while they laughed their way through a private joke.
I was happy for them, though I couldn’t help but feel strange that after Jackson had cut-and-dry removed himself from our long-woven history, our parents had found a way to enforce it. We had so long kidded about them getting together, but when they actually did, he wasn’t around to balk at the punch line.
It crossed my mind whether it would have happened if we’d stayed together, whether it had been pending awhile but their children being romantically linked had prohibited even the discussion. And if it had, was it better that Jackson and Ida—a dangerous, circuitous affair that had festered too long—had ended, so They could begin? Did the factually old deserve more than those who simply felt too aged for their own good?
Eventually the circus came down in favor of other projects, ones requiring less devotion and planning. Jackson was happy with build-your-own wooden planes and ant farms, and relieved of a good amount of guilt. The circus had remained on the walls through fall and winter, some pieces of the butcher paper curling and estranging themselves from others. Though he had tried, on many occasions, to make progress, the fine markings of his pencil, erased and redrawn, only looked alien and insignificant next to the seven giant chartreuse sharks James had carelessly slopped on in crayon one afternoon. The permanence of the wax frustrated Jackson; the jagged triangular teeth teased the procession of small dogs through a hula hoop he had taken such pains with.
I had tried to help, my hair held back by yellow heart barrettes. I drew a cage around the misshapen sharks, but that black wasn’t thick or powerful enough, only made the beasts seem sort of striped, and that, to Jackson, was even worse. So in the spring, after much deliberation, he admitted defeat.
His mother noticed a certain adultness in the way her son devoured his after-school peanut butter and jelly; when he was finished, he cleared his throat and locked himself in the bedroom. In the hour and a half James was at his swimming lesson, taking immense pleasure in his green goggles and floating, Jackson took the pieces down, one by one, and placed them in a box until he decided what to do with them. He trusted I would come up with something. He looked forward to his brother’s return, expecting screams and sobs, to an expression of passion their project had deserved but James had never provided.
What he got was almost worse. James did not acknowledge the absence, didn’t notice how bare their wall suddenly seemed, how the paint previously beneath their doomed circus was a shade brighter than the rest of it. Instead he flopped onto his bed, demonstrated his perfected breaststroke, and made gurgling sounds into the cowboy sheets. Jackson was furious. That night, he lay awake with a knotted stomach while James dreamed and murmured.
“Everyone … can have the peanut butter,” said James’s sleep, and Jackson began to unknot as he hoped for a brilliant revenge.
Though Jackson was generally very attentive in school, thrilled by mathematical equations and more so by their answers, that Friday he mostly drew circles, over and over until they perforated the paper. On the walk home he stepped on every crack and did not participate in the game of slug bug that James and I played halfheartedly. James, sensing something the matter, wondered amiably what was for dinner to an apathetic Jackson. As he watched us pass, the old man who always sat on his porch in pleated dress pants, puffing at his pipe, was thankful for another spring, especially watching James shoot finger guns at the passing cars. We were encouraged not to speak to strangers, but when the old man asked us how we were on our walk home every day, we smiled in the best way we could think of.
Today, though, Jackson gave no notice.
My father found the Godzilla in the bottom of a box at a yard sale three months before, hidden beneath some children’s books whose illustrations had been edited with crayon, and held it up to James, who shot out his arms in welcome immediately. It wasn’t priced, wasn’t supposed to be there, and the woman with untouched roots in unflattering pink capri pants, whose children were long gone from Madrone Street, shrugged and said she’d take whatever they gave her. My father pulled out a dollar; James found a filthy gumball-machine toy in his pocket, one