Amanda straightened her desk and left without saying a word of farewell to the others. She still hadn’t spoken when she and Taylor were seated in the back of the limousine.
“So, that’s where you work?” Taylor asked. He wasn’t used to making conversation. For the last eight years he’d talked to Harker about the ranch and to Amanda about what she was studying.
“Where I work, but not where I belong,” Amanda said with some bitterness.
Taylor smiled. In his new position of not being her teacher, he was determined not to tell her what he thought of that filthy house filled with those filthy people. He reached across the seat and took her hand. “No, darling, you don’t belong with them. You belong with me and people of your own kind.”
Amanda looked at him and wondered if she were like him. She didn’t feel much like going to a carnival but she didn’t want to go home either. Maybe she did belong with Taylor. Of course she belonged to Taylor!
The carnival was loud and dirty; it stunk; it glittered; it was garish—and Amanda loved it immediately. It was what she needed to forget people who thought she was a spoiled little rich girl.
Taylor stepped out of the limousine and wanted to get right back in. The place was as hideous as he remembered. There was a sign looming over his head:
Princess Fatima, a full-blooded Bedouin
from the fabled City of Nineveh, will dance
the mystic anaconda dance exactly as danced
by Hypatia in the Holy Writ.
Next to the sign was a fifteen-foot-high picture painted on canvas of a plump, scantily clad woman with a snake wrapped around her. This is what he went to college for? he thought. This is what he went to college to escape.
“Amanda, we can leave if this place offends you.”
Amanda’s eyes were wide in wonder as she looked about her at the skill booths, the rides, the exhibits, the food vendors. Everyone seemed to be yelling at once. “No, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She took his hand. “Oh, Taylor, thank you so much for bringing me. What shall we do first? Are you hungry? How about some popcorn? I used to eat that when I was a child. What do you think a corn dog is? Shall we find out?”
“Oh yes, please let’s do,” Taylor said, thinking he just might get sick. Did other men go through this for the women they loved? If so, it’s a wonder anyone ever got married.
An hour later Taylor was sure he was going to be sick. He’d eaten popcorn, peanuts, a nasty thing called a corn dog and, feeling that he’d done his duty, he had politely refused the chocolate-covered caramels Amanda had offered him. He had even acted awestruck when a fat, dirty fortune-teller had looked at Amanda’s palm and said, “You will dance with a queen and have a son who will become king.”
Now she was looking longingly at a booth in which a vile-smelling young man in a red satin shirt was trying to get Taylor to throw a ball at wooden milk bottles in order to win a hideously ugly doll covered in pink and purple feathers.
“Amanda, what if a person were to win?” he asked, aghast.
“It’s just for fun,” she said.
“Come on, mister,” the young man called. “Three balls for a nickel. Ain’t a lovely lady like this worth a mere nickel?” He looked Amanda up and down. “I’d pay a nickel to win her.”
Amanda looked at Taylor with pleading eyes, and while he was trying to think of a reason why he couldn’t participate in this ignorant, loutish game, they were shoved aside by another couple as if they weren’t there.
Amanda’s good mood left her when Dr. Montgomery and Reva stepped in front of them. She saw Hank slam the first ball into the milk bottles, all of them falling.
“Shall we go?” Amanda said to Taylor.
Hank turned around with a false surprised look on his face. “Well, Miss Caulden, fancy meeting you here. Driscoll,” he said, nodding at Taylor.
“You gonna throw again, mister?” the barker asked, still eyeing Amanda.
Hank threw another ball and knocked more milk bottles down, then turned to Taylor. “Didn’t they teach pitching where you went to school?”
“I think we should go,” Amanda repeated to Taylor, but he didn’t move.
Hank knocked down a third set of wooden bottles.
“Your choice,” the barker said to Reva, motioning to the kewpie dolls hanging from the ceiling and walls of the booth.
Reva’s face lit up as she pointed to a pink feathered doll.