No Strings

The truth is she found herself unable to throw the words much further.

Oliver would sit on her lap, and in addition to keeping his mouth moving, she’d also be expected to say her lines, and his, and get his voice across the room without moving her lips.

All of this was too much, much too much, and her sister agreed that she needed a break from Oliver to rediscover her joy of performing.

Three days on the Midwest-to-Northern Canada circuit taught her that a ventriloquist without a dummy is a hard sell, especially when in place of a dummy, there’s a bushel of wheat on your lap, not dressed up to look like anything at all.

Four stops in, she was removed from the tour, and that meant she had to handle her own bookings. Theaters became auditoriums and then cafeterias and then cafetoriums. Audiences went from being the elite members of Columbus and Kearney to the children of those same audiences as they sat, cross-legged, on the floor of their classroom, watching a strange woman tell jokes to what looked like corn stalks.

After a year, she was broke, and that was when she made the call.

“Just make sure he understands that he needs you,” her sister strategized, all the while grooming a labradoodle at her doggie salon, “You’re doing him a favor.”

Of course, they both knew that wasn’t the case.

The truth was Oliver had done just fine without her. He’d been a big hit on the Southern-to-Really-Southern circuit, and when he got to Decatur, he’d played a week-long engagement at the Buck Toolhardy Palace, where he’d gotten rave reviews and sold out every night to uproarious crowds.

Chances are the only reason he’d agreed to take the meeting with her was because a reunion, even after such a short time apart, was bound to get them exactly where they had always wanted to go.

Japan.

The Tokyo Ventriloquist Market was more lucrative than ever, but to break into it, you had to have something special. She and Oliver had never been able to muster up whatever it took to get the attention of the bookers overseas, but when Oliver’s agent floated the idea of a limited-run, “They’re Back!” tour, there was immediate interest.

That’s how she wound up sitting at Scoffee’s Coffee in Palmetto nursing a black with sugar waiting for her dummy to show up.

When he did, he sat down right where he always did--on her lap.

He looked good. She had to admit that.

Somebody had put a new coat of paint on him, and those splinters around his lip were gone.

So, she thought, He’s had work done.

They exchanged pleasantries, and then, seemingly to cut the tension, he asked her how her sister felt about the meeting. She confessed that it was causing a lot of consternation, and he lamented that “the puppy poofer” had never liked him. She didn’t bother disputing that. It was too early in the day for a lie.

Without gauging her interest, he launched into the terms for the Tokyo tour. He breezily mentioned that it would be a seventy-thirty split, which was insulting, but not surprising. He had proven his worth without her, and now she was an adornment to him, but she already felt herself feeling relieved to no longer be the one pulling the strings.

It occurred to her that sometimes, in order to have agency over the parts of yourself you really care about, you have to allow others to take control over the parts you don’t.

She didn’t care about her career. At one time, she pursued this as a passion, but she understood that she had no talent for ventriloquism innovation, she stopped finding any real interest in it. Technically, she was always very impressive, but she never managed to transcend the form, the way other women in the industry could. Helga Fleeberger could throw eight different voices at once and Key Lime Kendra had taken to sewing her mouth shut onstage while singing an aria using a live fish as her dummy.

These artists were reinventing the form, and that wasn’t something she was capable of, so for now, she may as well make a good living until she can either find something she loves enough to look at in a new way or retire early and write a tell-all about Oliver and how she once caught him wearing a Pinocchio nose and not much else.

And part of her had missed him.

He had his flaws, but they got each other. They had a history together. She had fashioned him out of a rocking chair she inherited from an uncle she never liked. The result was a dummy with the kind of quick, comic timing that only old furniture could create. The first time she put him on her lap, she remembered feeling complete in a way that recalled discovering a lost object that nobody knew lost.

Until it wasn’t.

As he rambled on about adding new jokes to the act, she didn’t bother taking notes. It would all be put down in a binder and sent to her via FedEx by people. New people. People that now worked for Oliver, but definitely not for her. In fact, she was now one of the people that worked for Oliver, even though it would never be explained to her that way or to anyone else.

To preserve the illusion of a partnership, she would continue to contribute her ideas, and those ideas would go ignored, but it had been like that for sometime anyway, so having it be official now was a relief.

Because the things that wouldn’t change are the things she loves the most.

Rehearsing the bits. Picking out matching costumes. The little prayer they say together before they walk out to the applause that would now go on for minutes instead of seconds. The way he rested against her at the end of the show, right before she stood up to bow for the two of them.

The audiences would never know who was really pulling the strings, and a lot of people would argue that in that sense, she would always have all the power.

But it really didn’t matter.

From now on, he could do all the talking.