford to stay. Freya calls Buck, explains that she had her appendix removed, and asks him to pick her up from the hospital. Buck arrives, drunk, and tells Freya a story about his days touring with a band. Freya takes a pain pill, collects her car, and drives to her apartment.

Freya’s apartment used to be a motel near the ocean. She thinks, “I wanted badly to live near the sea, and then I got used to it” (17). She sees a yellow slip on her door saying she’ll be evicted because she’s behind on rent. She reflects that she can’t afford to pay her hospital bills, either, as she has no savings from working at the Thirsty Clam. It takes her six days to recover, and she doesn’t have help to move. Feeling guilty, Freya carries what she can to her car, including the used books she’s collected, and leaves town.

Despite the Percocet, Freya still feels the pain from her incision as she drives to New York. The dreary scenery reflects her mood. She passes the gas station where she stopped when she left and called her voicemail. She remembers hoping Steena would say she believed Freya and would be kind to her, but Steena’s message was derisive and shaming.

Freya returns to Somers and feels upset when she sees the house she grew up in. Everything is overgrown and falling to ruin. There’s a fence Step built to keep deer out, but which ended up mostly trapping them. Step’s car is still parked in the driveway, with his frayed sweatshirt in the back seat.

Freya reflects on when her parents’ lawyer, Hans Gruenberger, called to inform her that her parents were killed in a car accident. Freya inherited the house. She signed the papers and since then has occasionally lost sleep over “what [she] hadn’t taken care of, the unknown depth of consequence” (23). She still has her house key on a keychain with a plastic elephant.

The house feels stale, damp, and empty, and Freya briefly longs for one of the rare, bright moments when her mother was cheerful, hugged her, and called Freya her baby girl. She thinks, “we don’t have words for mourning people when their souls leave us long before their body is gone” (24). Freya feels out of place, and is spooked when she finds the fridge is running, with a bulb of fennel and two cans of Pepsi inside.

Freya reflects on how her parents met in a bookkeeping class. Step already owned the house and needed a bookkeeper for his insurance business. Freya’s mother was a single mom who already had Steena and took the same bookkeeping class. Her mother had once been a young professional in New York City before she got pregnant and married Steena’s father, whom she later divorced. After Freya was born, her mother became increasingly critical of Step, and they argued frequently.

Freya notes how little the town has changed, including the statue of Old Bet the circus elephant in the town square. She passes the realty office of Steena’s husband, Charlie Wells, and imagines him in it. Freya touches the window and says, “Sorry, Bet” (29).

Freya drives to Jam’s house. She lost touch with him when she left town because she canceled her pager service, afraid that her family wouldn’t try to contact her. Freya thinks, “the true secrets of myself are always more quiet and sad than I want them to be” (29). She finds Jam at his father’s house and climbs in his window. She curls up in Jam’s bed with him, and Freya recalls how they never had sex because they didn’t want to ruin their friendship. They watch James Bond movies. Freya tells Jam she was working in Maine and had her appendix removed. Jam says he kept being her friend in his head.

Jam feeds Freya and invites her to spend the night, and Freya reflects how sneaking out to Jam’s felt like survival when her parents were fighting. She reflects on how they met when she was in ninth grade and swapped books. She feels that all Jam ever needed from her was exactly who she was, unlike everyone else in her life. Freya falls asleep in Jam’s bed and wakes when he rises in the morning to go to work. Freya is surprised that Jam works at the butcher counter at the local grocery store because he had been such a talented musician. Jam’s father doesn’t appear to remember Freya or that her parents are deceased.

Returning to her house, Freya smells cigarette smoke and finds Aubrey in the backyard. Freya remembers the sense of attachment she felt to Aubrey from the moment she was born. Freya warns Aubrey that Steena will be angry if she discovers Aubrey is hanging out at her house.

After Aubrey leaves, Freya goes inside and finds a rat in a cage in the dining room where Freya remembers having family dinners. There is a biology textbook on the table, but the house is cleaned of its clutter. Freya recalls times Steena was cruel while babysitting her, and how “[e]ven though she was mostly mean to me, I desperately wanted to be Steena’s whole sister” (49).

Freya sleeps at Jam’s again and he wakes to a nightmare. When she asks about his piano, he says his father moved it to the basement. Freya thinks about her great-grandfather Vili, who carved piano legs for Steinway, a company that manufactures pianos. After Jam leaves for work, Freya looks around and notices Jam has no recordings of his own music. She was certain he would be famous, but after his mother’s body was found in the reservoir near town, Jam seemed to play less. Freya showers and tries to avoid looking at her wound, thinking, “I’m good at not seeing what I don’t want to” (54). When she sees Jam’s piano in the basement, she feels a deep sense of loss.

Freya gets coffee at the deli and sees a man Steena dated in high school. The man asks if Freya is related to Steena Russos. Freya thinks again of how much she admired Steena and wanted to be liked by her. She feels like her heart is behaving strangely. Freya decides to dye her hair so she won’t look like Steena any longer. She thinks, “I wish when I ran away to start over, I’d actually started instead of stalling, and I’d never had a reason to look back” (60).

Freya dyes her hair in the downstairs bathroom and thinks about how she used to play with Step’s shaving cream. She thinks, “I wish I could ask him if all the elements of his life felt haphazard and shocking, if that is also part of my inheritance” (61). Freya looks more like Step and was never considered as attractive as her mother or Steena, who have Italian heritage. Freya feels like her mother didn’t love or approve of her.

Before she can rinse the bleach from her hair, Freya slips and falls in the bathtub, jarring her wound. In shock, she goes outside. Around the base of the planter is a circle of bird heads. Aubrey finds Freya bleeding and drives her to the house of her friend Shray Singh. Shray’s father was a surgeon in Pakistan. Freya remembers admiring Ravi Singh in school. Dr. Singh looks at Freya’s wound and changes her dressing. When he tells her she will be okay, Freya wants to hug him, because she always wanted to hear such things from her mother.

As Aubrey drives them back to the house, Freya apologizes for being gone. Aubrey explains that Coriolanus, Freya’s cat, brings the bird heads. Aubrey says she’s been staying at the house sometimes and asks if she can sleep there that night. Freya apologizes to the cat also.

Jam comes to the house, and he and Aubrey tease Freya about her hair being orange. Freya learns that Aubrey works at the grocery store and knows Jam. Jam tells Freya that he wants to be an adult Aubrey trusts. Freya sees the rapport between them and thinks, “I feel like grown up Wendy, left behind while Peter Pan sets off with Jane on a new adventure” (79). Freya feels Aubrey doesn’t fully trust her yet. She recalls a time when she took a young Aubrey to hear Jam play music, and Jam and Aubrey made up a song together.

Freya enters her old room to find that Aubrey has been sleeping there, and most of the furniture is gone. She thinks about the books she loved as a child and all the times she cried in this room while her parents were fighting. Freya feels that, given the cruelty with which she was treated, she never had a real childhood. She looks at Aubrey’s drawings on the wall and understands how Aubrey was feeling when she drew them. Freya thinks, “I knew what she was up against, and I left her here anyway” (85).

Freya looks through Aubrey’s clothes, which to her signal “weird kid who hangs out in the art room” (86). She puts on an old prom dress she remembers buying with Jam. She had anticipated that prom might be the night she and Jam became more than friends, and so had opted not to go to the dance.

A man visits and introduces himself as Hans Gruenberger, her lawyer. He likes Freya’s name, and she remembers as a child how thrilled she was to see her name in a book about Norwegian gods.