Fire-Eater

FIRE-EATER/Lmdfl Fitzgerald ELLEN MORGAN drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, keeping them light, not gripping the hot vinyl because the very act of expressing the tension that this endless traffic generated in her would only augment it. All cities had traffic, but here in the crumbling streets of Rio, wending their way stubbornly between rock and sea, the roads seemed incapable of spitting their charges out. She had the frustrating sensation that she was blocked forever, a corpuscle trapped within the thickened walls of the city's collapsing veins. The light ahead of her changed, but the traffic didn't move. Up and down the line, drivers leaned on their horns. She inched forward. In the back seat Ellen's youngest child sat and cried. She cried the way she always cried, with very little sound and great stoicism, willing the tears not to come, willing the sobs back down her throat where no one could hear them. But Ellen had known even before they left the gymnastics class that her daughter would cry. The knowing was what disturbed Ellen so much; she didn't want her child to be sad and herself felt an inexplicable grief over how completely she took her child's sadness to heart. Being a mother was too great a burden when you bore your children's pain in addition to your own. She wondered if all mothers felt this way. It was such a small incident, the cartwheel that was perfect yesterday and executed so poorly today. Ellen had known the minute the girl flopped to the ground that she was not hurt but that her frustration would overwhelm her. When Ellen's daughter left the mat, Ellen had looked carefully at her face and could see already the darkening of the eyes, the flushed cheeks. The child would cry, and because she was so good and had to always be thought of as good, she would hold back as long as she could, increasing the intensity of her discomfiture until the missed cartwheel would become the symbol of everything she had never been able to master. Ellen sighed. Sometimes she cried herself. When her older child, a son, once tried to arrange a sleepover and called five friends who all had other plans, she'd cried because she knew her son's loneliness. Today she had no energy to respond to her daughter. She'd used up all her distracting stories and carefully chosen words of encouragement. Ellen at last came to the corner and was stopped at the red light. She looked down at the reassuringly constant lights on the dashboard, and when she looked up again, there was a young man directly in front of 146 · The Missouri Review the car. He had a red plastic nose stuck on his face and was wearing brightly striped socks and outlandishly large shoes. He started to juggle. "Marisa, look," cried Ellen. The little girl, cheeks hot and wet, skeptically stared, accustomed to her mother's distraction ruse. Outside in the street the man was tossing bowling-pin-shaped missiles into the air. At first it was a fairly routine display, but then he tossed the pins higher and spun around while waiting for them to come down. Then he tossed two at once, then the third in the middle. He was mugging and wiggling his hips while he tossed. Marisa fell silent. Ellen glanced at her in the rearview mirror and saw the slightest of smiles creasing the corners of her mouth. The man was probably looking for money, Ellen thought, and indeed when he caught the last pin, he whipped off his beret with a grin and a bow and headed toward Ellen's car. But he had become so involved in his routine that he misjudged the time, and the light had already turned green. Those drivers behind who had not caught the act were not charmed and pressed hard on their horns. Ellen frowned through the window at the man, who shrugged back and stepped onto the curb. The line of cars inched on. The diversion had been enough. The disappointing cartwheel was now relegated to the...