by John Updike
CARNIVAL! In the vacant lot behind the old ice plant! Trucks have been
unloading all afternoon; the WhirloGig has been unfolded like a giant
umbrella, they assembled the baby Ferris wheel with an Erector Set.
Twice the trucks got stuck in the mud. Straw has been strewn every-
where. They put up a stage and strung lights. Now, now, gather your
pennies; supper is over and an hour of light is left in the long summer
day. See, Sammy Hunnenhauser is running; Gloria Gring and her gang
have been there all afternoon, they never go home, oh hurry, let me
go; how awful it is to have parents that are poor, and slow, and
sad!
Fifty cents. The most Ben could beg. A nickel for every year of his
life. It feels like plenty. Over the roof of crazy Mrs. Moffert’s house,
the Ferris wheel tints the air with pink, and the rim of this pink mixes
in his excitement with the great notched rim of the coin sweating in
his hand. This house, then this house, and past the ice plant, and he
will be there. Already the rest of the world is there, he is the last,
hurrying, hurrying, the balloon is about to take off, the Ferris wheel
is lifting; only he will be left behind, on empty darkening streets.
Then there, what to buy? There are not so many people here. Grown-
ups carrying babies mosey glassily on the straw walks. All the booth
people, not really gypsies, stare at him, and beckon weakly. It hurts
him to ignore the man with the three old softballs, and the old cripple
at the merry-go-round, and the fat lady with her plaster Marys, and
the skeleton suspended behind a fountain of popcorn. He feels his
walking past them as pain. He wishes there more people here; he
feels a fool. All of this machinery assembled to extract from him his
pathetic fifty cents. He watches at a distance a thickest man in
earnestly rolled-up shirtsleeves twirl a great tinselled wheel with a
rubber tongue that patters slower and slower on a circle of nails until
it stops between two, and the number there wins. Only a sailor and
two boys in yellow silk high-school athletic jackets play. None win.
The thick tattooed arm below the rolled-up shirtsleeve carefully
sweeps their nickels from a long board divided and numbered as
if for hopscotch. The high-school boys, with sideburns and spotty
whiskers on their bright-pink jaws, put down nickels again leadenly,
and this time the man spinning the wheel shouts when it stops,
seems more joyful than they, and reaches into his deep apron pocket
and pours before them, without counting, a perfect little slipping
stack of nickels. Their gums showing as if at a dirty joke, the two
boys turn - the shimmer on their backs darts and shifts in cool z’s -
and walk away, while the man is shouting, “Hey, uh winneh. Hey, uh
winneh, evvybody wins.” His board is bare, and as his mouth continues
to form the loud words his eyes lock Ben into a stare of heartbreaking
brown blankness that seems to elucidate with paralyzing clarity Ben’s
state: his dungarees, his fifty cents, his ten years, his position in
space, and above the particulars the immense tinted pity, the waste,
of being at one little place instead of everywhere, at any time. Then
the man looks away, twirls the wheel for his own amusement.
The fifty-cent piece feels huge to Ben’s fingers, a wide oppressive
rigidity that must be broken, shattered into twinkling fragments, to
merge in the tinsel and splinters of strewn straw. He buys, at the first
stand he strikes, a cone of cotton candy, and recieves, with the furry
pink pasty uncoiling thing, a quarter, a dime, and a nickel: three
coins, tripling his wealth.
Now people multiply, crowd in from the houses of the town, which
stand beyond the lot on all sides in black forbidding silhouettes like the
teeth of a saw. The lights go on; the faces of the houses flee. There is
nothing in the lot but light, and at its core, on the stage, three girls
wearing white cowboy hats and white spangled skirts and white boots
appear, and a man also in white and bearing a white guitar strung with
gold. The legs around Ben crush him toward the stage; the smell of mud
mingles with the bright sight there. One of the girls coughs into the
microphone and twists its neck, so a sharp whine pierces from the loud-
speaker and cuts a great crescent through the crowd, leaving silence as
harvest. The girls sing, toe-tapping gingerly: “The other night, dear, as
I lay sleeping, I dreamt I held you in my arms.” The spangles on their
swishing skirts spring prickles like tears in Ben’s eyes. The three voices
sob, catch, twang, distend his heart like a rubber band at the highest
pitch of their plaint.“-I was mistaken, and I hung my head, a-and cried.”
And then the unbearable rising sugar of the chorus that makes his scalp
so tight he fears his head will burst from sweet fullness.
The girls go on to sing songs, less good, and then they give way to a
thin old man in suspenders and huge pants he keeps snapping and look-
ing down and whooping into. He tells horrible jokes that make the nice
fat ladies standing around Ben - nice fat factory and dust-mop women
that made him feel protected - shake with laughter. He fears their quak-
ing, feels threatened from beneath, as if there is a treacherous stratum
under this mud and straw. He wanders away, to let the words of “You
Are My Sunshine” revolve in his head. “Please don’t take my sunshine
away.” Only the money in his pocket weighs him; get rid of it, and he
will sail away like a dandelion seed.
He goes to the booth where the wheel is turning, and puts his nickel on
the board in a square marked 7, and loses it.
He puts the dime there, and it too is taken away.
Squeezed, almost hidden, between the crusty trousered haunches of two
adults, he puts down his quarter, as they do, on the inner edge, to be
changed. The tatooed man comes along, picking up the quarters and
pouring, with his wonderfully automatic fingers, the little slipping stacks
of five nickels; Ben holds his breath, and to his horror feels his low face
catch in the corner of the man’s absent-minded eyes. The thick solemn
body snags in its smooth progress, and Ben’s five nickels are raggedly
spaced. Between the second and third there is a gap. A blush cakes Ben’s
cheeks; his gray-knuckled fingers, as they push out a nickel, are trembl-
ing sideways at each other. But the man goes back, and spins the wheel,
and Ben loses three nickels one after another. The twittering wheel is a
moon-faced god; but Ben feels humanity clouding the space between him
and it, which should be unobstructed. When the tattooed arm - a blue
fish, an anchor, the queer word PEACE - comes to sweep in his nickels,
he feels the stippled skin breathing thought, and lowers his head against
the expected fall of words. Nothing is said, the man moves on, returns
to the wheel; but Ben feels puzzled pressure radiating from him, and the
pointed eyes of a man in a suit with chalk stripes who has come to stand
at the far side of the stand intersect this expanding circle, and Ben,
hurrying to pour his money down a narrowing crack, puts down his last
two nickels, still on 7.
The rubber tongue leaps into pattering and as the wheel whirls the
tattooed man leans backward to hear the one in chalk stripes talk; this
one’s tongue patters silently but a tiny motion of his smooth hand, simul-
taneous with a sideways stab of his eyes, is toward Ben. The rubber
tongue slows, flops, stops at 7 - no, 8. He lost, and can leave. The
floor of his stomach lifts queerly. “Hey, kid.” The man with terrible
spoiled arms comes over. Ben feels that no matter how fast he would
run those arms would stretch and snare him.
“Huh?”
“How old are you, kid?”
“Ten.”
“Whatsamatta with ya, ya daddy rich?”
A titter moves stiffly among the immense adult heads all around. Ben
understands the familiar role, that he has undergone a hundered times
with teachers and older boys, of being a comic prop. He understands
everything, and wants to explain that he knows his eyes are moist and
his cheeks red but that it’s because of joy, freedom, not because of
losing. But this would be too many words; even the one-word answer
“No” sticks to the roof of his mouth and comes loose with a faint
tearing noise.
“Here.” With his exciting expert touch, the tattooed man flicks Ben’s
two coins back across the painted number. Then he digs into his pocket.
He comes up with the usual little stack of five, drops four, but holds
the fifth delicately between the tips of two fingers and a thumb,
hesitates so that Ben can reread PEACE in blue above his wrist, and
then flips the fifth nickel up into his palm and thence down with a plunge
into his dirty sagging apron pouch.
“Now move away from the board, kid, move away. Don’t come back.”
Ben fumbles the coins into his hands and pushes away, his eyes screwed
to the sharp edge of painted wood, and he shoulders blindly backward
through the legs. Yet all the time, in the midst of the heat and water
welling up from springs all over his body, he is figuring, and calculates
he’s been gypped. Forty: he had the quarter and dime and nickel, and
they gave him back only six nickels: thirty. The injustice. They pretend
he’s too little to lose and then keep a dime. The waste. The lost dime
seems a tiny hole through which everything in existence is draining. As
he moves away, his wet knees jarring, trying to hide forever from every
sailor and fat woman and high-schooler who witnessed his disgrace, the
six nickels make a knobbed weight bumping his thigh through his pocket.
The spangles, the splinters of straw and strings of light, the sawtooth
peaks of houses showing behind the heads of grown-ups moving above
the scent of grassy mud are hung like the needles of a Christmas tree
with the transparent, tinted globes confusing his eyelashes.
Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attemps to give
ourselves to her wholly.