Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

assured Nela, when they were about twelve. Nela told him she was sure Father or the nuns could think up a reason since they could think up reasons most everything nice was sinful.
“Even though we can’t ever make a baby,” she said. “The doctor told us that.”
“We could pretend to have one,” Bertran suggested tentatively, hearing sorrow in her voice but uncertain whether her grief was related to the matter of babies.
“I suppose we could,” she said doubtfully, wondering why Bertran would suggest such a thing, but thinking perhaps he was sad over not being able to be a father. “What shall we name him.”
“Turtle,” said Bertran, the word coming out with no thought at all. “Call him Turtle. Turtle Korsyzczy.”
“Not Korsyzczy,” she objected. “What happens is, when he grows up a little, he changes his name. He says, ‘Korsyzczy is too much of a mouthful. I want a name that says who I am, not who I’m related to.’”
“Well, who is he then?”
“Well, he’s our turtle, Berty. Gray-wind-rising turtle. Only, let’s pretend he can fly. Call him Turtle Bird.”
Bertran thought about this. “I don’t like Bird,” he said. “It sounds too much like that long ago president’s wife, the one our history teacher said got the billboards down along the highways. Something else with wings, maybe.”
“Butterfly? Angel? Moth?” Nela suggested. “Eagle? Owl? Duck?”
“Dove,” he said suddenly, liking the sound of it. “Turtledove. Like in the Bible, the voice of the turtle, you know.”
Turtledove he became, their child, Turtledove. He, a boy, and never any discussion about that. Nela hadn’t demurred. Their child was a boy by virtue of being a “he,” but he never did anything that could not have been done equally well by a she or an it. The twins made up marvelous stories about him, though they never mentioned Turtledove to anyone else, any more than they mentioned what went on between the two of them. And aside from Marla’s plaint to the pediatrician andthe pediatrician’s sneer to his colleagues, no one mentioned their intimate activity to anyone, least of all to the twins’ father.
Lek was, therefore, totally unprepared when he entered the twins’ room without knocking one morning and found them intimately engaged. He had entered silently; they didn’t know he was there. In wordless shock, blank-faced and blind-eyed, he departed as soundlessly, left the house, and went to work. During a coffee break, a new coworker, one who was unfamiliar with Lek’s family but who had recently heard something about him, made sniggering allusions to the foolishness of a man who believed he’d made love to his wife four times on their wedding night when he’d actually been asleep the whole time.
Though he did not seem to hear, the words went through Leksy like a knife. Without a word to anyone, Leksy put down his cup, left the plant, and went to a bar. All through the (mostly) sexless years, it had been the memory of that morning that had kept him relatively constant. Not what Marla had said or the idea of it, or even the confirmation of his own maleness, but the feeling of the moment. The surge of contentment and joy and fulfillment. His whole body and mind had seemed to glow from within, as though lit by a joyous flame. He remembered it as the happiest moment of his life, shining like a star, and he had held that light before him, guiding himself with it, determined from the depths of his despair that it would someday be like that between them again, if not on this earth, then in heaven.
Now, he saw the star flicker out, a coal, a cinder, a black hard nothing. It had been a lie. His joy had been a lie. Marriage was a lie. Fatherhood, children, all that was a lie. Things coming out right if you just had faith and worked hard, that was a lie. He drank for a time, without becoming at all drunk. The alcohol went through him into some dry other place where all the liquor in the world could not have made